Thor: God of Thunder #11

Our ability to capture in writing what occurs in consciousness is extremely limited. Even the humblest bit of writing takes a great deal of energy to produce. I had large ambitions for my Friday post on Richard Buckner. From my week at work where there is an insane fellow employee to my pre-show meal at the food court at Uwajimaya, none of it made it from the brain pan to the written word fryer. Oh, well. C'est la vie.

I had ambitions on New Year's Day to read a book that my father gave me a while back, Ninety-Nine Names of Allah (1978) by Shems Friedlander. Instead I ended up reading a photocopy of the forward to Joseph Epes Brown's The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux that my father had inserted inside the Ninety-Names of Allah.

The Sioux believed in Wakan-Tanka. According to Brown,

Wakan-Tanka as Grandfather is Great Spirit independent of manifestation, unqualified, unlimited, identical to the Christian Godhead, or to the Hindu Brahma-Nirguna. Wakan-Tanka as Father is the Great Spirit considered in relation to His manifestation, either as Creator, Preserver, or Destroyer, identical to the Christian God, or to the Hindu Brahma-Saguna.

I finally got around to finishing the Jason Aaron-Esad Ribic story arc of Gorr the God Butcher and his Godbomb, which concludes in Thor: God of Thunder #11. To catch you up, here is the synopsis from the splash page of issue #11:

Gorr the God Butcher made it his life's purpose to kill all of divinity. And so he created a bomb that would explode through all of time and space to kill every God who ever was or will be. The Thors of the past, present and future, alongside the surviving deities that Gorr enslaved, made their last glorious stand against Gorr, fighting to the very end. 

With the last drop of God's blood he required, Gorr triggered the Godbomb. Thor the Avenger faced the bomb head-on, using the combined might of both his and his future self's Mjolnirs in a last desperate bid to halt its detonation. 

But there was no salvation to be had. The Godbomb exploded in a furious black swirl . . . and all was darkness.

This is a beautiful comic book. If you can, pick up Thor: God of Thunder, Vol. 1: The God Butcher and Thor: God of Thunder, Godbomb for the complete Gorr storyline.

Aaron does some important work here. The self is situated in proper Kantian fashion as the source of all creation/destruction. 

It is an emanation of Gorr's self, his fictive son, that proves his undoing. He rescues Thor, and Thor ends up absorbing the blast of the Godbomb and all the power of Gorr's Black Beserkers, which he then directs back at Gorr, defeating him.

A broken, one-eyed, one-armed Gorr pitifully pleads with his son:

GORR: Son, please, no . . . I can't lose you too . . . They did this. You have to see that. It's the Gods who've ruined creation. We'll all be better off without them. 

SON: You can't blame the Gods anymore, Gorr. It wasn't a God who betrayed you. It was only ever . . . yourself. 

GORR: No, please . . . Please don't leave me . . . Alone . . .