Ten days ago, I finished a long and occasionally arduous journey deep into the heart of nerdom: I finally read every issue of Marvel's THOR and its sister comic, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY, published since the character came back in 2007.* 

Between here and there, there have been about 60 issues of the main Thor book, plus 37 issues of Journey into Mystery, plus assorted one-shorts and miniseries. (I'll confess, I haven't read every single one of the one-shots, mainly because Marvel released a ton of them around the time the movie came out and I'm sorting out what's what. If I stumble onto any gems, I'll let you know.) That's a lot of comics - Gods bless the iPad, without which I doubt I ever would have taken up the project.

If you like superhero comics... Well, it's actually hard to tell, exactly, how well you will enjoy this particular era of the character. The 2007 Thor relaunch emphasized the fantasy side of the series as opposed to the super-heroing; most of the time, when the series goes towards superheroics, it falls a little flat. The best parts, for me, evoke a wonderful feeling of magical realism, the mixing of the mundane and the fantastic, the holy and the comedic.

This past Sunday, the History Channel debuted its first scripted drama series, VIKINGS. (If you missed it, or if, like me, you don't actually have a television, iTunes had the first episode available for free, at least at the time of writing.) 

VIKINGS follows the exploits of a de-mythologized Ragnar Lodbrok, a hero of Viking myths and sagas. Going by the first episode, the show hardly appears to be a straight adaptation of Ragnar's Saga; little about the show's hero remains the same as either the sagas or, as best as I can tell, the best guesses at the historical life of Ragnar. (I suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing, though it's a strange choice - nobody in America except serious Viking buffs will even recognize the name, and the people who recognize it will be confused as to why the character doesn't resemble the Ragnar of the sagas. Who knows.)

In the first episode, "Rites of Passage," Ragnar (Travis Fimmel) and his twelve-year-old son set out to their tribe's Thing, where, after a few matters of law and punishment are settled, the tribe's leader, Jarl Haraldson (Gabriel Byrne) will announce their destination for the summer's raids. Haraldson announces they will strike east, into Russia, as they have for several years; unfortunately, while it is known territory, it's also a poor place to make a profit, as the Slavs aren't any richer than the Scandinavians. Ragnar, with the help of a few new technologies, believes they should strike west, instead, but Haraldson won't have any of it. In secret, Ragnar hires a half-crazed shipwright, Floki, to build him a vessel so he and a crew can go exploring, putting him into direct conflict with Haraldson, who doesn't want one of his subjects making him look weak by defying his orders.

The Mayans, well known for their devotion to Zoroastrianism.

A few weeks ago I got an email telling me that Civilization V had gone on sale in the Steam store. I was broke; both the rent and my student loans came due in the same paycheck, and I was at the most difficult part of the pay-cycle, four days before payday.

I realize that the usual wheelhouse of this blog is "popular" culture - comics, video games, stuff like that. The peculiar artistry of nerds. Today, however, I need to talk about something a little closer to "literary" culture (which, ironically, has far less mainstream exposure than any artifact of the geek fraternity.)

I stole Gore Vidal's 1964 novel Julian from a friend back in 2010. ("Stole" is the proper verb. I borrowed it from her and then moved away without giving it back.) I intended to read it as research for a novella I was writing. I never got through it back then, partially because squeezing yet another 500 page novel into one's final semester of graduate school is quite difficult, and partially because I knew the ending would break me in half. But I knew I would have to finish it someday. I picked the book up again this fall, incited by Vidal's death earlier this year, and finished it this morning.

I doubt I have ever been so shaken by a book.

My roommate bought a Wii not too long ago, and the first (and so far only) game he's bought for it is The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I haven't played much of it beyond the beginning, but the beginning is a fascinating piece of work -- especially to someone looking at it through Pagan eyes.

OK, so, if you haven't played it, or if it's been a while, here's what happens. Link, the nameless, wordless pretty-boy hero of the story, lives in a city in the clouds (but not that Cloud City.) He's training to be a sky knight, or, in other words, a knight who lives in the sky. (Try to keep up.) He rides a gigantic bird and learns sword-fighting and all sorts of other knightly things.

There's a big competition coming up for the sky knights in training, and whoever wins the race takes part in some mysterious ritual atop the enormous statue of the city's patron goddess. The only other participant in that ritual is the princess, Zelda.

You can blame my girlfriend for this post.

Although I was an early adopter of Facebook - way back in the days of legend, when one needed to be a student at an approved college and we spelled Facebook with a The - I had managed to avoid the time sucking vortex of Facebook games for many years. They were, after all, Skinner boxes, one and all, designed to slowly but persistently separate dollars and time from those gullible enough to fall into their traps. In terms of sophistication, Facebook games are little better than the puzzle in the polar bear cage on LOST, except Facebook games don't even have the courtesy to reward you with a fish biscuit.

...and then my girlfriend started playing Marvel Avengers Alliance, which is a Skinner box abomination like all the rest, except clad in the bright spandex of my beloved superheroes.

Comics are my first love. I taught myself to read with Spiderman; my first after-school job primarily financed my $100 a month comics habit. And even today, comics may be my favorite medium, even if I have left the month-to-month antics of superheroes behind me. (Not for outgrowing superheroes, mind you, but because I was fed up with the companies behind them. I'm sure I'll end up ranting about this at some point.)

One of the series I have been reading through recently is NORTHLANDERS, published by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, written by Brian Wood, who is more famous for his book DMZ. NORTHLANDERS is an anthology series -- each volume, coincidentally about as long as a trade paperback, is a self-contained story. (The artist also changes with each volume.) The only thing the stories share in common is that they are set in the Viking Age, and the main characters are, as the title implies, people from the Northland. Unusually for a "Viking" story, however, that does not always mean Norsemen or Icelanders; Wood takes the entirety of the Viking world for his setting, and only a few stories have anything to do with Scandinavia proper.

 I was born into Wicca, and for the most part, that's where I have stayed. I celebrate the sabbats and the esbats with my family coven, Pleiades, just as I have since I was a boy. But I have been curious about other religions, especially others that fall into the umbrella of “Pagan,” since I was eight or nine, and thanks to the magpie ethics of eclecticism, I've been quite happy to sample what those other paths had to offer. I studied Taoism in the 4th grade, had a Kemetic period in high school, and today study a little bit of Kaballah (Thelemic and otherwise.) But there's one brand of Paganism I don't think I could ever try, much less commit myself to, even though I have friends who follow it and recommend it to me.

 I'm afraid I could never be a Druid.

 This may seem unusual. If you're into the Pagan community at all, you've probably heard plenty of nice things about Druids. Alaric Albertsson, Llewellyn author, member of the prominent Druidic organization Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF), and all-around swell guy, says he thinks Druidry is the future of Paganism. Well, I bloody hope not.

 Why, you might ask.