Journey into Mystery in the 1960s

In the early 1960s, the super-hero comic book was making a comeback and Marvel wanted to get in on the action. They already had a few hits with the release of Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man, and The Incredible Hulk. However, there was one problem: Due to a publishing agreement, they were limited by the number of books they could publish in a given month. It’s a weird arrangement that was with National Comics (later DC) their chief rival in the comic book business. Don’t ask me how that weird deal came to be. At any rate, Marvel was still publishing various anthology titles that featured mostly one-off science fiction and horror stories. These books served as testing grounds for new characters.

The first of these books to get the super-hero treatment was Journey into Mystery which began featuring regular monthly stories about the Norse god Thor. The character was retooled and updated for the 1960s. On paper, the creation of this version of Thor is credited to Stan Lee (plot) his brother Larry Lieber, and artist Jack Kirby. However, given how Jack Kirby had a well-known infatuation with Norse mythology, I think it’s safe to say that Kirby was more of a creative force when it came to developing Thor, particularly in later stories. However, this was an era where artists were paid peanuts and recognition was hard to come by, especially when you had an egomaniac like Stan Lee taking credit for everything. (No, I’m not one of those people who thinks we should collectively suck Stan Lee’s dick. He wasn’t a very creative guy on his own. He was a good pitchman, but that was about it.)

Anyway, the early Thor stories in Journey into Mystery are a total mess of ideas. Looking back at it now, you can really tell that they didn’t really know what they wanted to do with the character. In the first issue, we are introduced to Donald Blake, a lame doctor who comes across an old walking stick that turns him into Thor when he strikes it on the ground. It almost seems like they intended Don Blake to be the modern-day Thor as opposed to actually being the thunder god. However, over the course of the series, Don Blake starts referring to himself as the Thor and the lines between Don Blake and Thor became incredibly blurred. The ambiguity will eventually be put aside in Thor #159 when it is revealed that Don Blake was Thor the whole time, having been banished to Earth to learn about humility and prove that he was worthy of the mantle of the thunder god.

At the start, it seemed like Thor was going to be just like every other Marvel book at the time by having Thor pitted against communist dictators and alien invaders with the occasional appearance of his recurring foe, Loki the god of mischief. By issue #92 stories started delving more and more into Norse mythology. However, the title was still used to introduce new super-villains to the Marvel pantheon of characters including the Radioactive Man, Mister Hyde, the Cobra, Grey Gargoyle, and the Absorbing Man. To be honest, I particularly enjoy this era of Thor because it wasn’t overly tied into Norse mythology and Thor would interact with all manner of threats, something that becomes a bit of a lost art in later runs with the character, which often more heavily focus on Norse mythology. To me, I find the use and exploration of different theologies in popular culture is lazy. Since there are no copyrights on the characters just about anyone can do a story about Thor, or Hercules, or any other mythical character. You don’t have to invest much creativity.

Another interesting trapping from this title is how they tried to make Thor too much like a super-hero giving him a secret identity as well as the absurd weakness of losing his powers if separated from his hammer for more than a minute. In the 60s a secret identity and some very specific limitation was a common trope of the time. Still, it completely floors me how long Thor continues to have these tropes applied to him. It wasn’t until the 1980s — 20 years later! — when the character was finally stripped of these absurd limitations. Before then, writers would have to come up with countless excuses to work around them or just flat out ignore that Thor had a secret identity.

Another trope was the unrequited love interest. In this case, we had Jane Foster who was a nurse who worked at Don Blake’s office. Don Blake loved Jane but didn’t think she would love a man with a disability such as himself. However, Jane did have feelings for him and wished he’d just open up to her. Don also found himself in direct competition with himself, or rather Thor, as Jane would also develop a romantic interest in him as well. For decades it seemed like writers didn’t know what to do with Jane Fost as she was often used as a perpetual damsel in distress. Particularly when they started introducing the character Sif as Thor’s Asgardian love interest, having Jane Foster around seemed redundant. From there, Jane Foster only existed for bad things to happen to her, forcing Thor to come and rescue her, the pair having a will-they-or-won’t-they moment before she is shuffled away for a few years for another writer to try and figure out what to do with her. They will never do anything worthwhile with Jane Foster until more recent times when she replaced Thor as the thunder god, but I digress.

Things were a lot freer in the 1960s, when the character wasn’t bogged down by having the totality of Norse mythology heaped upon him. However, these free-wheeling times were fast coming to an end. By issue #97, after months of passing off plots to other writers, Stan Lee was back on as a lead writer with Jack Kirby as the primary artist. From this point, Kirby’s influence began pushing through. There is a lot out there that suggests that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were a lot more collaborative than Stan being the writer and Jack being the artist. I would even argue that after a certain point, Stan was just phoning it in and letting Jack do whatever he wanted. Nowhere is this more clear than when Journey into Mystery started dropping its sci-fi and horror back-up stories in favor of Tales of Asgard, a series of stories that retold Norse myths. By issue #104. the only thing that was left was the last few text stories until it the book was filled with Thor stories from cover-to-cover. By this time, the title Journey into Mystery was crammed at the top of the page as the words Mighty Thor became prominent on the page.

By this time, the Norse mythology aspects took on a central role of his stories. There was still the occasional tale where he would fight a more conventional villain, such as the Absorbing Man, but these battles were almost always instigated by Loki or some other Asgardian entity. By 1966, the print deal that limited the number of books Marve could publish came to an end. Unrestrained they dropped all of their old anthology titles in character-focused books. Journey into Mystery was replaced with Thor, however, the series continued with the same numbering.

This would not be the end of Journey into Mystery. The title would be revived again in the 1990s during the Heroes Reborn event. Thor was canceled and replaced with Journey into Mystery which initially featured stories about the Asgardians in a world without the Avengers or the Fantastic Four. That series continued numbering from Thor. However, when Heroes Reborn came to an end, so did Journey into Mystery, the book replaced with a second volume of Thor. Journey into Mystery also saw a brief revival in the 2010s, again continuing its original numbering. But those are stories for another time.

Note: I will only be indexing the Thor stories in these issues of Journey into Mystery for the time being. I will eventually go back and cover the sci-fi, horror, and monster stories at a later date.