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Thor #324: Review

Oct 1982
Doug Moench, Alan Kupperberg

Story Name:

Gravitation

Review & Comments

Rating:
4 stars

Thor #324 Review by (May 25, 2020)

Review: Superhero comics in its purest form: hero faces bad guy with special power and must puzzle out a way to defeat him. So, we have Thor, a hero who controls thunder and lightning, fights Graviton, a villain who controls gravity. The problem is that Graviton is looking for love in all the wrong places and is as casual about consent as he is about the laws of nature. But being thousands of feet in the air prevents Thor from just punching the bad guy’s lights out so he has to get tricky, finally settling on drugging him into surrendering. The scene of Don Blake plummeting is an impressive one, capturing the cover as well. Woo.       

Comments: Graviton first appeared in AVENGERS #158-159 and was fused with an island in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE ANNUAL #4. The Avengers learned Thor’s secret identity in AVENGERS #220. The bartender is modeled after Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in THE HONEYMOONERS. Story 2: Part one of four parts





 

Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Thor #324 Synopsis by Peter Silvestro

On a visit to Avengers Mansion, Thor is working out and starts talking to Wasp. Thor changes into Donald Blake and he and Jan have a nice chat lasting several hours. Meanwhile downtown, reality begins to warp and Graviton arrives, having escaped the dimension he was trapped in. He goes to the home of his former love and finds Judy Parks is now married to Joe and expecting a baby; she tells Graviton she could never love a man like him and he could have any other woman he wanted. The villain then decides to follow up on that, asking a bartender where he could meet classy women; bartender suggests a high-end clothing store like Bloomingdale’s. Graviton heads to the fashionable shop and levitates the entire building into the sky; entering, he announces over the store intercom that he is looking for a bride and offering the store as a dowry. Thor, on his way back to Chicago, sees the floating store and enters to find everyone and everything inside also floating. After being filled in on the situation, Thor hunts down Graviton and hurls his hammer at the villain, who halts it in mid-air with his powers and reminds Thor that if he is knocked unconscious, the store will plummet to Earth, killing everyone inside. Graviton then bounces Thor around and hurls him out through the wall without his hammer. He plummets and summons Mjolnir to him but it arrives as he transforms back to Don Blake with the hammer becoming a stick. Don drops hundreds of feet to the pavement but places the stick under him so that it hits the ground a fraction of a second before Don and he becomes Thor once more. As Blake he stops by a drugstore before heading up to face the villain, who is creeping on as many women as he can find. Thor injects the villain with sodium pentothal so that he must return the building to the ground lest he pass out and perish when it plummets. Thor explains to confused former hostages that he also had a stimulant ready to wake Graviton up should his first plan fail. Thor then takes the villain to outer space where he leaves him and returns to Chicago….

“A Gathering of Evil”

Writer: Doug Moench. Pencils: Alan Kupperberg. Inks: Jim Mooney. Colors: George Roussos.

Synopsis: Having married Frigga, Odin says a tearful goodbye to his old flame Queen Jolena. Loki spies them, gets the wrong idea, and is soon announcing to Asgard that Odin has been cheating on his wife. Loki then joins Tyr, who holds a grudge against Odin, in a plot to overthrow the All-Father and the first step would be to steal the Golden Apples of Idunn, without which Odin and his gods would becomes weak and easy to defeat. So the two baddies go out recruiting more enemies to their cause: Hela, declines the offer, having made peace with Odin but the Storm Giants, the sons of Surtur, Karnilla the Norn Queen, and the Wolfing Warriors gladly join the forces gathering against the All-Father….


Preview Pages
Click sample interior pages to enlarge them:




Alan Kupperberg
Jim Mooney
George Roussos
Ed Hannigan (Cover Penciler)
Joe Rubinstein (Cover Inker)
? (Cover Colorist)


Characters

Listed in Alphabetical Order.

Freyja
Freyja

(Frigga)
Graviton
Graviton

(Franklin Hall)
Hela
Hela

(Goddess of Death)
Karnilla
Karnilla

(Norn Queen)
Loki
Loki

(Loki Laufeyson)
Thor
Thor

(Odinson)
Wasp
Wasp

(Janet Van Dyne)

Plus: Jolena.

> Thor: Book info and issue index

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