This is Comic Geeks Speak episode 1413, Fan Expo Canada 2013.

Creator Spotlight Panel, Walt and Louise Simonson.

Welcome to the show, I'm Brian Christman.

It was my distinct pleasure this past weekend at Fan Expo Canada

to be the moderator of the Spotlight Panel on Walter and Louise Simonson.

The panel was only scheduled for a half an hour, so I opened it up to audience questions pretty much right away.

Now, there was not a microphone set up for audience questions, so you won't be able to hear them very clearly.

So I'm probably going to jump in and say what was asked

so you can understand the response is given by Walter and Louise.

So we start out with an audience question about Beta Ray Bill.

Bill was, let me see, it's really fast.

When I took over Thor, one of the things I like about doing books, when I was doing a lot of mainstream stuff, is if I'm writing it, I'd like to not tell stories we've already read like a million times. I mean, and that's just the way comics are. The stories kind of come in and out and they rotate. In Thor, for example, anybody who does Thor for more than three seconds has to do a Ragnarok story because the actual story is so cool in Norse myths. You've got to do it somewhere. I did it twice in my own run, so you just do it. But I thought about what I could do that felt like it hadn't been done before, and ultimately I began thinking, well, no one's ever really picked up the hammer. If you read the inscription on the hammer, whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor. Now, Loki picked it up once when Stan and Jack were doing it, because I think they kind of forgot about it. Oh, I've got some extra juice from the Norn Queen. I'll just carry it around for a while. No, I'm sorry, that didn't really happen. And I didn't write any retcons. I don't care. But I just thought no one's done it. And my take on that

is that I did Thorpe, I'd been running for 20 years, and that meant to me that no one

in the Marvel Universe around at that time could pick it up. Now, I realized since I did my story, I knew it was going to happen,

it's like you let the genie out of the bottle, and then everybody says, oh, I want my guy to pick up Thor. Pick up the hammer. I love Captain America, Mark Grinwald. I'll have to have him pick up the hammer. I love Superman. He has to pick up the hammer. I love Wonder Woman. She has to pick up the hammer. the hammer. I love this guy. He has to pick up the hammer. Really none of those guys could pick up the hammer. I love Wonder Woman. She has to pick up the hammer. I love this guy. He has to pick up the hammer. Really, none of those guys could pick up the hammer. Those stories are

all lies. I love all those people. They're all lies. So my thought was, I'll invent

a character. I'll give him a backstory that makes sense, that

makes it, that maybe he may be worthy.

Whatever worthy is, I did not go to the dictionary and study it.

I'm not getting a debate on the web, I don't care.

We all kind of know what it means.

So I invented a character, but you also want to, you want to play fair with the reader, but you want to mislead them in stories. You'd like them not to get to the end and go, oh yeah, this is going to go here. And then you go there. So one thing is in the old days, no reprints, pretty much, no trade paper, all the stuff they do now. None of that stuff's right. Book comes out once a month, it disappears, you never see it again. Let me go to a comic shop and get what back issue. But most of you don't. You read a month-to-month. What that means is a short form, and as a shortcut to meaning, you use a lot of symbols. Frank Miller was phenomenally good at symbol. I think one of of the magazines once for Frank Miller's symbol

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