Thor vs Gorr the God Butcher: Who Wins in the Comics and How?
Thor’s upcoming, fourth Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie is going to feature Gorr the God Butcher, a relatively new character that caused a lot of problems for the deities of Marvel’s fictional universe. We’re still a long way from the movie, but that does not mean that we cannot give you a proper comparison of these two characters’ powers and abilities, and tell you who won in the comic books. Enjoy!
Initially, Gorr was successful in fighting Thor and has beaten and even killed several iterations of the Asgardian god. Ultimately, though, he was defeated and destroyed by a past version of Thor, but not before his final speech made the Earth-616 Thor unworthy. Gorr is definitely one of the most dangerous foes Thor has faced.
Our comparison is going to be divided into three sections. The first is going to bring an overview of the two characters, after which we are going to compare their powers, including their signature weapons. Finally, we’re going to bring you a detailed analysis of the two characters to determine which one would win in a direct clash.
Gorr the God Butcher and his powers
Gorr the God Butcher is a relatively new character in Marvel’s fictional universe. He is a supervillain focused on killing gods. He made his debut in Thor: God of Thunder #2 (2012) and was created by Jason Aaron and Esad Ribic. Although he only has around a dozen appearances in the comic books, Gorr has become a very notorious villain and one of Thor’s most formidable foes.
Gorr is a very mysterious figure. He was born on an unnamed planet and is a member of an unknown species of aliens. Born in complete poverty, Gorr was taught to believe in the gods that watched over them, yet the gods never answered his prayers. Tragedy after tragedy struck Gorr’s life and at one point, devastated from all the losses, he denounced all the gods and was exiled by his people.
Later, he witnessed Knull, a dark elder god, fight another god in a desert. Shocked by the realization that gods exist, Gorr became furious because he now saw that the gods were there but simply did not want to help him. When Knull’s opponent asked for his help, Gorr became even more furious and as Knull’s sword bonded with him to become the All-Black the Necrosword, he used it to kill the god. Gorr then became the God Butcher, vowing to kill and destroy every god in the universe.
Sometime during his butchering journeys, Gorr encountered Thor and the two of them has several epic clashes, where Gorr managed to get the upper hand against a lot of versions of the Asgardian God before the latter finally managed – via a past version of himself – to kill Gorr using two Mjolnirs; despite his death, Gorr managed to make Thor unworthy with his speech about gods being unworthy of the devotion of mortals.
Still, Gorr was later resurrected, which was easy as his consciousness remained alive thanks to the All-Black symbiote. He once again engaged in a fight with All-Father Thor and King Loki, wanting to kill them once and for all. He was eventually killed and the symbiote was destroyed, but the moral Gorr was resurrected, albeit as an insane amnesiac, but with the possibility of living the rest of his life in peace.
Due to being a relatively new character, Gorr has not yet appeared in much in other media, but he is set to be the main villain in Thor: Love and Thunder, where he is going to be played by Christian Bale.
Thor and his powers
Thor Odinson is a fictional superhero appearing in comics published by Marvel. He was created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby and was inspired by the Norse god Thore, with whom he shares most of his traits. He made his debut in the comic book Journey into Mystery #83 (1962) and has since become an essential name for Marvel Comics, being the center of several stand-alone series and part of several superhero groups and series. Thor was initially created by Kirby for DC Comics back in the fifties, but the character never achieved any sort of prominence, which is why Kirby co-created another version for Marvel.
Thor is the son of the father of the gods of Asgard, Odin and the spirit of the Earth Jord, an avatar of Gaea. Odin’s goal was to have a son who had powers not derived solely from the homeland of the heavenly gods. So Odin created a cave in Norway, where Jord gave birth to Thor. Thor is raised among the Asgardians in the belief that Frigga, his father’s rightful wife, was also his biological mother.
He spent his childhood throwing himself into the most dangerous adventures together with his envious adoptive brother Loki, his friends Balder, Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg and his first love, Lady Sif, not denying the strength and nobility of his heritage. Thor becomes the best warrior of Asgard, skilled enough to be able to wield the enchanted hammer Mjolnir and to recover the ring of the Nibelung on behalf of his father under the guise of “Siegfried”, giving life to the legend of the same name.
However, all this leads the Asgardian prince to develop an arrogant, impulsive and almost warmonger character, which is why Odin decides to teach him the value of humility by exiling him to Earth (without memory or powers) in the body of the young, frail, meek and lame medical student Donald Blake who, after ten years, opens a private clinic in New York becoming a brilliant doctor known for his virtues of perseverance and compassion.
Realizing that he has now learned his lesson, Odin arranges for his son to go on vacation to Norway, to a cave, find Mjolnir and recover his powers in time to thwart an invasion of Skrull aliens. Later Thor and his alter ego Donald Blake begin a double life taking care of the sick in their private clinic together with the nurse Jane Foster (loved by both) and defending humanity from evil.
The main adversaries faced by the God of Thunder in the course of his first adventures are the Absorbing Man, the Destroyer, the Demoman, Zarrko the man from Another World, the Radioactive Man, the Lava Man, Cobra, Mister Hyde, Amora the Enchantress, Skurge the Executioner, Gargoyle and finally his archenemy and adoptive brother Loki who, on one occasion, to defeat him, takes control of the Hulk making him clash with him.
Before the situation degenerates escalates, however, Iron Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp arrive to help the Asgardian hero, and thanks to them, he manages to free the Hulk by defeating Loki. Given the excellent teamwork, once the battle is over, the five heroes decide to form the Avengers. Falling in love with Jane Foster and life on Earth, Thor refuses to return to Asgard even after Odin marks the end of his exile, which creates numerous friction between father and son.
Meanwhile, due to Loki’s machinations, the hero is drawn into a series of epic adventures such as facing the demon Surtur and the giant Skagg alongside Odin and Balder or proving his innocence by a false accusation before the Tribunal; these events force him to take a long period of absence from the Avengers. Some time later, Thor meets the Greek god Hercules with whom, after facing Pluto, Ego the Living Planet and the High Evolutionary, he establishes a deep and lasting friendship.
Finally, Odin agrees to transform Jane into a goddess to test her and determine if she is worthy of her son but, after failing, the nurse is stripped of her powers and sent back to Earth with no memory of Thor, who later recommences his historic relationship with Sif, with whom he faces the troll Ulik for the first time. After rejoining his old battlemates to protect Asgard from the monster called Mangog, Thor rescues Sif after “He” kidnaps her, discovers Galactus’s origins, confronts Surtur, the Stranger and Abomination again, and then clashes with Doctor Doom.
Eventually, he will fall in love with another girl, Viviana, one of the few remaining Valkyries. Thor will sacrifice everything about her to save her from a terrible fate that is death. The two, separated for years, will meet again and give birth to Louis, a demigod.
Comparing the powers of Gorr the God Butcher and Thor
Our second section, despite a different title from our usual one, will still contain a comparison of the two characters’ powers. It won’t be a direct comparison as much as a listing of their powers abilities, which is going to serve as a basis for our analysis in section three of our article. Now, let us begin.
Firstly, let us see what Thor can do. Thor is a god and as such, he has a lot of the same powers his father, Odin, has. But he is still weaker than Odin. He is superhuman in most aspects (strength, durability, intelligence, longevity, etc.) but unlike Thanos, he is not immortal. He is practically invulnerable, but he does age and, like all the other Asgardian gods, will eventually die; it’ll just take him longer than your average bear to do so.
The thin with Thor is that he has access to a variety of unimaginable powers that stem from Asgard, the best-known being the powers of Mjolnir, the Stormbreaker, and the Odin Force. Thor can also use other forms of energy and blend with them, as he did with Power Cosmic. There’s also the forbidden Warrior’s Madness, which can turn Thor into an unstoppable beast, but also destroy his psyche, which is why it was banned by Odin.
Since his final resurrection, Gorr has been stripped of all of his powers and has become a “civilian”. Yet, while he was the God Butcher (when he was in symbiosis with All-Black), he has a plethora of powers, including superhuman strength, agility, durability, speed and reflexes. He also had the ability to manipulate constituent matter, as well as regenerative abilities that rendered him practically immortal, especially when combined with the fact that his consciousness was permanently fused with All-Black, making him not only long-living, but practically eternal. He could be killed by destroying the All-Black, but that is exceptionally difficult, albeit not impossible.
And this concludes this section. We have given you a thorough comparison of their powers and we can now continue with the main question.
Gorr vs Thor: Who wins in the comics?
And now for the most important and interesting section of our article – the analysis. Here, we are going to use what we have found out about these two characters and analyze how all these facts would (or would not) help them in a fight against each other, but with a twist. Namely, rather than give you a classic comparison as we usually do, we are going to give you a chronicle of their clashes in the comic books, with the outcomes of each of these battles.
The goal is to determine who won in the comic books and how it was done, and in order to do that, we thought it would be best to give you a brief overview of their battles. As for the recommended reading, before we continue with the story, here are the titles you should consult to get the most out of this rivalry:
- Thor: God of Thunder #1-5 (2012-2013)
- Thor: God of Thunder #7-11 (2013)
- Original Sin #7 (2014)
- Unworthy Thor #5 (2017)
- King Thor #1-4 (2019-2020)
Now, let us commence with our story.
During the 9th century, Gorr came to Earth and killed an American god; the body washed up on the coast of Iceland, where it was found by Thor. Later, while accompanying a Viking raid group to Russia, Thor found some of the Slavic gods dead.
Thor was attacked by Gorr, who almost managed to kill him, but shortly before the fatal blow, Thor unleashed a thunderbolt that knocked them both out. Gorr recovered and escaped to a cave, where he once again fought Thor. Although Gorr tried to torture Thor for seventeen days to get information on Asgard’s location, Thor held out long enough for his Viking worshipers to find him and to save him from Gorr; they managed to cut off the alien’s right arm, believing that they had slain him.
Gorr managed to survive their encounter, however, and he spent the next millennium slaughtering more and more gods, growing stronger and stronger and gathering an army of dark minions, the Black Berserkers, to aid him in his crusade. Thor became aware of Gorr’s activities centuries later and began to chase him away when a prayer called him to a world without gods. Finding the slaughtered gods, Thor immediately recognized Gorr’s work.
As Thor made his way to the cave where they fought to find him, Gorr attacked Chronux to claim the Pool of Forevers, using the blood of the Time Gods to cross the stream of time. He returned to the beginning of the universe and killed one of the very first elder gods, taking the heart of the infant deity as a trophy.
He then traveled millennia into the future and reached Earth-14412, claiming the desolate world as his base of operations, and enslaved all the gods he could conquer, except All-Father Thor, whom he regularly tormented for his failures. For the next nine hundred years, Gorr forced the enslaved gods to mine the shattered planets and star cores to dig for material to build the Godbomb that he would use to annihilate all gods throughout the time flow. Gorr also created constructs of his late wife Arra and son Agar from the All-Black symbiote, though his “son”, unbeknownst to him, had embodied his subconscious self-loathing.
Upon the arrival of Thor the Avenger of Earth-616, Gorr sent Black Berserkers back in time to retrieve young Thor from around 800 AD – the Thor he first met – and then brought him back to the future, where he was enslaved with the other remaining gods.
Young Thor tried to destroy the Godbomb with a piece of a star, but was instead catapulted off from the planet, where he met Thor the Avenger and King Thor. The three decided to attack Gorr and his planet one last time and they almost killed him, but since Gorr absorbed the power of the gods he had slain, Gorr was too powerful and defeated the three Thors, leaving them for dead and continuing on his way to activate the Godbomb.
When his wife’s construct called him a god, Gorr furiously killed her.
However, “Agar” decided to help Thor the Avenger bring down the God Butcher after realizing that his father had become essentially what he had always despised. Charged by the prayers of the son and every surviving God in time and space, Thor absorbed the explosion of the Godbomb and the Necrosword. With his power, Thor was able to weaken Gorr, with “Agar” denouncing Gorr as the god of hypocrisy before Thor’s former self finally killed him.
But even after his death, Gorr had managed to leave his mark on the Earth-616 Thor, as Gorr’s philosophy was responsible for making Thor unworthy and unable to lift Mjolnir.
Gorr’s consciousness was contained in All-Black, finally at peace in a world without any gods. Eons after his death, Gorr was resurrected by King Loki – the host of All-Black at the time – to kill him after killing All-Father Thor. Instead, Gorr interrupted their duel by taking All-Black back and using him to impale King Loki from the back.
Gorr crucified Thor and Loki and mocked them both, but was propelled into orbit by the power of the All-Father. Remembering the scattered parts and ramifications of All-Black, Gorr involved All-Father Thor in a battle that devastated the solar systems, vowing to let Thor watch as he slaughtered the people of Midgard and all of life in the cosmos before creating his own, making sure that the new peoples were free from the need for worship.
Attacked by Loki, Gorr mutilated him before devouring the two brothers in All-Black, stating that he had passed mortality and was not only a god but a force of nature.
The gods that Thor saved and sent to Indigarr billions of years ago have been awakened by the thunder goddesses who returned in time to save their grandfather and uncle. Overwhelmed, Gorr was beheaded by Atli Wodendottir, but his consciousness resided in All-Black, the ancient symbiote who had previously infected the universe itself.
Gorr attempted to devour Thor by manifesting a black hole, but was distracted by King Loki, who told him the story of every heroic deed Thor had ever performed – giving Thor time to wield the full power of storm god from Mjolnir and destroy the All-Black symbiote. Resurrected as a mortal but left with amnesia and mad, Gorr was taken in by the Sky Lords of Indigarr to spend the rest of his days in peace.
And that’s it for today. We hope you had fun reading this and that we have given you all the information you were looking for. See you next time and don’t forget to follow us!