30 Days of Marvel: Day 21: Current obsession

[fajrdrako]

30 Days of Marvel: Day 21: Current obsession

Hmm. How many obsessions can a fan have at once?

As usual, I have many Marvel obsessions... Many favourite comics and favourite characters because there are so many good ones out there. Daredevil and Magneto have been favourites for decades.

But now... just now... I'll say Loki. Thanks to Pasqual Ferry's lovely art and the revival of the character as a boy; thanks to good writing by Matt Fraction Kieron Gillen; thanks to the magnificent portrayal of Loki by Tom Hiddleston....

Yeah. My current obsession is Loki, Marvel's god of mischief.



[Fan art by ~kisago on deviantart]

I had a look at Wikipedia on Loki as a mythological figure, and was amused by the scholarly descriptions:

...Folke Ström... in 1956 concluded that Loki is a hypostasis of the god Odin. In 1959, Jan de Vries theorized that Loki is a typical example of a trickster figure. In 1961, by way of excluding all non-Scandinavian mythological parallels in her analysis, Anna Birgitta Rooth concluded that Loki was originally a spider. Anne Holtsmark, writing in 1962, concluded that no conclusion could be made about Loki.

Regarding scholarship on Loki, scholar Gabriel Turville-Petre comments (1964) that "more ink has been spilled on Loki than on any other figure in Norse myth. This, in itself, is enough to show how little scholars agree, and how far we are from understanding him."

...Stefanie von Schnurbein (2000) comments that "Loki, the outsider in the Northern Germanic pantheon, confounds not only his fellow deities and chronicler Snorri Sturluson [referring to the Prose Edda] but has occasioned as much quarrel among his interpreters. Hardly a monography, article, or encyclopedic entry does not begin with the reference to Loki as a staggeringly complex, confusing, and ambivalent figure who has been the catalyst of countless unresolved scholarly controversies and has elicited more problems than solutions".

Fertile ground for Marvel and for movies, I'd say.

Comments

[baronjanus]

I have my affection for Loki, the god and concept. :)

I'll get to watching the Avengers some day, no doubt, and then we'll see how I react :) I get a feeling I might like him as I tend to fall for that type of villain, but I assume he won't bear much resemblance to what I had in mind besides the name.

[fajrdrako]

Not knowing what you had in mind... I don't know what you'll think of him. But we often like the same types of characters, so I think the prognosis is good.

The character was actually more interesting in Thor - had more background, and was more fleshed-out, with a meatier role.

But I loved him in both movies. His costumes are better in The Avengers.

[threeringedmoon]

Have you read Diane Wynn Jones' Eight Days of Luke? It has an excellent riff on Loki.

[fajrdrako]

I was just thinking about that book this morning - because of my post yesterday. I remember that I loved that book, but I read it more than thirty years ago - don't remember it well now. Must read it again!