Thor: Love and Thunder barely cracked the best Thor villain of our age

polygon.com:

I never expected Thor: Love and Thunder to do justice to Gorr the God Butcher. It’s nothing personal — Gorr simply isn’t your average supervillain. He’s not a guy who shows up to crow at Thor about how this time his evil plan is definitely going to work, unlike all the other times. There’s one definitive Gorr story, an 11-issue hammer-drop of an epic that might also be the best Thor story of the last decade.

So as Thor: Love and Thunder hits Disney Plus this weekend, go ahead and watch it if you want to — or don’t watch it if you don’t. But either way, treat yourself to the saga of Gorr the God Butcher.

If I’m being honest, I wholeheartedly recommend reading Jason Aaron’s entire Thor run. But this is not an effortless ask for anyone but those who are already unusually serious about comics. So I can’t ask you to get a Marvel Unlimited subscription. It would be unreasonable to me to suggest that you Google a reading order list. And I definitely can’t tell you to settle in for over a hundred issues of pulp action, high emotion, and absolutely gorgeous art from the likes of Esad Ribić and Russell Dauterman. That would be foolish.

But it’s fine, because most of the themes of Aaron’s — again, quintessential and very fun — seven-year run on Thor exist in microcosm in its very first, completely stand-alone story, drawn (mostly) by Esad Ribić and colored (mostly) by Ive Svorcina: the saga of Gorr the God Butcher.

You don’t have to watch much of Thor: Love and Thunder to get Gorr’s basic deal: The guy thinks all gods should die, and he’s got a plan to make that happen. The question of worthiness and how to obtain it is the throughline of Aaron’s Thor run, which saw the God of Thunder unable to lift his hammer after losing his