While my dad's comic collection, or what survived of it to the point when I could find it in my grandmother's basement, leaned more towards DC, there are the scattered Marvel comics among it, including three issues of Thor. Two from the Lee/Kirby era, and one by Lee and John Buscema.
Of the two by Lee and Kirby, you have the penultimate chapter of Thor's first run-in with Mangog, who somehow possesses the strength of his entire race - a billion billion beings - and is hellbent on taking revenge on Odin for wiping them out. Odin's asleep as usual, so it falls to Thor to take his best swing at things.
The other one, sadly is not the next issue, but is probably more important to the lore of Marvel's version of Thor. It's the issue where he brings Jane Foster to Asgard and she freaks out at the weird shit she sees, to the point Odin erases it from her mind and sends her back to Earth. Jane would, of course, get those memories back at some point, and then become Thor herself, and then a Valkyrie, which I think remains her current status.
It's also significant for the fact that when a heartbroken Thor is sent to defeat some multi-limbed monster Odin originally unleashed to test Jane Foster, he gets bailed out by a mysterious warrior. Who turns out to be Sif. When your All-Father chucks one girlfriend out the door, he opens the window for another.
The comics are what I figure most people thought of as "Thor" for a long time. He makes big speeches about never surrendering and fighting on, and shoots lightning at Mangog until the ground beneath his feet heats up enough to become an active volcano (???) Then Mangog just grabs some lava and throws it at Thor and the Warriors Three (with Volstagg in full Cowardly Lion mode and Fandral jumping headlong into things.)
Kirby's going big, and there are some good full-page splashes in the Mangog issue (the colors seem messier on the early Jane Foster issue), but I assume Colletta's erasing backgrounds in a lot of the smaller panels, where it's just a solid block of color behind the characters.
The third one, issue 192, maybe showing the wear in the formula. Thor's stuck fighting "Durok the Demolisher", who is your typical mindless, unstoppable force. A more human-looking Destroyer armor, but less visually interesting than the Juggernaut, and without any capacity for speech. Loki is somehow running Asgard because he's got the "Odin-ring", and Sif is reduced to offering her hand in marriage to keep Loki from killing the Warriors Three when Hogun tries to smash the ring with his mace? Knock it off Loki's finger somehow? I dunno. The issue ends with Balder having Karnilla bring him to Earth so he can summon the Silver Surfer to give Thor a hand. Yeah, it's not great.
2 comments:
That is a very poor scan of a beautifully drawn and beautifully inked splash page.
Sorry, I forgot to hop back to the 1970s and ask my dad not to let his comics lose their covers or leave them in a box in a basement for 20 years.
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