How Thor: Love and Thunder compares to Jason Aaron's comics

Drawing on 60 years of comics, the Marvel Cinematic Universe generally has a lot of material to source from. But the latest entry in the franchise, Thor: Love and Thunder, has a very specific point of origin: the seven-year run of Thor, God of Thunder written by Jason Aaron, with art by Esad Ribic, Russell Dauterman, Mike Del Mundo, and others.

Kicking off in 2012, it was Aaron's Thor run that introduced the villainous Gorr the God Butcher, and turned Dr. Jane Foster into the first female God of Thunder. If you've seen Thor: Love and Thunder by now (or even if you've just seen trailers for it) you probably recognize those plot elements. So please allow us to explain how the movie compares to his comics — with some insight from Aaron himself.

Gorr the God Butcher

When Aaron began his comic series in 2012, he figured his position as a Marvel writer was secure after years of popular work on Wolverine and X-Men comics (not to mention his own Scalped). But Aaron still wanted to take a big swing with his version of the thunder god, and decided to make the most of Thor's unique attributes. Unlike his Avengers teammates Captain America and Iron Man, Thor is literally a god: He's already been around for centuries, and will surely survive long after his mortal friends have turned to dust. What kind of enemy could pose a threat to Thor's past, present, and future — all at the same time?

"It came from leaning into the idea of Thor as a god and exploring what that meant," Aaron says. "As part of that, I wanted to bring in basically this serial killer of gods. Then we'd see him evolve as a villain over the course of the eons as we bring in the different iterations of Thor."

Aside from a brief montage at the beginning of the film that shows Thor moving through different stages of adolescence and young adulthood, Love and Thunder mostly eschews Aaron's three-part framing that shows Gorr facing off against young Thor in the past, current Thor in the present, and wizened old King Thor in the future. But this was the mind-blowing concept that started his comic off strong.

On the other hand, Love and Thunder's introduction of Gorr (Christian Bale) is drawn pretty directly from Aaron's comics. After being a devout believer all his life, Gorr is heartbroken when his faith is not rewarded when he needs it most. His family dies in his arms, and his beloved gods don't lift a finger to help. When Gorr comes upon a mysterious black cosmic artifact, he realizes that it is the weapon that can help him wreak his vengeance on the divine. Enter All-Black, the Necrosword.

"I don't remember exactly how I seized on 'All-Black the Necrosword,' but I was pretty happy when I did," Aaron says. "That's scribbled somewhere here in my Thor notebook. I've still got the notebook where I just jotted down ideas for bits of dialogue and names for dwarves and that sort of thing. Still, of course, I never imagined that someday I'd see it on a movie screen being held by Christian Bale."

The name Gorr, meanwhile, was drawn directly from Thor's very first appearance in 1962's Journey Into Mystery #83, which Aaron went back and read as part of preparation to write his own saga. That first issue pit Thor against the Stone Men of Saturn, and one of those rocky aliens (the basis for Taika Waititi's character Korg) is named "Gorr."

"Ever since I sat down to begin my Thor reading journey, that name must have stuck in my head," Aaron says.

But while Thor: Love and Thunder only has two hours to tell its story on screen, Aaron had over 100 issues of comics for his Thor epic. Even after Gorr is defeated in Aaron's run, the challenge he posed to divine privilege continues to influence Thor, who wants to ensure he's not the kind of god who deserves to get killed by the Necrosword for abandoning his believers.

"Everything with my Thor run boils down to the fact that I was a kid who grew up in the South — I was raised Southern Baptist, raised with religion and faith being a big part of my life," Aaron says. "I hit a point in my college years where the faith part eroded for me, and I've been an atheist for more than half of my life at this point. So taking over Thor, who is at this point the most renowned god in Marvel comics, and very much wanting to lean into that idea of his godhood, it became, 'How do I approach that as an atheist?' So I think it was very much about me writing the kind of god that I would like to believe in. So we have Thor Odinson questioning his own worthiness, looking at the other gods around him, realizing these guys aren't always the best role models, and trying to lead by example."

Jane Foster as the Mighty Thor

In both Marvel comics and the MCU, Dr. Jane Foster has been around for just as long as Thor has. The comic character first appeared in Journey Into Mystery #84, one issue after Thor's own debut, while Natalie Portman's version first entered the MCU alongside Chris Hemsworth's thunder god in the first Thor film way back in 2011. In both cases, she was mostly stuck being a classic superhero love interest, a damsel in distress who must constantly be rescued from one supervillain or another.

"I liked the idea of taking her, someone who had been around for Thor's history pretty much as long as he had, but for the first time putting her at the center of that world — not as a love interest, not as a sidekick, but as Thor," Aaron says. "She was not Lady Thor. She was not an offshoot. She was not second to the main guy. She was the main person. It was her book. It was her corner of the Marvel universe. And it was a huge thrill to get to explore all of that through her eyes."

In both the movies and comics, Jane taking up Mjolnir has a very emasculating effect on the Odinson. It's not like Steve Rogers giving up the star-spangled shield for a time — literally who is he if he's not Thor?

The inscription on Mjolnir is key to the whole myth: "Whosoever holds this hammer, if they be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor." But who exactly decides who's worthy and who's not? The classic idea is that Thor's father Odin does. But Anthony Hopkins' cinematic Odin is dead by the time of Love and Thunder, while the comics version of Odin has no idea why a woman has taken his son's place — and is quite upset about it.

"The story was always that Odin put this enchantment on the hammer, but we established in The Mighty Thor pretty quickly that even Odin can't pick up the hammer anymore — it's very much grown beyond him," Aaron says. "Ultimately, we addressed the idea that there's a real sentience to the hammer itself."

It turns out that, in both the movie and the comics, Mjolnir itself chooses its wielder. This ends up imbuing the seemingly inanimate hammer with some character and agency. That's why Hemsworth's Thor pines after Mjolnir like a spurned lover, while the comic version can only watch in amazement as Jane uses the hammer in new ways.

"Once I said, 'Okay, we're going to make her Thor. She's going to be the central character. She's the Mighty Thor,' part of that was: How's her relationship with the hammer different?" Aaron says. "So it reacts differently when she throws it. She talks to it in a different way. Then when Thor Odinson would come back and see this, it sort of drives the stake even deeper in his heart. He's looking at the hammer saying, 'It never did that for me.'"

There's no magic solution to cancer

What differentiates Marvel superheroes from, say, DC's pantheon is that they all have feet of clay. The X-Men have incredible powers but are hunted and feared by human society as a result. Steve Rogers is the embodiment of everything noble about America, but as such finds himself a man out of time. The list goes on.

Aaron knew he had to do something similar for Jane if she was going to be a true Marvel hero, and he hit upon a devastatingly brilliant concept: She has a fatal cancer diagnosis. Her courageous struggle against the disease is part of what makes her worthy to be a god, but every time she uses the hammer to become Thor, its divine light cleanses her body of all poison — including chemotherapy drugs. Each flight through the sky leaves her cancer worse than before.

Love and Thunder carries on this Achilles heel. Even when the protagonists come face-to-face with a truly omnipotent being toward the end of the film, they are unable to cure Jane's cancer.

"I knew once we put cancer on the table, we can't just magic that away," Aaron says. "Not even in a book that's about gods and goddesses flying around. It's got to be a story with heart and emotional weight. But at the same time, it was never meant to be a maudlin story. If anything, what she's going through just makes Jane love and appreciate everything that she's seeing all the more. She loves being able to lift that hammer and fly around to all the realms and punch Odin in the face. She's enjoying every second of it, despite everything she's going through."

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