(All Images Belong to Marvel Comics)
By Hercules’ beard! Time has moved forward far too swiftly. But here we meet again at the end… well, the mid-point of all things. Where last we left off, our grouchy God of Thunder layed the Smackest of smackdowns on his dear old dad’s noggin’. Gotta admit, Odin done deserved it. But let us not dwell an a broken relationship between All-Father and All-Son. Let’s now take a moment for a really cool All-Mom to talk some sense into her brash and beleaguered son.
Onward! To issue #11!
You might not know this, but Thor can be a bit… obsessive. What’s his omnipotent OCD focused on?
Mjolnir.
I mean, your attention would be highly locked on to easily one of the greatest weapons of all time as well. A hammer that merely by wielding it, said you were more worthy than not just 99.9% of all mortals, but also all of the heavens combined. That is one doozy of a confidence booster. So Thor not only lost the ability to wield Mjolnir, it also went and nobly used itself as a warden of a god-killer in the center of the sun. That’s a lot to take in. And you only had till the end of this sentence to process it. Thor has processed it, and decided to solar dive to find Mjolnir.
To do so, Thor has been literally burning through his supply of substitute hammers. That is a finite supply of B to C-grade weapons (with occasional A-grade sprinkled in. Looking at you, Hel-Bringer). I will be the first to say he is over-doing it.
And following me in that estimation is none other than Thor’s own step-mom, Freyja. As soon as Thor pops up for air (vacuum?) she decides it’s time for some mother/son time. And what kind of bonding time should an All-Mother have with our Thunderer? Why some hammer-assisted time, of course! And while they do that, let’s learn about Freyja’s hammer.
Name of Hammer: “Sound Wisdom”
Cause of Destruction: It never got destroyed! In fact, it remains in Freyja’s wise care.
Story: The clanging. It never stopped. Not for one moment. NOT FOR ONE BLOODY MOMENT.
Count Luster Bellbreeze angrily paced his room in the guest quarters of Skornheim Mountains, in Nidavellir. Count Bellbreeze was a diplomat for the Light Elves of Alfheim. It was an honored assignment/punishment by Queen Featherwine herself. It was also the only reason Bellbreeze hadn’t been rounded up with the Queen’s royal court and forced to serve Malekith. Some days the burning rage he felt at Malekith’s insult to Bellbreeze’s people was almost enough to choke him.
Up until the damn dwarves started making hammers for Thor’s armory.
When that began, the clanging was all Bellbreeze could hear over the rush of blood in his own elven ears. And what drove Bellbreeze even more into a tizzy was that there was no music to it! It was just noise. Noise with no end. Cacophonies echoing over every surface of the dirty guest quarters he had been forced to endure since his arrival.
It was time, he decided. Time to give someone a piece of his mind.
Count Luster Bellbreeze, the Grand Duke of Milkstone Mountain, strode majestically out of his room… and nearly tripped over a dwarf that had been snoozing just outside his door.
“By the Queen’s Supple Bosom! What are you doing there?!” shouted Bellbreeze.
The dwarf snorted awake. He had been sitting and sleeping bent over a hammer held across his stomach. He looked up blearily through a bushy mop of eyebrows. “What.. how?” he mumbled keenly.
“I said,” gritted Bellbreeze through even more gritted teeth, “What in the dung pits of Svartalfheim are you doing right outside my door?!”
“Sleeping,” stated the dwarf. “Was,” he amended.
“Do you know who you are addressing?!” demanded Bellbreeze, “I am Count Luster Bellbreeze of Alfheim! Grand Duke of Milkstone Mountain! First of the Queen’s Auxillary Honeysuckle Guard! Laird of the Fraternity of the Maple’s Sorrow! Who are you to be under my foot?!”
The dwarf looked up at Bellbreeze in confusion. “Name’s Moldcrust. Moldcrust of… here.”
Moldcrust lifted the hammer in his hands up for Bellbreeze to see. “And this here’s a new hammer I just beat into life. I don’t know her name yet. Probably not gonna be as long as yours.”
“First I’m ordered by my Queen to come here! Then my home is taken from me! And then there is that BLOODY CLANGING! Every hour of every day! And now I have to deal with a brain-addled dwarf and his pet hammer!Will the insults never cease?! Am I cursed to be beset by constant irritations?!”
After Bellbreeze, First of the Queen’s Auxillary Honeysuckle Guard, finally stopped, Moldcrust looked up in thought, holding his hammer to his chin. “Hmm… Yeah, probably,” pondered the dwarf.
Bellbreeze looked at Moldcrust in astonished silence.
“Is… is there nothing I can do…?” whispered Bellbreeze.
Moldcrust pondered the question. “Nope. Not likely. So you should sit down and relax.”
Count Bellbreeze, Laird of the Fraternity of the Maple’s Sorrow, looked at the dwarf in stupefied awe for a few moments. And then he leaned back against the door to his guest quarters and slid down against it until he was sitting in the same relaxed pose as Moldcrust.
“That… that is surpringsly sound wisdom. Thank you.”
“No problem,” replied to the dwarf. Moldcrust suddenly shot up and looked at his hammer. A pleased smile grew across his face. —
Will you look at that? The story of this hammer comes a little more into focus. And as the mother has her own hammer, so too must the son grab another hammer for himself.
He even snagged another hammer to commit some acts of god. Of the life-saving variety.
Name of Hammer(s): “Swing 1 & Swing 2”
Cause of Destruction: Who knows how these swings end?
Story: “What are you saying, Herman Farnsworth?” demanded Screwbeard the dwarf.
“First of all,” replied Herman Farnsworth, a human blacksmith consultant from Midgard, “Either call me Herman or Farnsworth. Calling me by my full name each time we talk is taking too much time. And we do not have time because SECOND we are not making enough hammers for the number we need to have now.”
“I do not understand, Herman Fa-… Herman,” replied Screwbeard.
“Okay, so it is simple supply and demand,” explained Herman, “Thor wants ALL the hammers. Yesterday. And he’s an immortal? So it’s kind of unfair to have that time table for a huge order of hand-smithed weapons, right? So you needed to outsource and do a rapid-fire talent search. You guys heard about me cause I do some blacksmith work for some of the heroes back on Earth. So I know how to make quality stuff that has to hold up to super-villain level beatings. But I also do a lot of work for cosplayers. And they need my stuff fast because they forgot to order what they need before a con.”
“A con?” asked Screwbeard.
“Lots of humans, lots of costumes,” Herman explained rapidly, “It’s a whole thing. Don’t worry about it. The point is is that I only keep up with the numbers that I do because I know where to make shortcuts.”
“Shortcuts?!” shouted Screwbeard, “The God of Thunder will not be given some shoddy work from my forge!”
“Hey, Screwbeard!” placated Herman, “Buddy, I am not saying lower the quality. I’m saying you should streamline it. How many beautiful, pain-stakingly, hand-crafted hammers have you made…? That Thor just shattered on the head of some idiot like Juggernaut? Huh?”
“…a few,” muttered Screwbeard.
“Fourteen,” corrected Herman, “Last week. Also I’ve been hearing he’s leaving them lying around in the sun. I mean literally inside the sun.”
In response, Screwbeard quietly pouted to himself.
“So what I’m proposing,” continued Herman, “Is we make one good design and mold that we can pump out. One solid line of hammers that can hold up to Thunder God levels of use. I call it the ‘Swing’ line of hammers!”
Screwbear looked confused.
“Swing?” reiterated Herman, “Cuz Thor is always ‘swinging’ his hammer around? And it’s a play on the swing shift idea where somebody takes over someone’s shift? Do you have restaurants here? Not important. What do you say?”
Screwbear scowled to himself for a moment. “Can I see the design?”
Herman smiled, “Buddy, I can do you one better- no wait, TWO better! I got two working prototypes right here. I call them ‘1 and 2’. Kind of a play on Dr. Seuss…? Okay if you don’t know what a restaurant is I don’t know why I thought you’d know who Dr. Seuss is…” —
The references were flying every which way with that one. I get Herman. He speaks to me in a delightfully mortal way.
And so we cross the rainbow bridge on yet another issue of a comic that came out two years ago, focused on weapons that were never seen from again. If you’ve been reading this far, you know for a fact this entire blog is an act of love.
See ya next blog!