Gods And Comics!

I was recently reading Robert E. Howard's "Cairn On The Headland", a short story about a mysterious pile of rocks under which we discover is buried the body of Odin himself. As I read this story I flashed on images of Odin and his early days from the vintage comic book Tales of Asgard, a Thor annual which collected many of the earliest Tales of Asgard stories, stories that present the Nordic myths of the creation of the Universe and present us with a young and vital Odin.

And then it crossed my mind that most of what I know casually about mythology comes from some basic comic book sources. Tales of Asgard and Thor inform my mutated understanding of Norse myth, despite having read many of the orignal sources and multiple books on the subject. All that scholarly stuff has been pushed into some deep recess and on it sits the vivid four-color images of "King" Kirby and others. What I know about Greek myth comes from Charlton's Hercules comic and other comics. Glanzman and Gill trump Edith Hamilton in my memory it seems. Also important was the Daularies' Book of Greek Mythwhich is a glorious oversized volume filled with bright images and good basic tale. It was one of the key books I had to buy for my own kids when they were young and I pushed it into their paths as often as I could.

Myth of all sorts permeates comics. Marvel doubtless has key elements of both Greco-Roman myth and Norse myth fused into its universe, forming almost a substrate for that universe. DC toys with it more, but offers up Hercules among others. In college I once talked a professor into letting me write a paper on Thor, and lots of it was about the comic. It was a really lame paper, but memorable in its awfulness.

But it's clear to me that without the "education" that I got from comics, my understanding of the world of myth and many other things would be quite different.

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