30 Days of Marvel: Day 21: Current obsession
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:
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".