That’s a lot for a skilled creator like Simonson, and he took advantage. Issue #337’s panels number is a bit low for Simonson’s run, but it lines up pretty well with a lot of today’s comics, except that Simonson got 10-30 more panels in his comics because the page count was higher.
Simonson had the benefit of longer actual comics (issue #337, for instance, is 24 pages long, and the extra four pages that he got as opposed to today’s Marvel/DC comics is extremely significant) and the benefit of the “way comics were made” – issue #337, again, has 115 panels, which is 4.7 per page, and if we take out the two full-page splashes, we get 113 panels over 22 pages, which is 5.1 per page. Chris Claremont and John Byrne showed how well this could work with the Phoenix Saga, which basically lasted 38 issues before resolving. Work with me, people!) In the 1970s, comics writers had begun to craft long-running stories that went on in the background before exploding into the forefront, and that trend continued in the 1980s. (N.B.: I’m totally aware that these are broad generalizations. In today’s trade-focused world, there are fewer pages per issues and fewer panels per page, and while writers still do long-running sagas, they tend to stick to one story over the course of a trade and then move on to something completely new. When Kirby, Ditko, and Lee were re-inventing comics in the 1960s, they tended not to do long-running story arcs, packing a ton of content into each issue but generally resolving things after a few issues if they didn’t in the same issue that they began something. Simonson began Thor at a good time in comics history. Issue #337, with its logo-smashing and Thor-alien cover, is a tremendous announcement to the comics world that Simonson will pull no punches. The first three pages set up the epic in amazing fashion, while the final two pages, with Blake scrambling over the wreckage of Bill’s spaceship, trying to reach a father who has abandoned him, show us that Simonson isn’t going to ignore the human element of the book, either. Simonson, of course, was building on the years of characterization that others had done before him, but there’s still a desperation in Blake that stirs our hearts, more than the foreboding from the first few pages of the issues, in which we catch our first glimpse of Surtur and his preparations to break the universe. Simonson is so good at this that at the end of his first issue, he gives us a full-page splash of Donald Blake, stripped of his power, standing in a driving rainstorm and screaming to the heavens after Odin, mistakenly, takes Beta Ray Bill back to Asgard because the alien has picked up Thor’s hammer and been transformed. Simonson, more than any Thor creator except Kirby (the most operatic comics creator ever) understands the value of spectacle, and in his best works ( Thor and Orion, I would argue), he is able to blend this spectacle with excellent storytelling, so that the emotions the characters feel isn’t just a façade for the gigantic plots but an integral part of the whole. Thor has always been the most operatic of Marvel’s or DC’s superheroes – the Nordic theme evokes The Ring of the Nibelung, of course (although I guess we should call those Gesamtkunstwerken, to be specific), but even other characters who might seem to be operatic – the Greek mythic heroes, Hercules and Wonder Woman, would fit, as would Kirby’s New Gods – don’t quite reach the heights that Thor and his cast of characters often do.
Walter Simonson’s epic run on Thor has all the hallmarks of an opera except for, of course, the music. You could be forgiven for calling this an opera. The Mighty Thor by Walter Simonson (writer artist, issues #337-354, 357-367), Sal Buscema (artist, issues #355, 368-369), Terry Austin (inker, issues #342, 346), Bob Wiacek (inker, issues #348, 367), Al Milgrom (inker, issue #367), Geof Isherwood (inker, issue #369), George Roussos (colorist, issues #337-341), Christie Scheele (colorist, issues #342-363, 365-369), Paul Becton (colorist, issue #364), and John Workman (letterer, issues #337-355, 357-369).
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