Exclusive: Walter Simonson Talks To 'Full Bleed' About 'Thor: Ragnarok' and More

IDW Publishing, who are set to publish Full Bleed Volume 2 when it reaches its Kickstarter goal, have provided ComicBook.com with an excerpt from Full Bleed's interview with comic book legend Walter Simonson.

The interview, written up by Greg Goldstein and Marena Bronson, is titled "The Twilight of the Gods," an appropriate enough title for the creator of IDW's own Ragnarok, which reimagined the Norse pantheon as a creator-owned series after Simonson spent years on Marvel Comics's Thor.

You can check it out below, and you can check out more details on the Kickstarter, or back it to earn rewards including copies of Full Bleed, here. There is a little more than a week left to support it.

THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

An Interview with Comics Legend Walter Simonson

By Greg Goldstein and Marena Bronson

Walter Simonson is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic book creators ever. For more than forty years he's been making his mark as a writer and artist on titles like Star Slammers, Fantastic Four, The Avengers, X-Factor, Manhunter, Star Wars, Alien, and others. His four years on The Mighty Thor in the '80s turned out to be the defining run on the God of Thunder, and it inspired a generation of creators working in the industry today.

When Greg Goldstein asked if I wanted to join him for an in-depth interview with his long-time friend last summer I jumped at the chance. How often do you get to sit down and have an in-depth conversation with a living legend? Greg and Walter have known each other for many years, but this was the first time I'd had a chance to meet him. From the minute he walked into the San Diego Comic Art gallery (where we conducted the interview) and introductions were exchanged he was everything I've heard him to be and more – smart, friendly, animated, generous, funny, and a consummate story-teller with a booming voice.

The conversation lasted more than an hour with Walter talking about everything from the 19th century book that first sparked his interest in Norse myths, to his adventures with Thor, to what risks are worth taking. Along the way he gave Greg and I – and now all of you – a masterclass in the art of visual storytelling. – Marena Bronson

Greg: There was lot of conversation last year, with Thor: Ragnarok in theaters…about Thor, and about Ragnarok. It just so happens that you worked on one and created the other. I think, before we dive too deep in, what does Ragnarok mean to you? It's only described briefly in the film.

Walter: I don't know the literal translation in Old Norse. It may be the doom of the powers. It's usually translated as the twilight of the gods. The idea is that, in Norse mythology, at the end of time, certain events occur. These events lead to a time when the gods gather together, and their enemies will gather together. They will all join together on a battle plane, which is 100 leagues in every direction. The gods and their enemies will face off. Every god will kill his counterpart, and every counterpart will kill the god.

So, at the end of Ragnarok, all the gods are dead. All the bad guys are dead, with the exception of a fire demon, named Surtur, who's lived forever. Surtur went up against, I think, Freyr. Freyr had given away his magic sword, which was an unbeatable sword, in an earlier story, for love. So, he only has a stag's horn to fight with. That doesn't really do the job. So, he's killed. Surtur is the last surviving entity of that group. In the poetry, it's not like comics, where continuity is important. Things happen.

You don't have to explain them or explain what happens after them, but presumably, Surtur can survive in this world where everybody is gone. So, he has this great sword and this raging fire. He flings fire across the nine worlds. Everything goes up in a great conflagration. Surtur isn't mentioned again in the poetry. So, presumably, he also perishes, or at least, he's no longer there. The earth sinks into the ocean. The stars fall from the sky. Everything becomes dark. Everyone's gone. Everyone's dead. Everything has ended.

Then, after a time, the earth rises up again from the ocean. It's green once again. I'm not sure where the light comes from because the sun and the moon were destroyed as well in this great conflagration. They were eaten by giant wolves. So, the earth rises back up. There's a deep forest and a man and a woman who survived in there through this whole thing. It turns out that the very highest halls of the gods in Asgard, called Gimli, have also survived. Some of the children of the gods have survived. The children of Odin and Thor have survived up there.

They come back out into the green fields, and they find the gold chess pieces that their parents played with. So, the world kind of starts again. Baldr, who was killed in the stories, is a sun god. He rises back up from what's left of the underworld, and presumably, he brings light to everything. There's a very cryptic bit of poetry. At the very end of the poem, it's interpreted in different ways in translations. I don't speak Old Norse (laughs).

So, I don't have any real idea about it, but it suggests that one of the great dragons that existed before Ragnarok had also survived. I don't remember if it's Nidhogg or one of the other ones. It rises up, and its wings are filled with corpses, or they're made of corpses. The implication is that, as with life and as with the gods, evil has entered this new world that has now come up after Ragnarok. That's what Ragnarok means, and that's the significance of it in the Norse myths.

Marena: That's a good segue into a couple different questions, I think. First off, how did you get interested in Norse mythology in the first place?

Walter: My dad was a reader. My mom was a reader as well. We had books in our home library, not as many books as I have now, I'm sad to say, but they had a lot of books. One of them was Tales of Northern Lands, and there was one about Greek and Roman mythology. They were grownup books. They weren't kid books. The Northern Lands book was copyrighted in 1893. I'm not that old. The books were old even when I was a kid. They were about 60 years old when I was a kid. I'm older now than what those books were when I began reading them.

Greg: My brain is still spinning to catch up with that. I think I've got that.

Walter: I'd have to do the math. If I'm not that old, I'm pretty close to that interval of time. It was really an adult book. They had all sorts of illustrations of the Norse gods, which were pretty funny, in retrospect, because they're illustrated as if they're classic Greek gods, in togas and robes and very classical poses out of Mediterranean art, but they were still the Norse gods. They had snippets of poetry. There were snippets from the Elder Edda, and there were snippets from Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson's work, and quotes from their translations of that.

It was a pretty detailed summation of the Norse myths. I don't know how accurate it was. This was a book that was done in the late 1800s, so there may be a lot of scholarships that have superseded that material, but they were great stories. My grandparents came from Norway. I don't claim any genetic affinity to the Norse myths. I don't know that it really works like that, but they did. I love the Norse myths. I read all the mythology. One of the first things I probably read was a kid's version of "Beowulf," which I thought was fantastic.

Even the Greek and the Roman stuff I really got into. The Norse stuff appealed to me. I kind of think that it's maybe because they all die at the end. It's really this apocalyptic powerful climate. It's this great story. Of course, when you're 7 or 8 years old, death is a long way away. So, when people start dying, it doesn't mean as much to you as it does when you start reading it when you're 70 years old. So, I loved them. I loved the book. I read other mythological things here and there from the library.

There wasn't as much stuff available then as there is now. Now, there's just a ton of stuff, especially on Norse myths. I loved it. When I discovered the Marvel Comics and discovered Thor, which was my first Marvel comic, I read that in a drugstore. I'd never seen it before, and I said, "Wow, it's Thor." I was wowed. I was probably 19. The comic fan-base wasn't what it is now, and neither was continuity. I was a kid, and I didn't care that Thor didn't have red hair.

I didn't care that he didn't have a beard. I didn't care that he didn't have a goat chariot. I just thought this was fantastic. I instantly got into Thor. I began reading the book regularly. The mythology really appealed to me. Ultimately, I just idolized them. I have many books now, as my wife would tell you, about Norse mythology — kid and adult books. Some are even older than the book that I got from my parents that I still have in my library.