Thor’s Sister Angela Has a Bizarre Power Odin’s Other Children Don’t

While Thor‘s sister Angela possesses all the “standard” powers of an Asgardian, she also has another bizarre set of abilities that come from her complex editorial history. Loki is certainly the most famous of Thor’s siblings, but he is far from the only one. The God of Thunder has a number of siblings and half-siblings. Among them is Angela, firstborn of Odin and Freya, raised by the Angels of the hidden realm of Heven. She first appeared in Marvel Comics in 2013, but actually debuted two decades earlier in the pages of Image Comics.
Angela’s true name is Aldrif Odinsdottir. As Odin’s firstborn, she was the rightful heir to the throne of Asgard but when she was an infant, Heven, one of the Ten Realms, waged war on Asgard. The Queen of Heven seemingly slew Aldrif, and an enraged Odin banished her realm from the World Tree. However, the baby survived and was raised by one of the Queen’s handmaidens. Years later, she was pulled out of Heven by a fracture in the space-time continuum, met Thor and the other Asgardians, and learned about her true heritage. Unable to live among the Asgardians but also rejected by the people of Heven, Angela wandered the Realms and had many adventures, including joining the Guardians of the Galaxy.
Angela has displayed a variety of skills and powers over the years. Her Asgardian physiology grants her superhuman strength, stamina, and near-invulnerability. Trained for most of her life by the Angels, who are renowned for being among the greatest warriors in the Ten Realms, Angela is a deadly fighter and a skilled hunter and tracker. She is an expert with any bladed weapon, and her skills with a sword are almost unmatched. On a few occasions (for example, in Guardians of the Galaxy 2015 #18, by Brian Michael Bendis, Valerio Schiti, and Richard Isanove), Angela has shown the ability to use her costume ribbons as prehensile limbs, using them to strangle, cut, and disarm her opponents, thanks to a psychic connection to her outfit. The true origin of this weird power, however, lies in Angela’s past as a character from Image’s Spawn comics.

Angela was originally created by Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane as a supporting character for the Spawn series, debuting in Spawn #9 (March 1993). Angela was a bounty hunter sent by Heaven to kill Spawn, as part of the ongoing conflict with the forces of Hell. Due to her success among readers, Angela became a recurring character and even got her own miniseries. However, she later became the subject of a legal battle between McFarlane and Gaiman over the rights to the character, which Gaiman claimed he co-owned. Despite McFarlane’s denial, Gaiman won and later sold the rights to the character to Marvel Comics when he briefly returned to the House of Ideas in 2013. She made her Marvel Comics debut in 2013’s Age of Ultron #10 by Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev, Bryan Hitch, Butch Guice, Brandon Peterson, Carlos Pacheco, David Marquez and Joe Quesdada. Angela’s origins had to be rewritten, so she became the daughter of Odin and the previously-hidden realm of Heven was introduced to explain her unique appearance.
In the Spawn comics, Angela’s control over her costume mirrored one of Spawn’s prominent powers, and some Marvel writers decided that it would still make a good addition to the character, despite her now completely different origins. The in-universe explanation is that she was raised by the Angels of Heven, so Angela developed abilities that other Asgardians lack. Angela is a really interesting character, and her unique editorial history makes her stand out from the other children of Odin, including Thor.
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