Thor is the God of Thunder, and one of the strongest and most important heroes in all of Marvel history. He’s best known for fighting modern-day threats and being a founding Avenger, but he’s actually protected Midgard much longer, having first traveled to Earth sometime in the 9th Century. He’s fought all manner of beast, villain, and evil god during his long tenure as Midgard’s number one protector. He’s most famously battled his sibling, Loki, and other evil Asgardians, but he’s also made quite a few foes outside his own pantheon. There’s the Gargoyle, Mister Hyde, and even Ego the Living Planet, to name a few. However, none of them can hold a candle to Thor’s deadliest villain of all.
Gorr the God Butcher was introduced during Jason Aaron’s run on Thor: God of Thunder. He was an unstoppable force of nature, unlike anything Thor had faced before. It took the combined might of three different versions of Thor across time to finally beat him, but only after he murdered thousands of gods across the cosmos, taking over everything divine in King Thor’s future. Gorr was a mysterious, unknowable being for the first several issues, with Thor only knowing that he wielded the strange yet all-powerful Necrosword. After a truly marvelous introduction, thirteen years ago today, Gorr’s origin was revealed in Thor: God of Thunder #6, which also served as the retroactive introduction of another of Marvel’s deadliest, best villains.
Gorr was born on a planet without a name where the sun never set. Every day, his people prayed for the comfort of night while they scavenged for bugs on the bottoms of rocks and droplets of goop on cave walls. He watched animals tear his mother apart before the altar of his gods. When he was grown, his pregnant wife was killed by an earthquake just after she proclaimed her unending devotion to their gods. When his final child starved, Gorr finally snapped. He denounced his gods, and his people left him to die in the desert. There, the two fighting gods crashlanded before him. The Light God begged for help, but that drove Gorr to take the Black God’s shard and slay his first divine being.
Though Gorr did not know it, he wielded the All-Black the Necrosword. It granted him unparalleled might, which he used to traverse the cosmos, slaughtering every god he could find. This would eventually lead him to Earth, where he battled the God of Thunder, Thor. It would take everything from every part of Thor’s life, but Midgard’s protector would eventually win the day. Still, this issue perfectly set up Gorr’s eternal hatred against the gods of the multiverse and called out his own hypocrisy, as he had become a god himself. He wasn’t even aware how true Volstagg’s jab was, as he had not just bonded to a dead god, but a primordial being of darkness. He bonded with Knull’s All-Black the Necrosword.
This issue introduced what Gorr knew of his weapon’s origins, but he did not even know its name. He knew much less that it was the All-Black, the first and greatest symbiote created by Knull, forged of the primordial darkness. Years after this issue dropped, it would be retconned that Knull was the dark god, and his eternal opponent was the wielder of the Enigma Force, brandishing the All-Light. The God of the Void and the God of Light have battled since the dawn of existence, but when they fell to earth this time, the symbiote was stolen.
Gorr the God Butcher and Knull, God of Symbiotes, remain two of Marvel’s coolest villains. They are both embodiments of pure anguish and darkness. One is a broken man whose prayers were never answered, and one is a dark god who wants nothing more than to return life to the infinite darkness of the void. Their connected origins are insanely cool, and proof that, when a retcon is done right, it can add to the story instead of taking away. This is one of the best Marvel retcons in recent memory, and it gave us two incredible villains.
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