The Biggest Beta Ray Bill Fan
I want to go to a topic I have been thinking a lot about for some time. That topic is the C-list comic book character Beta Ray Bill. Now you may wonder just who is Beta Ray Bill and why you think he is an interesting character worth talking about. Well, that is a great question. Beta Ray Bill is a Marvel Character first written and drawn by Walter Simonson on his run on Thor. He made his first appearance in issue 337 of Thor in 1983. What must be understood about Thor at the time is that no character had ever picked up the Hammer other than Thor at the time. So, Simonson wanted to have a new character wield the hammer and thought that it would be interesting to have this monster be worthy of the hammer. So the design of Beta Ray Bill is this overly muscular humanoid in a dramatic space suit who has a skeletal horse face. In his first appearance, he obtains the hammer and is found worthy and thus granted the power of Thor. The two characters would later become battle brothers and close friends after Odin gave Bill his own hammer, Storm Breaker. I have most of Bill’s appearances in comics, and it has been a rough ride for him. In his appearances, we learn his backstory. Beta Ray Bill is a member of an alien species who call themselves the Korbinites, whose home planet was destroyed by fire demons, so the Korbinites decided to genetically modify one of their people to be a cybernetic super soldier to guard them while they are in cryogenic sleep looking for a new planet. Bill is this soldier that is why he has his monstrous appearance.
However, Bill has never been a big character. He is a popular side character who is often used as a Worf-like character. Often beaten to just prove how strong the new bad guy is. He has had a wild path where different writers have been trying to find out where to put him. He does have some themes that follow him around, such as honor, duty, and appearance. He is often an honorable person loyal to those around him, and willing to sacrifice himself for duty all the time. However, the consequences of that are written in his own monstrous appearance where his struggles with dysphoria.
There has been one series that has exemplified his character best. Daniel Warren Johnson was given a short five-issue series for Beta Ray Bill in 2021 that follows Bill as he looks for a magical item that will give him the power to turn into a normal Korbinite body. In the series, you see that he is vastly upset at his overly masculine appearance. We get a wonderful retcon where he had the medical transformation happen when he was a child and not as an adult, which makes it even worse but more compelling for the reader. We also feel the weight of choosing to be an identity for others and not being who you are for you. Of course, I read some trans themes into the characters because they suffer so much from dysphoria and because of the final panels, but a writer would have to make that explicit because he has such a memorable silhouette, and changing that most likely would not fly in corporate comics. I have ideas for a short to on going with Bill but I’ll keep those to myself in case I ever get the chance to write it.
Thank you for reading. I hope you all click on next year.