Guides to Beta Ray Bill & Thunderstrike (Early Access for ALL PATRONS) (Patreon)

My month-long campaign to fill out my Asgardian roster of guides ahead of Thor: Love & Thunder continues with a pair of noble hammer-wielders who each made a massive impact with their relatively brief comic runs...

Guide to Beta Ray Bill & Guide to Thunderstrike, Eric Masterson & Kevin Masterson 

(If you're getting a little weary of Asgard... well, so am I, but we both only have to make it through one more week of Asgardian guides before my focus shifts to other franchises! More on that below.)

As a reminder, you no longer need a special CK login to access guides! When you visit a Patreon guide you should be prompted to log in to CK using your Patreon login. If you aren't prompted when visiting a guide page, try visiting the CK login page directly.

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Beta Ray Bill is one of those comic characters who has confounded me while seeming very, very cool.

That's because I've never read the sublimely legendary Walt Simonson run on Thor in full. 

Yes, yes, I know, "how could I," "how dare I," etc. In my defense, I used to own the omnibus, but I'm not a fan of the updated modern colors - so, when Marvel announced their Epic Collections in 2014 I decided I'd simply hold out to read it in Epic Collection.

Here we are almost a decade later and I'm still holding out, so it was time to remedy the situation and read his origins (and every other issue he has every appeared in) for this Beta Ray Bill guide.

Even having read a fair amount of his appearances before this point, I had questions. First of all, why is he a walking horse-person who is dressed like Thor? What is going on with his golden hammer? And, why do I keep hearing that he is a cyborg?

Here's the shortest possible version of his origin story:

Beta Ray Bill is the designated guardian of a race of permanently-displaced aliens called Korbinites, whose galaxy was coincidentally destroyed by Thor's villain Surtur. The Korbinites don't look like horses - they have weird, noseless lightbulb-shaped heads. They are all that color of orange, though! The surviving Korbinites cybernetically enhanced Bill with powers of one of their fearsome native creatures and set him as the defender of their refugee fleet as they sought a new inhabitable planet.

When the fleet hit the Milky Way Galaxy, SHIELD asked Thor to investigate. Beta Ray Bill assumed he was a demon (fair mistake), beat the crap out of him, and picked up his cane-slash-hammer, transforming into a Beta Ray Thor. Odin summons both men to Asgard and has them engage in a fair fight for Mjölnir, and again Bill wins. Odin is so impressed with him that he gifts him his own hammer, Stormbreaker, which not only grants Bill Thor-like powers but also allows him to transform to a pre-cybernetic-horse-person version of himself.

Bill becomes forever indebted to Odin and Asgard, and treats Thor like a brother... except for how he kinda has a thing with Thor's lover Sif during their brief exile to Earth. Eventually, Bill tears himself away from Sif and Asgard to continue protecting his fleet (in a plot that impressively lasted a solid decade).

And that all happened during Walter Simonson's Thor! It doesn't even take that many issues to occur. That run is dense as Uru.

Not only does Beta Ray Bill have an awesome design and an awesome origin story, he... he keeps being awesome. Every time. Forever. He's awesome in every single appearance he has ever made and I know this because I just read them all in a matter of days.

Bill has a Superman-esque moral compass, except imagine if Superman still had to check in on Krypton every so often. And then imagine later something very sad happened to Krytpon (I know, it's hard to picture it) and something even sadder happened to Earth. What would Superman do with himself?

That explains Bill's mid-00s arc, which saw him witness Asgard's brutal Ragnarok as well as see a horrifying fate befall his people. Even though Asgard eventually bounced back (as it always does), Bill no longer had the excuse of, "I've got to go check on my peeps," to get him out of every Thor appearance. Writers Abnett & Lanning, the creators of the modern version of Guardians of the Galaxy, decided to tap into Bill's brief cosmic power streak from the 90s where he teamed up with Silver Surfer to make him a space hero.

This reinvigorated the character for a few years, and ultimately made him an attractive choice for Donny Cates to add to his version of the Guardians of the Galaxy in 2019. Bill wound up being one of Cates's favorite toys, so he also made him a recurring character in his subsequent 2020 run of Thor. And, because Cates continued to progress Bill's character development, that also made room for Daniel Warren Johnson to deliver a totally rock-n-roll Beta Ray Bill mini-series in 2021 with deep ties to all of his Walt Simonson original history.

Beta Ray Bill no longer confounds me, and now I think he's even cooler than I did before. You can hardly go wrong with any of his appearances - every single one of which is summarized in this Beta Ray Bill guide. And, if you just want the best-of-the-best with no cameos, I put together a list of all of his greatest hits so you can get the entire condensed history I've described above in as few issues as possible.

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Reading every Eric Masterson comic for this Thunderstrike Guide reminded me of why I love the Marvel Universe.

(Below I will vaguely spoil a 25-year-old comic I almost certain you have not read. You've been warned.)

Eric began in Thor (1966) #391 as the most minor of supporting characters - an architect at a job site where Thor maintained a human cover identity. Over the course of five years, Eric went from supporting character, to ally to Thor, to intrinsically linked to Thor, to becoming Thor himself! All the while, creators Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz developed a rich personal life for Eric - including a loving relationship with his son Kevin, complex friendships with a handful of colleagues, and an unlikely roommate in Hercules.

A year away from the end of that arc, DeFalco and Frenz dropped a cryptic dire hint in their "The Thor War” storyline in Thor (1966) #438-441. As Dargo, a Thor from a (potentially) alternate future departed back into the timestream, he says, "Promise that you'll try to enjoy your life - and your power - for as long as it lasts! That you'll make every moment count!"

At the time this seemed like a remnant of Dargo's alternate future history that didn't quite line up with our present. It was just one more offhand dropped hint that future writers would never follow up on.

Except... was it? DeFalco and Frenz would continue penning Eric Masterson through the end of his time as Thor and into his own title as Thunderstrike, when Thor and Odin gifted him with his own enchanted mace as a thank you for his service to Earth and Asgard.

And, uh... VAGUE SPOILER ALERT FOR A TWENTY FIVE YEAR OLD COMIC...

...

...LAST CHANCE TO ESCAPE...

...

...Thunderstrike does indeed end in tragedy.

I usually don't get too attached to comics as I review them to build comic book guides, but this one was a total surprise and it wrecked me.

Eric Masterson never asked for any of this. He wasn't bitten by a radioactive spider. He didn't seek out a cure for his shattered hands. He was a regular human being in the Marvel Universe who tried his hardest to do the kindest, bravest, most-ethical thing in every situation even when that came at great personal cost. He even let some criminals walk away from their crimes if he thought it would be better for them in the long run!

Eric kept doing the right thing and kept being punished for it. We've seen that sort of thing happen to Peter Parker hundreds of times, but with Eric Masterson it was different. Maybe that's because we witnessed him being an upstanding, responsible professional before his first run-in with Thor. Or, maybe it was the inevitability of the hand he was dealt - how so often he was manipulated by forces so much larger than himself.

Of course, other comic books have tragic stories of regular people turned heroes. But what makes Thunderstrike - and Marvel - different is how Eric Masterson is still remembered. He continues to be a part of the unending fabric of the Marvel Universe. He has been invoked, but never returned, rebooted, or reversed. His son remembers him and it colors how he views all of the heroes of Marvel, mortal or otherwise, even as he picks up his father's mystical weapon. Thor will always recall him, as will Captain America. His fate has colored the Odinson's reaction to other civilians taking on his mantle.

The eight years of Eric Masterson stories I read for this Thunderstrike Guide are still alive, and the emotions I felt reading to the end of his run are still reflect in stories being told today.

That is why I love the Marvel Universe.

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What's up next for comic guides?

There might be one more week of Asgard guides in your immediate future.

It's based on a theory.

The theory is that in my newfangled, database-driven, every-appearance-tracked, heavily cross-referenced way of building guides, it's extraordinarily more simple if I work on a gang of guides that have something in common.

It creates an economy of scale. There's less context-switching.

Often that something in common is characters or series which have often been collected together. However, it could also be characters launched in the same era, or who are featured heavily in the same crossovers.

Creating the Guide to Jane Foster took a long time. I had to build a bunch of links between Thor stuff in the background of my process and review a lot of Thor issues. Angela and Valkyrie were a little bit faster as a "time per issue" average. Beta Ray Bill and Thunderstrike were faster still.

So far, it seems like there might be something to my theory. Also, this strategy of guide-bombing around a single franchise is demonstrably good for CK's search engine optimization. It increases my domain authority around a single topic steadily over a period of time.

Am I ready to move on to a new, non-Asgardian challenge at this point? OH HECK YES I AM. But, while this iron is still hot, I think I should strike at least one more time to wrap up one final, oft-requested Asgardian guide before I switch contexts. Maybe more.

After this multi-week run on Marvel Guides I'm eager to knock out several DC Guides, as well as finally get some more indie guides out. I'm still not 100% confident that I can continue this aggressive pace all through the Southern Hemisphere Winter, so I don't want to share a schedule with you just yet. However, I'll probably be a little less oblique about my plans in my next post.

As always, if you have top-requested guides that you want to see me tackle soon, your comments matter the most to me of every comic fan on the internet.

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Meanwhile, on Crushing Krisis...

I continued my new Dungeons & Dragons TTRPG coverage with a look at the ten 5e-Compatible Kickstarters closing this week.

I reflected on living through the introduction of new public holidays with Juneteeth in the states and Matariki here in New Zealand.

I flashed back to the pure innocence of Sharice's "I Love Your Smile" from 1991.

Finally, my Drag Race coverage continued with more All-Winners season recaps and Power Rankings for the first episode of Drag Race France.

And, fun fact, my Beta Ray Bill guide launch was my 5,000th post on Crushing Krisis! (And, that doesn't count the nearly 200 comic book guide pages you've helped support - just daily blog posts.)

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Current Exclusives for Crushing Cadets ($1/month): 27 Guides!

DC Guides (6): Batman – Index of Ongoing Titles, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: Hal Jordan, Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner, Omega Men

Marvel Guides (21): Alpha Flight, Angela, Beta Ray Bill, Blade, Captain Britain, Dazzler, Domino, Dracula, Elsa Bloodstone, The Eternals, Jane Foster – Thor & Valkyrie, Legion, Marvel Era: Marvel Legacy, Mister Sinister, Sabretooth, Spider-Ham, Thunderstrike, Valkyrie, Vision, Weapon X, X-Man – Nate Grey

Current Exclusives For Pledgeonauts ($1.99+/month): 54 Guides!

All of the 27 guides above, plus…

DC Guides (15): Animal Man, Aquaman, Books of Magic, Catwoman, Flash, Harley Quinn, Houses & Horrors, Legion of Super-Heroes, Justice League, Lucifer, Mister Miracle, Nightwing, Outsiders, Suicide Squad, Swamp Thing

Marvel Guides (12): Ant-Man & Giant -Man, Champions, Darkhawk, Falcon, Gwenpool, Moon Boy / Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur, Power Pack, Sentry, Silk, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Venom

Indie & Licensed Comics: None right now