How the Marvel Universe Is Drawn Into Thor's War of the Realms

One of the things that makes the Marvel Universe so fascinating is how the modern world exists side by side with the fantastic and the mythical. The collision point between those worlds is where stories happen, of course, and sometimes those collisions are so big, they're capable of shattering multiple worlds, placing the lives of billions at risk. Such a collision happens this April when Marvel's War of the Realms event kicks off, and hordes of monstrous creatures and armies straight out of Norse myth will invade Earth.

The Mighty Thor creative team of Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman is hard at work finishing the main War of the Realms miniseries, the culmination of a story Aaron began building in 2013's Thor:God of Thunder #13 where he and Ron Garney reintroduced the villainous Malekith to Thor's world. Since then, the scheming Dark Elf has built up an alliance that has been conquering the worlds of Asgard. When War of Realms begins in April, the only world left for Malekith and his Dark Council to take down is Midgard... and its legions of heroes.

Thor will, of course, be one of the heroes trying to thwart the invasion, but he won't stand alone. CBR spoke with Aaron about developing War of Realms and what readers can expect from the event, especially now that Wolverine and the Fantastic Four are back in play.

CBR: You've been building to War of the Realms for six years now; how does it feel to finally reach this point?

Jason Aaron: It feels good to finally reach this point. It is a little bittersweet though, because it means I'm almost to the end of my Thor run.

All this time, I've been building towards this very specific story. It started as just a big Thor story. Then I was writing Avengers. So I figured it was a Thor and Avengers story. Then at one of our editorial retreats Tom Brevoort asked, “Why don't we make this our next event?” The scope was right for it to be an event and the tracks had been laid. So it was just a matter of figuring out what everything looked like and the schedule.

This story was always going to be a huge epic that involved everybody, but becoming an event gave me an opportunity to give bigger roles to characters like Daredevil and the Punisher. So that was really exciting.

The core “Thor-ness” of it is still there, though. The story has just got bigger in terms of how it's presented. This sprang from the pages of Thor and it involves more than Just Thor himself. It involves Jane Foster, Freyja, Loki, Odin, and a lot of other characters we built up in the book over the years.

You don't have to have read the previous six years worth of those stories to understand Thor's role in all of this, though. I've been building towards this invasion for six years, but the inciting incident is still in the first issue of War of the Realms. This part of the story really begins when all these fearsome otherworldly monsters show up in New York City. So even if you haven't seen how the war has spread from realm to realm over the last years, you can pick up the moment of the invasion hitting our shores and go from there.

NEXT PAGE: How Punisher, Wolverine, the Fantastic Four and More Factor Into War of the Realms

The cover of War of the Realms #1 features three characters I know you have great affinity for: Wolverine, Punisher and Doctor Strange. What's it like writing them in a story like this?

There is some very fun Punisher stuff in this story. To me, he's fun to write in this kind of story because he's such a fish out of water. I love his perspective on things and how he interacts with characters. So writing him and Wolverine together for the first time in a while was a blast. And it was had a lot of fun returning to the Punisher/Doctor Strange dynamic I established in Original Sin. Plus, we haven't seen Wolverine in the midst of these sorts of stories in a long time, so it was nice to have him back

The promise of a story like this is we can cross the lines between things. So it's very much a Lord of the Rings style battle exploding into Midtown Manhattan. So we'll have things like Captain America riding a winged horse or all of these street level and big time Marvel heroes in a kind of story that's normally Thor stuff. We'll also have some Marvel Universe stuff in things that are usually fantasy oriented.

You mentioned Daredevil. Have you had much of a chance to write Matt Murdock before? What's it like writing him with Heimdall's super senses

No, I don't know that I've written him at all, and it's a lot of fun. I'm writing him in both the pages of War of the Realms, and there will also be a Daredevil focused story in the War of the Realms: War Scrolls anthology book.

I've been playing with all this stuff in Thor for six years now, so it's fun to see it explode in such a huge way all across the Marvel Universe. So it's not just Daredevil running across rooftops throwing his billy club. Like you said, it's changed the character on a fundamental level. We're dealing with a different sort of Daredevil.

The Fantastic Four haven't been around for the last few Marvel events. What kind of role will they have here?

They definitely have a presence in the book; I wanted to put everyone on the table, and the FF haven't been around in a long time. There's a really cool moment with them. I don't want to say what's in store for them after that.

Will the X-Men also be part of what you're doing? I know they've played somewhat limited roles in past Marvel events.

We'll see a lot of Wolverine in the main book, but given all the crazy stuff going on with the X-books, it was a little more difficult to get all of the X-Men in there. There is a big chunk of them, and you can check out the X-Men tie-in book that Matt Rosenberg is doing. I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

What about the villains of the Marvel Universe? Seem that characters like Victor Von Doom and Roxxon head Dario Agger would all have very strong feelings about Malekith's invasion of their homeworld.

For sure. We'll see some of that in the books. Dario Agger especially has been a big part of everything I've been doing in Thor for years. He's sold out Midgard to Malekith and his invading army, so he'll certainly be part of things.

Can you talk at all about Wilson Fisk's role in this story? He was part of Secret Empire, and it seems like now that he's Mayor of New York he'd have an even bigger part to play in this story.

We'll see Fisk as the Mayor addressed, but I don't believe it will be in the main book. What Fisk and the other Marvel villains think of an invasion like this is definitely a great question. It will be answered, but not in the main book. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of room for it.

I'm now nearing the end of this book, and I find myself wishing I had 40 pages for every issue.

It does seem like the biggest challenge of telling a tale like this is deciding what not to include.

Right. This is a big battle raging all across the globe. We cover as much of that as we can in the main book. There are stories about specific characters on specific missions and that leaves us with some cool tie-ins where we can dive into more detail about things like fire goblins in Shanghai, Trolls in Australia, or Malekith's Dark Elves raging across Europe.

Your Mighty Thor collaborator Russell Dauterman is drawing War of the Realms, and I understand he's been working on it for a while now.

Yeah, we knew right away that we wanted Russell to draw this. For that to be feasible with the publishing schedule they wanted he had to start way early. So he started working on War of the Realms right after he finished Mighty Thor. That was over a year before the issue's release. So I had to jump ahead a year to write War of the Realms, which normally would be a terrifying thing to do. It was no big deal though, because I had been laying the tracks for this story for six years. I knew where everything was going to land.. We're way ahead in terms of how these event books usually go.

So, barring anything unforeseen, Russell will draw the entire series.

Yeah, knock on wood! I think we're on a really good pace right now. I think he'll be able to draw the entire thing and have it come out on time.

This is a massive war story. We're talking an army with Frost Giants, Fire Giant, Dark Elves facing off with all the heroes in the Marvel Universe. Russell is tackling a lot on every page, but during his Thor run, he did a lot of world building in terms of the different realms and the bad guys who populate them. So he's really been doing grunt work for War of the Realms for the last few years. It wasn't like he was starting from scratch. He's doing am amazing job tackling all the craziness of a story like this.

It also doesn't hurt that he's working with Matt Wilson, who was his colorist on his run of Thor. It was great to keep the two of them together and have them roll right from Thor into War of the Realms.