Journey Into Mystery #83

Journey Into Mystery #83 (1962)
by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber & Jack Kirby

While the hero origins retrospective is still in the Golden Age, I’m jumping ahead to the Silver Age to cover the first full superhero origin I ever read: the Mighty Thor.

We are still very early in Marvel: for comparison, the other Marvel issue sharing the cover date of August 1962 is Amazing Fantasy #15 (the first Spider-Man story).
Incredibly Hulk #2 (the second Hulk story) and Fantastic Four #5 had a cover date of July 1962.
So no wonder Thor still looks and sounds a bit… off.

The story opens in Norway, where Dr. Don Blake is randomly on vacation.

And then aliens invade! You would think they would use gravity to explain their super-strength, but apparently it’s all about atmosphere.

These are the Stone Men of Saturn. Their race will eventually be called Kronans, and they will be retconned as being from another solar system entirely… but as far as this story is concerned, they are literally from Saturn.

Then a random fisherman discovers them and decides to warn the nearby town.

Despite the fact that he needs a cane to walk, Don Blake decides to investigate. Still pretty forced, but I was fully expecting HIM to run into the aliens first so I appreciate the move.

But he does end up tripping and stumbling into a mysterious cave.

In the cave, he manages to find a stick that he hopes to use to move away the giant boulder blocking the only exit.

Obviously it doesn’t work (why would he think otherwise???), and he ends up hitting the wall with the cane out of frustration.
I have to point out that if he kept his cool we wouldn’t have a Thor.

But indeed we do have Thor! Notice that his hammer is not as big as it will be drawn traditionally.
Also, most of the time when another character gets the power of Thor they do so by picking up the hammer, NOT the stick. Mostly because eventually the hammer stopped turning back into a stick.

Much more importantly, he’s still acting as if Don Blake took the body of Thor.

To avoid having Thor being TOO overpowered, the Silver Age gives him a weakness: he can stay Thor only as long as he has the hammer, but turns back into Don Blake if he loses it for more than 60 seconds.

The Marvel version of Norse mythology is famously inaccurate; just to name one thing, the hammer (which won’t be named Mjolnir in the comics for the first 4 years!!!) is not enchanted to be lifted only by the worthy… it’s just ridiculously heavy.
The origin story gets THAT right, though.

I’m no expert on Norse mythology, though… give me the Greek myths any day.
So I’m not entirely sure whether Mjolnir returning to Thor whenever he throws it from mythology, or if it’s a Marvel thing.

I’m absolutely certain that the Thor of mythology doesn’t need the hammer to call the storm.
The fact that he has to hit the ground twice to summon a storm is dropped rather quickly, and it’s only brought back occasionally.

I can’t think of any other occasion when they bring back the idea that he needs to stamp it three times on the ground to stop the storm.

For like 99.99% of Thor stories, you ONLY see him stomp it for transforming (except all the times they drop the transformation entirely).

Thor, would you mind playing with your hammer at another time? There’s a freaking alien invasion going on!!!

Thor doesn’t technically fly… he just THROWS THE HAMMER and holds onto it for dear life!!!
Technically speaking he CAN fly in later stories, but I’m pretty sure that this is STILL canonically how he takes off.
Which is kind of stupid when you think about it, but at least it differentiates him from Superman.

So now we have our fight: the God Of Thunder versus some Thing wannabes.

The aliens soon realize they’re ridiculously outmatched, so they unleash a giant robot.

Aaaaand it goes down in one panel.

So Thor has just single-handedly stopped an alien invasion in his first story.
He will of course get a lot of space adventures, but funnily enough he doesn’t stop alien invasions often… if anything, that tends to happen on the pages of Avengers.

And that’s already the end! I can’t wait for the next adventure of “Thorr”, whoever that is.

Those are some rude NATO soldiers.

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Historical significance: 7 /
I know, you’re probably thinking: “IT’S THOR, why isn’t this an easy 10/10?”.
But other than Don Blake finding the cane, nothing else has that much importance… and even the reason why Blake gets it will be retconned several times.
Really, even the fact that Thor was originally Don Blake isn’t that relevant anymore!

Silver Age-ness: 8 /
If you dismiss the retcons, this American guy being in Norway and just randomly finding a stick that turns into a god just when aliens invade is as contrived as it gets.
For Marvel, at least. At DC, this would be nothing.

Does it stand the test of time? 4 /
While I haven’t examined the others in detail yet, I’m going out on a limb and call Thor the worst origin story for the early Marvel Silver Age.
There’s no human drama, there’s no tension, and there’s basically no stakes since Thor is never in any sort of danger. Plus the aliens are extremely generic.

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How close is this to the modern character? 3 /

The look is ALMOST there, weird hammer proportions aside, as are the powers… but he doesn’t act or feel like Thor.

He wouldn’t start speaking with his “thee”s and “though”s until Journey Into Mystery #120. That’s a full three years of modern English before he goes full Shakespeare!

But even there, he JUST speaks that way when he’s on Asgard: in the same issue he returns to speaking modern English once he gets back to Midgard.^*
*Earth

So what changed? Well, after Journey Into Mystery changes name into Thor, he ends up fighting Hercules in Thor #126.
And since Hercules committed to that speech pattern from the beginning, it stuck to Thor.

So you can thank Hercules for giving Thor one of his most recognizable gimmicks!
Yet another reason why Hercules is the best.

A couple words on Thor’s creation. You might have noticed in the credits that it’s not just Lee & Kirby… well, it IS just Lee and Kirby, but it’s TWO Lees.
Because the script is actually from Stan’s brother, Larry.

After writing an outline depicting the story and the characters I had in mind, I asked my brother, Larry, to write the script because I didn’t have time… and it was only natural for me to assign the penciling to Jack Kirby.
STAN LEE, 2002

Stan also said that the decision to create Thor came from the desire to one-up the Hulk, going from “the strongest man in the world” to a literal god… but while not impossible, I have a hard time believing that considering the Hulk only appeared in ONE story before Thor showed up.

Despite some fans pushing the narrative that Stan Lee never created anything and only stole credit from other creators without giving them no recognition, he was pretty consistent in giving Kirby credit for a lot of Thor stuff.
Especially after the backup feature “Tales of Asgard” started, moving the narrative to mythologically inspired stories.

I concede it’s not impossible that the idea to use Thor as the star came from Kirby: not only because of his interest in mythology, but because he already drew a completely different version of Thor before: Venus #1 (for what eventually became Marvel), and three times for DC on Adventure Comics #75, Boy Commandos #7 and Tales Of The Unexpected #16.

The latter is notable because the hammer is drawn exactly like in Journey Into Mystery #83, five years earlier.

I trust there’s really no point in going over Thor’s changes over the decades… how the Don Blake identity was eventually dropped (only to later return), or how his world has slowly moved closer to the myths while at the same time keeping the various sci-fi additions from the Lee-Kirby run.

But I have to mention that Thor is in a very interesting position in his universe.
It’s been said that the core difference between DC heroes and Marvel heroes is that DC heroes are gods trying to live as humans, while Marvel heroes are humans trying to live as gods.
And while I find it an oversimplification, it does highlight a fundamental difference on how the two universes approach their characters.
But it also highlights how Thor is different from other Marvel heroes, since he’s LITERALLY a god. You would expect this would make him stick out like a sore thumb… but to me, that’s what makes Thor work.

If Thor was in the DC universe, he wouldn’t feel special. But place him in Marvel, and you have the chance of using a god for characterization!
Which leads to moments of Thor being surprisingly deep.

It’s also very cathartic to have a hero who, despite being a flawed god, is always dependable when you need to go up against unsurmountable odds.

But it also helps that Thor is just FREAKING COOL!!!