Our book today is Marvel Comics’ Essential Thor Volume 7, collecting Thor issues 248 to 271 and Annuals 5 and 6 – all stories dating from the halcyon late 1970s. Almost all of these stories are written by Len Wein and drawn by either well-established comics legend John Buscema at the bored tail-end of his last great phase or else up-and-coming comics legend Walt Simonson, here some of his first tentative steps toward a visual style that would make his later run on Thor one of the most revered and popular in the title’s half-century-long history.

Wein is one of the great writers of the post-Stan Lee era of four-color superhero comics, but he could be Elmer Fudd and this stuff would still get copiously reprinted – after all, Marvel Studios is about to rack up its second $1 billion dollar movie with the upcoming second “Thor” movie, so all Thor-related “properties” are fair game for flooding the market. The “Essential” volumes have been appearing at a steady pace for years (as we’ve seen here, here, here, and here), a boon to all long-time Thor fans, so maybe #7 would have appeared right around now anyway, although surely only the character’s cinematic popularity could account for the recent all-color hardcover volume reprinting one of the same story-lines included in Essential 7.

The stories collected in this latest reasonably-priced black-and-white volume (what readers gain in savings they lose in the often sublime coloring job done by Glynis Wein on almost every one of these issues) are vintage Wein, thickly enmeshed in back-story and returning again and again to social issues – starting with a quick plot meant to culminate at Thor‘s landmark 250th issue – the some ways, the ultimate social issue this comic could tackle: what would Thor and his fellow Asgardian gods do if their all-powerful ruler, Odin, suddenly became a tyrant? Wein sets up the elements in a predictable but still enjoyable way: the evil councillor (Igron is this one’s name, but before him there was another evil major domo named Seidring the Merciless, Odin apparently having a thing for hatchet-man assistant managers), the increased fascism (already present in the Stan Lee years, when it was queasily apparent that the Asgardians were clearly intended not only to obey Odin but also to worship him), the imprisoning of his one saintly advisor (an old exposition-dispenser named only the Grand Vizier, who has since disappeared completely in the flurry of ret-conning the Thor has gone through since 1979), and the outlawing of the pure-hearted Balder the Brave, who flees to Earth to warn Thor that his father appears to have gone insane.

Thor and his friends – Hogun, who’s grim, Fandral, who’s dashing, and Volstagg, who’s portly, plus the mortal woman Jane Foster, whose life was recently saved by Thor’s immortal beloved, the warrior-woman Sif, apparently at the cost of her own life (a move that prompted a torrent of bitter fan letters) – promptly travel to Asgard, where they find the Realm Eternal’s warrior police-force turned out in full strength against them. They battle their way out of the spotlight and find like-minded resistance fighters (including the towering warrior-woman Hildegarde, likewise never to be used again), and at the Grand Vizier’s insistence, they split up to go and rally the people of Asgard to rise up against Odin (Buscema gives us a great panel showing the various methods of persuasion our heroes use) – and I remember being struck even when I read it the first time, as a callow youth of 28, by the fact that Thor and his friends readily undertake this outright sedition before they know that it isn’t really Odin at all, that the evil Igron is in cahoots with the malevolent Mangog (whom we’ve met before here at Stevereads!) to impersonate the missing Odin and enslave Asgard. It’s a tantalizing glimpse into the political underpinnings of Asgardian society – classic Wein – but it’s shut down in a fairly businesslike way, of course. Mangog is defeated, and the quest to find the missing Odin is on (along the way, Jane Foster bangs a sword against a stone way and, in a flash of light, becomes Sif – which prompted a torrent of ecstatic fan letters).

It’s the following quest-story that filled the company’s recent full-color hardcover reprint volume The Quest for Odin, which features the great artistry of John Buscema reduced as close to rote by-the-numbers hackwork as it could possibly get – but that volume (and the corresponding issues here in Essential 7) also features the first great work Walt Simonson ever did on Thor, in a complicated story involving Thor, Loki, Karnilla the Norn Queen, the Enchantress, the Executioner, the Destroyer, and a restored Odin. It’s grand, epic stuff – the perfect milieu for the character (unfortunately, this Essential volume also features reprints of issues where Thor squares off against mere mortal adversaries – including that walking punch-line, the Stilt-Man – which only serve to underscore how fundamentally ridiculous the character is in the role of an ordinary crime-stopping superhero).

But the best treat of this Essential volume was written by Steve Englehart, not Len Wein, and although it, too, features art by John Buscema, it’s Buscema at his most heartfelt – and the result is even grander and more epic than anything Wein ever carried off. It’s a long story that first appeared in Thor Annual #5, and it’s the first issue of Thor that intentionally succeeded in re-capturing the broad-stage cosmic feel of Stan Lee’s great Tales of Asgard feature. In this story, an isolated group of Norsemen is in pitched battle with an isolated group of ancient Greek warriors; both sides pray to their gods for aid, and as a result, Thor finds himself facing off against the Greek god Hercules in a super-powered brawl that quickly terrifies Greek and Norseman alike. Thor and Hercules abruptly stop in mid-fight, convinced that they aren’t settling anything; instead, they agree to assemble their fellow gods and meet on the field of open war. When Thor informs Odin of the plan, Odin scornfully rebuffs him, and on Mount Olympus Zeus seems just as unenthusiastic – until Loki, disguised as Thor, appears in the midst of the Olympian gods and decks Hercules. Zeus angrily gives his approval for war, and the eight pages that follow are some of the most, well, mythical that Buscema ever did for Thor: two huge armies clashing in an otherworldly landscape:

And when it’s all over, the Valkyrie come to spirit away the valiant dead to the halls of Valhalla:

Englehart wouldn’t be Englehart if he didn’t throw in a trick ending, but it doesn’t matter: this is Thor at its loudest and most elemental. It was a treat when greedily gobbled up at Trow’s Paper Goods a million years ago in a different era, and it’s every bit as much of a treat now.