Thor in the 1990s
Thor was never a particularly strong title, with only a handful of great story arcs spread out over the decades, so it should be no surprise when I say that the 1990s were one of the weakest decades of the character. However, like many other titles from this era, I believe that people tend to paint everything with that same “all 90’s comics were bad” paint brush rather than actually reading the stories and seeing if they any good, but I’m getting ahead of myself (as usual), so let’s roll back to the beginning.
The start of the decade saw the continued run of Tom DeFalco and artist Ron Frenz. The pair would work almost consistently on the title issue #459.
Issues #413 and 414 wrapped up Thor’s involvement in the Acts of Vengeance storyline although these issues don’t have the event branding on the cover page. It’s during this story that we learn that Thor’s growing weakness from recent issues is due to the fact that Loki has still be mystically linked to the thunder god since issue #400. Thor then enlists the aid of Doctor Strange to break the spell. What’s more frustrating is that shortly after Acts wrapped up, Loki went back to being Thor’s antagonist immediately after the event, with DeFalco even doing that tired "obscured face” trope to leave readers guessing who it was. While that probably would have been fine if I were reading this month-to-month as it was being released, binging this entire run makes it feel uninspiring. Get used to that.
Another thing that continues on is DeFalco’s desire to do stories in the same vein as the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby era of the 1960s. While Ron Frenz can do a decent Kirby-eque art style, these issues feel incredibly dated with their simplistic plots and retro art. Keep in mind, this is the same time period where the likes of Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee were working for Marvel. The entire style of comics was changing as more stylized art was becoming common place. Comparing Thor to the likes if McFarlane’s Spider-Man and Lee’s X-Men, makes it look dull by comparison.
The stories also kind of plot along as it quickly becomes apparent that the idea of merging Thor with Eric Masterson proved to be a bad move. This issue being that Masterson is a divorcee fighting for custody for his son. Adding this element to the story just backs Thor into a corner in terms of the types of adventures he goes on. You can’t go on cosmic quests or spend months in Asgard when you got a kid to raise and an ex-wife trying to take him away from you. Case in point, issues #419-425 feature just quite an epic. In order for Thor to be able to be gone for an extended period, Eric Masterson suddenly decides to stop fighting for custody of his son so he can go off as Thor. The idea of Masterson juggling his ordinary life and raising his son just doesn’t work with the constraints imposed by the usual tropes of a Thor comic. It gets a lot better when Masterson takes over as Thor, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Issue #419-425 also features two running stories: The first being the Black Galaxy Saga and the Endless Circle story arc. Each issue would be split into two separate stories, a Thor feature and a Tales from Asgard feature. Both stories are just retreads of similar Lee/Kirby plots with the Black Galaxy focusing on the High Evolutionary in space trying to create a new race of genetically egineered gods while also learning the secret origin of the Celestials while the Endless Circle is another Ragnarok story wherein Surtur and Ymir awaken and threaten to destroy Asgard. These stories are so mired with derivative story elements that they are a boring read. How many times do we have to read stories in the pages of Thor about the High Evolutionary and creating a new race of gods? Well, I hate to spoil it for you, but you’re going to be sick of both concepts by the time this decade is over because they are revisited to the point where you’ll have no fucks left to give.
The Endless Circle story is exhausting as well since there had been two major “prevent Ragnarok” style stories in the last decade, the last one happening less than 20 issues before hand. In this case the old trope of Odin either being possessed or replaced by someone else also rears its head. Doing Ragnarok once every few years is fine, I guess, as long as you come up with something different. However, the Endless Circle is endlessly derivative by reusing plot contrivances that have been done to death already at this point. It’s all just so underwhelming and uninteresting.
An outlier in all of this is issue #415, a filler issue with art by Herb Trempe that rehashes Thor’s origins for the millionth time. During the 1990s, Herb Trimpe at tempted to mimic the style of popular 90s artists and it created some of the most god awful work of his entire career and this story is no exception. I only mention it to warn you that you might want to stab your eyes out of your skull reading it.
After these two big story arcs, does a bunch of stories that are just excuses to have guest-stars with issues #427-429 guest starring Excalibur and issues #429 and 430 featuring the Ghost Rider.
Issues #432-433 saw the role of Thor get passed directly to Eric Masterson, with Thor’s entire being transferred into Mjolnir for a time. It was during Masterson’s time as Thor that I first started getting into comics and, as a kid, it seemed to me like Eric was Thor for a very long time. Revisiting this book 30 years later, I’m a little surprised to see that he was just barely Thor for two years. At any rate, what’s really interesting is how things don’t really change. Reading the letter pages at the time, making Masterson the brand new Thor really upset a lot of fans who — foolishly — believed that this change would be permanent. This same upset would happen decades later when they did the same thing with Jane Foster. Time and time again comic book fans freak the fuck out over a change that happens thinking it will be permanent only for it to be reversed later. I find that a lot of interesting stories often get overlooked because of this outrage. God forbid a writer change up the status quo to tell something different.
The thing about the Eric Masterson story arc is that once he becomes the new Thor, these stories are actually quite interesting. We go from Thor, who is a chivalrous hero with centuries of experience under his belt. He is royalty. He is regal. He acts a certain way because of his heritage and upbringing. Suddenly, the role is given to a mortal who is unsure of himself. He doesn’t know if he has what it takes to be a hero. He certainly doesn’t feel worthy. We’re given a Thor that is very uncertain of himself and has a huge learning curve to overcome.
This two year period shows that Tom DeFalco — when he’s not being derivative of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — can write decent stories with interesting characters. Eric Masterson is not a very good Thor, but that’s kind of the point. He’s rough around the edges because it is nearly impossible to fill Thor’s shoes. That’s kind of the whole point. However, through it all, Eric manages to become a hero in his own right and when the real Thor pops back up again in issue #457-459, Masterson continues his heroic career as Thunderstrike and is spun off into his own series.
That all said, when Masterson becomes Thor and later Thunderstrike, DeFalco changes his entire persona. Eric becomes more bumbling, says incredibly cheesy lines, and just makes a lot of bone head moves. This is a bit of a departure of Masterson early on. It’s not bad. It’s just abrupt.
All in all, this run of Thor is not entirely that bad. However, it’s not without its blemishes. For example, DeFalco continues to try to push Earth Force as viable characters. Introduced at the end of the last decade, Earth Force isn’t all that interesting. Their helmets make them look like circumcized penises which is not a very good look unless you want me to think your characters are dick heads. Which they are. The Earth Force stories are all very, very bad. The characters are one dimensional and not very interesting. No surprise that after DeFalco’s run on Thor, Earth Force isn’t really seen again. There is an Earth Force team that appears in Avengers: The Initiative #19, but the writers replaced the original team with unrelated characters and for good reason.
With Thor restored as a one true thunder god in Thor #459 it was time for Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz to move on to greener pastures. In the following issue writing duties were taken over by Jim Starlin and Ron Marz, with art by Bruce Zick. Starlin, best known for his Adam Warlock and Thanos stories, would only remain on as co-writer until issue #462, leaving Ron Marz to take on full writing duties. Marz would continue writing until issue #371 which accounted for two story arcs.
Both of which involve a central plot wherein Thor — after years of shared identities, alter-egos, and others taking on the mantle of Thor — is suffering from an identity crisis. This leads to him going mad. His madness personifies into a woman calling herself Valkyrie who guides Thor on his path of rediscovering who he is.
While an interesting premise, the story gets stretched out and dragged down by two major events that come one after the other during this run.
The first from issues #463-467 were tie-ins with the Infinity Crusade event which was crossing over a ton of Marvel’s books at the time. In this event, the entity known as the Goddess amasses various heroes who have a strong sense of faith in something and recruits them to her cause, which she promises will bring peace and harmony to the universe. Thor gets dragged into this and joins up with the Goddess’ camp, clashing with the non-religious heroes as they figure out the Goddess’ “universal peace” is merely destroying the universe and all life on it. This story totally interrupts the on going story in Thor, with the Goddess putting Valkyrie basically on pause and Thor’s madness being ignored for a few issues.
As far as tie in stories go, these issues have very little to do or have any larger impact on the greater Infinity Crusade story. One issue is even mostly Odin telling an old story from Thor’s youth juxtaposed with one page spreads of Thor fighting Drax the Destroyer. As far as a cross-over tie in story goes, these issues of Thor happen to be the worst of the worst as they don’t add much of anything to the big event in question, nor is there any progress done on the on going storyline.
This was followed by Blood and Thunder a 13 part story that also took place in the pages of Silver Surfer, Warlock Chronicles and Warlock and the Infinity Watch. If anything, these were stories of diminishing returns as Marvel was trying to capture lightning in the bottle again. Infinity Crusade was the third “Infinity” event in so many years, a premise that had already exhausted itself. While Blood and Thunder tried to replicate the multi-book crossover that made events like Operation: Galactic Storm, X-Cutioner’s Song and Maximum Carnage a success. However, this time it was books nobody cared about crossing over with books that nobody knew about.
This whole event was also to kind of wrap up the whole Thor going mad storyline. For something that was such a personal journey for the thunder god, it involves a lot of characters who either had very little to do with Thor before or after. I question the judgement in having this crossover feature characters like Adam Warlock and the Silver Surfer, who at this point had very few interactions with the god of thunder and to this day aren’t really that closely associated. This storyline could have been better handled if it was a crossover with the Avengers, or Thunderstrike, or literally any other character that has more than just a casual association with Thor.
Also by this point, the whole thing with Valkyrie had just stretched on for far too long. What would have been an interesting story for maybe 3 to 5 issues is stretched out to 20. That’s way too fucking much. There is also this subplot about Pluto trying to trick Zeus into going to war with Thor. This storyline is quickly resolved without much of anything really happening. I guess it had something to do with the negative response this arc was getting. Like, if you turn to the letter pages for any of these issues more than half of them are all negative complaining about the current direction of the book. I mean, this was also the case when DeFalco was writing it, but DeFalco didn’t give a fuck. He was telling his story until it was done. With Thor in other hands though, I guess editorial was more inclined to listen to readers.
What made all of this worst worse was the change in artists as Bruce Zick (who was ok, I guess) was replaced with M.C. Wyman. Wyman’s output in comics was mostly aping the style of other more notable artists. Early in his career a lot of his work resembled that of Adam Kubert, who was making waves on X-Men after the departure of Jim Lee. He even did a few issues during DeFalco’s run and the art style is pretty capable. While not the best, it’s decent enough.
However, when Wyman was made the regular artist of Thor, he decided to try and copy Rob Liefeld’s style. Now, I’m not going to spend this time dunking on Liefeld. We all know his work. We all have our opinions on it. That said, I find that artists who try to copy his style usually tend to do a worse job than if they hired Rob himself. Wyman is guilty of this as is Herb Trimpe among countless others. Like it or hate it, the only person who can do Rob Liefeld properly is Rob Liefeld. Case in point, Wyman’s artistry on Thor is fucking awful. Just overly muscular people that have impossible anatomies. Everyone looks the same. Bulky. Barrel chested. Thick legs. Nearly everyone has the exact same body types. The High Evolutionary and Loki have the exact shame shape as Thor. It’s just awful. Later on in the run, Wyman stops doing the Liefeld thing and sticking to more contemporary styles that are still very 90s, but a lot less awful than the stuff earlier in this run, so there is that.
Ron Marz would later be replaced with long time Marvel writer Roy Thomas. Thomas had previous run on Thor back in the 1970s. If you remember my primer on that period of time, you’ll remember how I called that era of Thor rudderless and Roy Thomas’ contributions to the book didn’t help. However, in terms of terrible story telling, Thomas really out done himself when he took over Thor in the late 90s. For 18 excruciating issues Thomas gives us one of the most boring and contrived High Evolutionary stories of any run previously. By this time, Thor had had all manners of god and god-adjacent characters created using science crammed into the book. The New Men, the Young Gods, the Eternals were shoe-horned into the book, and prior to Thomas’ second run on Thor, DeFalco also added the New Immortals. Why would any writer in their right mind look at a book that already has decades worth of newly created godlike characters that were quickly abandoned and go “yes, more of that please?” Because that’s exactly what the fuck Roy Thomas did by introducing us to the Godpack. Also, just because, he also created a new version of the New Men called the Ani-Mutants. They weren’t different from the New Men, it was likely done because mutants were a huge sell in comics at the time.
On top of all of this, Thomas decided to reintroduce the Don Blake character, revealing that there actually was a real Don Blake and Thor took over his life while the real D.B. ended up frozen in the cave in Norway this entire time. This was later walked back when it was revealed that this Blake was just a construct created by Sigyn, wife of Loki, in some revenge scheme gone bad. The real Don Blake was killed and replaced with a magical doppelganger. This additional flourish makes no damn sense and it makes the idea that Don Blake being a real guy kind of pointless after being summarily killed off and replaced with a magical double that is also killed off when the plot gets too convoluted. It was just a bad idea all around and Marvel seldom brings it up again, except for in handbooks, usually just short handing the original origin and leaving it at that.
The biggest problem with this Roy Thomas run is that he introduces way too many new characters, gives them no room to grow or develop. Then decides to also toss in a 30 years of lore in a convoluted plotline for… what?… nostalgia for the Lee/Kirby era? He was both trying to move forward and still call back to the past, like this wasn’t done to death during DeFalco’s run who, might I add, did a much better job at it.
I think the problem with Roy Thomas’ arc is that — like Mark Gruenwald — he is a very detailed writer who respects the continuity and does these dense referential stories. That said, he suffered from the same problem that Gruenwald did late in his career as well: In trying to be as continuity dense as possible their stories stopped being interesting on their own. The plots were secondary to the lore and once you get deep into that headspace you tend to overthink things. The whole Don Blake plotline is a perfect example of that. It was absolutely unnecessary and it just made everything more convoluted. It didn’t add anything of value. A good writer has to strike a balance between honoring continuity and telling a good story. If you lean to heavily into one, the other suffers. It wasn’t a bad idea because of the concept, the idea of Don Blake actually being a real guy whose life was stolen from him for years is actually an interesting idea. It’s the execution that was bad. I think Thomas — who has written countless bangers in his career — could have done a better job of it if he thought it out a bit more.
I think it also speaks volumes about the Godpack characters that, after Roy Thomas’ run they have long since been forgotten by everybody but guys like me who spend their time pouring over old comic books. By the time Thomas was getting around to coming up with backstories for the characters his tenure was coming to an end. It’s absolutely mind boggling that he was able to use these characters in 15 issues and you can sum them up in one sentence. That one has an axe for an arm, that one shoots lightning, that one can see real good. Outside of what they do, there is nothing even remotely interesting about them. Other than the most minimal backstory, there is almost nothing about them. Thomas would have been better off just slotting in pre-established characters with the same power sets and while that would have been less effort than creating brand new characters, but at least they would have came with backstories already.
However, I do want to be charitable to Roy, because we have to remember that this was the mid-90s where Marvel editorial had their head up their butts over the speculator market and trying to do repeat things in other, more popular books, in ones that weren’t doing so well. Thor obviously wasn’t doing very well since the book was canceled a year after Thomas’ run. So I’m left to wonder how much of Roy’s story was editorial mandate and how much was him.
Thomas would try to build up to something, but ultimately whatever it was he had planned was immediately dropped when he left the book. Instead we got a DeFalco/Frenz fill in story that ended up in Thor because Thunderstrike got cancelled.
So what was Roy trying to do? He was trying to build up yet another Ragnarok level crisis in the pages of Thor. However, the looming threat never gets anywhere during this run because of all of the nonsense I mentioned above. Which I think is just fine and well, by this time Thor had been in publication for 30 years and there had already been a Ragnarok story at least once a decade and each one was another case of diminishing returns. Frankly, I am usually put off by Ragnarok stories, because — at this point — it’s a lazy plot to use when writers can’t think up of something original. In my opinion, Thor is always best when Norse mythology is used as a flourish to tell new tales instead of trying to find a way to re-interpret old myths in a modern contexts, which brings us to the writer who took over after Roy Thomas: Warren Ellis.
At the time, Ellis was getting some traction at Marvel after his well received runs on Hellstorm: Prince of Lies, Excalibur, and Doom 2099. Despite some of the recent revelations about his problematic personal behavior, Warren Ellis has always been — at the very least — an entertaining writer. His later work on Transmetropolitan is some of his best work. He did The Authorit, Planetary, Hellblazer and a groundbreaking work on Iron Man that was later used in the basis for the movies.
His run on Thor was short and sweet, but it was something else. He would team up with artist Mike Deodato, Jr. to present the Worldengine saga which saw a scientist create an artificial Ragnarok in order to try and create a new race of gods. I know I spent multiple paragraphs shitting on both DeFalco and Thomas for doing similar plot lines. And yes, this story arc is absolutely derivative.
However, I would argue it is better written than all other stories. In all the above story arcs, my major gripe is that they were trying to replicate the same plot beats that were done by Jack Kirby every time the King of Comics farted out a brand new idea. They were trying to do something similar. Ellis took a concept and wrote it in his own signature fashion. Ellis approached the combination of mythology and technology in a way that was complex, technical, but did so in a way that makes some kind of sense.
This is also one of the times where someone put in some real work into Norse mythology. Like deep cut Norse mythology, not the half-assed Encyclopedia Britanica family-friendly CAC approved nonsense that had been used throughout Thor’s 30 years of publications. It was also the first time was saw Norse runes being properly used for the first time in the fiction. This more “mythologically accurate” take on Thor would be more widely adopted by later writers, but Ellis was the first one to do it.
The unfortunate thing is that after 4 issues, Ellis was gone. In those four issues, Thor found himself greatly de-powered. However, whatever Ellis had planned for the title probably never came to pass. Deodato remained, but regular writing duties were handed over to William Messner-Loebs, who continued the series until issue #502. We’ll get to WML in a second, I want to talk about Ellis’ four issue run for a little more.
While the story was a refreshing change of pace, it does suffer from some pretty hard “Ellis-isms” namely a character that was basically a proxy of himself who would act all British and edge the fourth wall about how ridiculous all this super-hero stuff is. This was something he already did quite a bit in Excalibur with the Peter Wisdom character and he would go on to do it with countless other superhero books. It’s used as a device to explain Norse mythology and the character in question gets killed off by the end of these four issues, but the fact that he’s not really there only for exposition seems like a pointless use of a new character.
In this story, Thor is basically stripped of most of his powers, loses his immortality, stops wearing a shirt, and also loses his Shakespearean affectation. People often mock this as the “worst Thor ever”, but really? I think the outfit during Roy Thomas’ run earlier was even worse by comparison, a shirtless Thor was an upgrade in my opinion. Also, Thor losing his affectation is something I don’t have a problem with and honestly, this constant adherence to making Asgardians sound like this is so incredibly old hat by now, I am glad that some writers do break from this convention more regularly now. That’s kind of the thing I find so boring about the Asgardians, they are stuck in this dated dead-end culture that never changes by its exposure to the outside world, at least not in any meaningful and long lasting ways. You’ll see the occasional story where this cultural exchange works both ways, like the time Walt Simonson gave the Asgardians machine guns, but these new things don’t tend to last very long.
The point I am trying to make here is that when you have unrestrained cultural interaction, you’re going to eventual start to see a melting pot and the idea that the Asgardians culture hasn’t really budged an inch since the birth of Jesus Christ is just ridiculous and improbable. Their involvement in the affairs of the present day should be enough to slowly alter and influence their culture. Point is, Ellis was one of the guys who tried to edge Asgard a bit forward into the present day. It usually gets slid back by people who seem to think Asgard needs to remain perpetually in this Stan Lee/Jack Kirby state of no progress, but luckily they are pushing away from that. If there is anything that the MCU has done for comics, it’s allowing Thor and his extended cast become influenced by the outside world and not being afraid to keep it that way. Fuck, new Thor comics have the thunder god using a cell phone that gets reception in Asgard. That’s progress.
Anyway, only being four issues long though, there is not a whole lot of story to be had. A lot of that is because of the way the pages are laid out. Mike Deodato, Jr is generally a very good artist but you can tell that this was from early on in his career. A lot of his composition goes against the narrative text layout, there is a lot of empty space. Sure there are huge two page spreads but a lot of them are bereft of details. This was kind of the style at the time and I get that digital art was in its infancy and artists can now draw with a lot more detail at greater resolutions, but these pages are fucking sparse. I suppose it had to start somewhere and at least things got a lot better over time, especially Deodato. I’m not the first person to point this out, but early Deodato suffers from the same problems a lot of the 90s wave of artists had. When trying to draw sexy women, they drew some very weird proportions.
I’m not going to get into the ethics of drawing sexy women in comics and what that does to affect (insert name of group here), but I am also not opposed to the idea of sexy women in comics if it serves an artistic purpose beyond ogling a pencil drawing of an impossibly proportioned woman. In this case, the character in question is the Enchantress and since seduction is kind of her thing, okay I guess it gets a pass? But man, her legs are longer than her torso in almost a Liefeldian kind of way. It’s not that bad, but its noticable. Thankfully Mike’s work improves during his run of Thor (which ends in issue #502) and beyond.
The unfortunate thing is that Warren Ellis only did four issues. I don’t know if that was by design? Did he quit the book? Was he removed? Search all I could, and I can’t really find anything online about that because, surprise surprise, it’s not a widely covered era of comics because people always white wash the 90s as the worst era in comics. Oh there will be endless hot takes dunking on how bad the Clone Saga is, but nobody thinks to look into the behind the scenes story around oddities like this.
From what little I can find about this run, I think he was only on assigned for the book to kick start a new direction and that was it. I come to this conclusion because he was still writing a lot of stuff for Marvel around that time. Also if they hated what he did, then William Messner-Loebs wouldn’t have had continued the plot that Ellis started. They would have found a way to undo it all and did something else, but instead they stuck with it eight issues at least. They weren’t ready to pull the plug on it yet, but it did happen eventually.
Which brings us to William Messner-Loebs and what he did with the title after Ellis’ departure. From what I have read, there are a lot of promising ideas, I just don’t think that Messner-Loebs really had an opportunity to really flesh out what they were doing. This was just before the big Heroes Reborn relaunch and I feel like by this point the writing was on the wall for this title. As such, a lot of the plots were truncated or quickly reversed. For example, issue #495 had Thor completely lose his powers only to get them back again five issues later. He was also setting up a storyline which would reveal that the Asgardians were all exiled on Earth and hiding in mortal guises.
On top of this, there was an editorial mandate to circle back all the legacy Avengers characters so they would be more closely associated with the team book. That means Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man were going to have a more “hands on” association with the Avengers after the three characters spent a number of years off the team. I think this also distracted away from what solo stories Messner-Loebs was trying to do.
However, whatever was planned was quickly curtailed as Thor was being cancelled after issue #502, which is a hastily slapped together Onslaught side story that seems so rushed they didn’t even bother putting the event branding on the cover. The story is a disjointed “farewell” issue that doesn’t really do much of anything.
In a 2013 interview, Messner-Loebs states that the news that Thor was being canceled was sudden and unexpected. So I think we can cut him some slack for what happened to the title.
A lot of people paint this run with the general “90s comics are bad” brush, but I think that in this case it is unfair. Yeah, there are some issues with the stories and pacing, but I think that has less to do with Messner-Loebs work, and more to do with the editorial whims of the time.
What I can’t seem to find any information on is why Messner-Loebs wasn’t on to write Journey into Mystery, which picked up all the plot threads left unresolved in Thor. This duty was left to Tom DeFalco, which is too bad since since I am genuinely interested in knowing how Bill would have wrapped this all up. However, this is a subject for my index on Journey into Mystery.
Thor, like many of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four were all to be part of the Heroes Reborn reboot, which saw these characters moved from the Marvel Universe proper where they lived rebooted lives and relived their origins in a more modern context. While Avengers, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Captain America got brand new series, Thor didn’t at least not initially. While all this was going on, Thor himself was, for the most part, only appearing in the pages of the 2nd volume of the Avengers. This was Rob Liefeld’s interpretation of the character, who was Thor-by-way-of-Conan-the-Barbarian. When Liefeld was infamously fired from Avengers and Captain America, Walt Simonson was hired on to wrap the Heroes Reborn arc, revealing that the Thor who appeared in Avengers (vol. 2) #1 was not the real Thor, but a Counter-Earth duplicate…. for reasons? It’s never really explained in universe, but I’m quite sure the abrupt change was out of disdain for what Liefeld had done with the character.
Regardless, the Heroes Reborn saga was a failure in what it set out to do: Try to reinvent the Avengers and Fantastic Four in a separate and distinct universe. Instead what it had done was show readers how much they would miss that those heroes belong in the Marvel Universe proper. This was followed by the Heroes Return event, which saw reboots of Avengers, Fantastic, Four, Captain America, and Iron Man. By this point, Marvel had also decided to can Journey into Mystery and give Thor his own title back. These titles were given all of the hype and given blockbuster creative teams. In the case of Thor, we had writer Dan Jurgens teaming up with legendary artist John Romita, Jr. FF, Avengers, Cap, and Iron Man were huge successes, what could possibly go wrong with Thor? Strap in petunia, we’re going to get into that right now!
As far as the art goes, this is peak Romita at the top of his game. In his own unique style he is able to render visually compelling stories. His action sequences really convey the gravity of the epic story being weaved by Jurgens. Titanic two page spreads beautifully render the carnage and destruction that is caused by a clash between gods. While still maintaining his own personal style, Romita, Jr’s work takes influences from Jack Kirby’s run on the character as well as the titanic action pieces that one would find in a manga like Akira. It has the right balance of retro and contemporary art styles so that it doesn’t feel dated to look at.
The initial storyline by Dan Jurgens starts off pretty strong, but as his run progresses there are some issues, but that doesn’t start happening until the 2000s, so I’ll save my commentary on that for now. His initial story arc is strong. Instead of the usual run-of-the-mill Thor foes to start, he instead decides to introduce a brand new set of villains for Thor to fight, the Dark Gods. I will commend Dan for coming up with wholly original characters on that front. Where most writers will lazily pick through mythology to find something to adapt, Jurgens comes up with his own original pantheon. Their designs by John Romita are bizarre and otherworldly and almost Kirby-eque in their appearances but with all the Romita signatures. While the Dark Gods are probably not the most fleshed out characters, they are a refreshing change from the nearly constant stories involving Loki and the same handful of Thor foes that have been churned out ad nauseum prior to this point.
The idea that there is this secret race of evil gods that had never been seen before has a lot of milage that could be covered, characters to explore, and mythology to build. Unfortunately, as of this writing the Dark Gods have never been used outside of Jurgens run on the book and that’s a shame. While I’ve derided other newly created god-like entities above, the Dark Gods had a little more going for them I think.
This run on the book also has Thor take on the mortal guise of Jake Olson, an ambulance driver. While we’ve seen Thor getting bonded to other people in the past, Jurgens at least tires to change things up a little. This isn’t the overly complex is-he-a-real-guy-or-a-construct situation with Don Blake, or the merge with Eric Masterson where Thor had to balance his life with his human host. In this case, Jake Olson died during a battle between Thor and the Destroyer. Thor doesn’t get bonded to Olson, but rather Thor is forced to take over his life as penance for not saving him. This is an interesting concept and Thor finds himself having to figure out Olson’s life. Which is easier said than done since Jake is engaged to be married to a single mother.
The other interesting thing is that whereas Thor was previously paired up with mortals that are generally good people, it’s later revealed that Jake Olson wasn’t that great a guy. He was swiping drugs from the hospital to sell on the street.
This is all some very interesting ideas that subvert the usual Thor-bonded-to-a-mortal tropes. Unfortunately, as is always the case with Thor, the more subtler and interesting story ideas usually fall on the wayside for the epic stories. I would have been very interested to see how they would have done with the Jake Olson situation if they gave it enough time to breath and grow into its own thing.
Still, this was merely setting the stage for the following decade and we’ll get into that some other time…
