The Bananas Backstory Behind 'Thor: Love And Thunder's New Asgard City

Aside from giving us our first look at swole Natalie Portman, the first trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder also provided a quick update on those unlucky Asgardians who have been living on Earth since their flat planet (or whatever you call Asgard) exploded, and half of them got Thanos'd. We learned that within a few years, New Asgard went from a small coastal village where these immortal aliens were working as fishermen to a town with golden buildings, multiple cruise ships, and so many Viking ships flying by that the local children aren't even phased by them.

In the movies, the Asgardian immigrants settled on Tønsberg, the same Norwegian village Odin entrusted with a reality-reshaping cube for about 980 years until some Nazis stole it (way to drop the ball, Tønsberg). The comics also had an "Asgardians come to live on Earth after their home is destroyed in Ragnarok" storyline, with some noteworthy differences: for one thing, instead of going to Norway, they came to crash in an exotic location called "Broxton, Oklahoma." 

At first, it was just Thor by himself because everyone else was still dead -- and since that "everyone" included his dad, Thor was able to use his beefed-up powers as ruling King of Asgard to summon a bunch of big-ass castles in an empty field just outside of Broxton. When some nice policemen came to point out that you can't just materialize an entire city on someone else's land without permission, Thor simply made New Asgard levitate over said land.

The actual landowner wasn't satisfied with this solution, but Thor shut him up with a truck flatbed full of gold. Next, Thor set about populating the city by retrieving the souls of his friends, which are trapped inside random people from all around the world -- including Loki, who happens to be in a female body and stays that way for a while. The people of Broxton were, generally speaking, pretty friendly with their new neighbors: they welcomed them with coffee cakes and ice cream at a town meeting and patiently explained human concepts like "septic tanks" and "sewer systems" to them.

The Asgardians were apparently pretty good for the local economy, considering that a single party required a caravan of trucks loaded with barrels of beer and crates of pizza. That might explain why, when the U.S. government came to invade New Asgard led by the "reformed" Green Goblin and his off-brand Avengers, some Broxton-ians helped defend the floating city ... although the "floating" part didn't apply for much longer.

The straw that broke the camel's back for Broxton's residents was the time Galactus came to eat them because of some cosmic snack located in New Asgard's ruins. Some townies grabbed their rifles and told the Asgardians to get out of the neighborhood (meaning Earth) because they were putting Broxton in danger. That storyline ended with everyone, including Galactus, making peace again, but time proved those townies right: even after the Asgardians packed up and went to live in a New New Asgard in space, Broxton continued attracting the attention of supervillains because Thor once lived there. Over the years, the town has been rendered uninhabitable by an evil(er) energy corporation ...

... razed by trolls, and finally, leveled completely by Thor's hammer when she became sentient and revealed she hated being grabbed around by him -- so much so that she killed thousands of people just to spite him. 

Will the movie version of New Asgard meet the same tragic fate? Of course, if the town is rendered uninhabitable and razed to the ground, it would be way more realistic if it ended up happening not because of the space gods but due to all those tourists in the cruise ships.

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: Marvel Studios