Oh no no no, it was much more bizarre than that. Byron was theologically offended by the very notion of Thor. As a very devout Jew, he believed there was only one god, and therefore was heavily against portraying Thor or any of his supporting characters in the books. The only exceptions were The Ultimate Super-Villains, which I had to practically put him in a headlock to let me do (it helped that 1) the Loki story was by Mike Friedman, a New York Times best-seller who was under contract to do a Fantastic Four novel for us and whose name would help sell the book and 2) it was a Loki story, so focusing on the bad guy, so it's okay for him to be blasphemous) and The Avengers vs. the Thunderbolts because it tied directly into the contemporary Avengers comic of which Thor was an active member.At this late date, I suppose there's no harm in revealing that the reason Thor does not appear in any of those novels is because Byron personally thought Thor was a dopey character.
Yeah, I'm not exactly a fan of Marvel's Thor either, but from what I've seen in the TV shows and movies I always got the feeling that Marvel treated Thor and Asguard as aliens (along the same lines as the Shi'ar) with a higher level of technology and longer life spans and that some of our ancestors took them as gods.
DC Comics isn't so different in this regard--the Endless from Sandman are part of the DC Universe, after all, and the War of the Gods crossover was predicated on such a premise.From what I've seen, Marvel does tend to treat the various mythological pantheons as real deities or something close -- supernatural beings of immense power, spawned from the fundamental essence of the universe.
So I've been reading X-Men: Smoke and Mirrors by Eluki Bes Shahar, and so far it is a really great book (I'm on page 274 right now). This is one book that I would really like to see as a movie. And the storyline about the Ohio Mutant Conspiracy is a really fun story line.
The one negative that I would have to say about the book is the cover: What is up with Gambit's white eyes? He almost looks possessed!
FYI, eluki bes shahar mostly writes as "Rosemary Edghill" these days, if you're interested in checking out any of her other books.
eluki co-wrote the third book in the X-Men/Spider-Man: Time's Arrow trilogy with Tom DeFalco.I'm probably not going to be reading any more of her books. While Smoke and Mirrors was great, unless she writes a Trek novel, probably her only other story on my to read list is It's A Wonderful Life from the Ultimate X-Men anthology, and any other Marvel novels that she wrote in the 90's/2000's.
^ It wasn't Scott's prose writing, it was Elliot's. Scott plotted the novel, and Elliot wrote the manuscript. We did that a bunch of times in the series, having a comics writer do the detailed plot outline and then someone else did the actual manuscript.
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