Mighty Thor #325, p26 (Loki, Tyr, Midgard Serpent)

You won't often see me getting art from the past but this is a page from one of the oldest Thor comics I still own so I couldn't resist it when I saw it. As a kid I did not see that the serpent looks like a sock puppet or that it has a different number of teeth between panels or question the absurd way the animal with the cart leaps into the serpent's mouth. Loki and Tyr's pantomime acting didn't bother me and the ordinary plot and awkward dialogue did not register. I just thought a giant snake was cool. There's an online interview somewhere with a grumpy-sounding Alan Kupperberg where he had nothing remotely good to say about this story and makes a reference to a cartoon character called 'Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent'. I had to look that one up and it's pretty apt. Hopefully you can tell I'm actually pretty fond of this maybe not-so-great art. Not-so-great or not it tells me how embedded some of our earliest influences can be. It's easy to draw a direct line between a page like this the more modern Thor pieces in my collection. This piece also tells me that if I was really going to head into 80's nostalgia I'd have to pretend that I was reading far cooler books than I really was!