Marvel Epic Collection: Thor the God of Thunder
by Stan Lee Jack Kirby and others
a nice big fat trade paperback compiling all the earliest Thor and Tales of Asgard stories from Journey Into Mystery 83 (Aug 1962) through 109 (Oct 1964)
the answer to the age-old question "when does Thor get good?" lies within!

the Mighty Thor was originally created by Lee and Kirby in the same concentrated burst of activity following Fantastic Four 1 that also quickly gave us SpiderMan, the Hulk, Iron Man, the X-Men and all those other characters the whole world now knows so well.
I suspect the character was mostly Kirby's idea, as he had featured characters named Thor as oneshot villains in various comics over the decades, and in the early 1940s drawn a strip called Mercury or Hurricane, featuring a pantheon of Greek gods.
In his earliest appearances Thor is basically the old Captain Marvel/Billy Batson/Shazam concept, with lame Doctor Don Blake trading places with the God of Thunder each time he strikes his walking stick, yet sharing a conciousness. These earliest stories follow a very generic structure, of fighting costumed bank robbers and worrying Nurse Jane Foster will find out his secret identity.
Eventually Thor would become all-Asgard all the time, and the vehicle for Kirby to express his wildest visual and conceptual imagination, but it took a couple of years to get there.
Kirby only drew the earliest appearances here, including the debut of Loki in the third story, then left to concentrate on other responsibilities. Most of the early stories are drawn by Al Hartley (better known for romance comics), Joe Sinnott (who would ink Kirby's pencils in the best Fantastic Four stories), and Iron Man's Don Heck. None of them have Kirby's imagination and I doubt they co-plotted the story concepts way Kirby would do. Worse, the stories themselves are scripted not by Stan, but by his brother Larry Lieber. So in the first two years, it was second tier talent creating Thor, which is why it is so generic and not the Thor we know.
In Journey into Mystery 97 (oct 1963) Lee and Kirby intoroduce the backup feature Tales of Asgard, which is where things start getting interesting. The backup is always five pages, four huge panels to a page, to showcase Kirby's wild artwork, telling actual episodes of Norse mythology, explorations of neighbouring realms, fleshing out the evergrowing cast of Asgardians and revealing Thor and Loki's backstories.
The main stories remain generic imitation Superman plots for a few more issues, til Journey into Mystery 101 (feb 1964), where Lee and Kirby return for good. Instantly the earthbased presentday adventures of Thor become weird and unpredictable, incorporating the new concepts from the backup series, and taking on more epic tone.
(Probably by no coincidence, Lee and Kirby's return is the same month as the first issue of the Avengers, which of course also featured Thor.)
This volume ends just a few issues after that point, just as it is finally starting to get good. I know the Earth-based stories and boring old Jane Foster disappear entirely two years later, in Thor 136 (jan 1967), so it is a gradual evolution in storytelling. It just kept getting more and more cosmic after that until Kirby finally left the title, and Marvel, after Thor 179 (aug 1970).
check out Mike's Newsstand, one of my favourite websites, where you can query the database to see the cover of every comic published any month since 1933, or every issue of a series. Here are all the covers of every issue of Journey into Mystery/Thor.
Last edited by caractacus potts (13th Jul 2019 14:37)