Thor #183

THOR #183 (1970)
by Stan Lee & John Buscema

Second part of Doctor Doom’s original fight with Thor.

Thor is pursued by one of Doom’s missiles. His solution to stop it is to create a tornado to send it into space… and in the process losing his hammer.

His landing is not exactly graceful.

This is a problem because in this period Thor would return to his mortal self if he was separated from the hammer for more than 60 seconds, which is exactly what happens.

When the hammer does eventually fall, Doom can’t resist the challenge and tries to lift it.

That’s pretty standard in Thor stories, but Doom goes the extra mile by blasing it.

When even that doesn’t work, Doom creates a force field around it.

He then begins his search for Don Blake by using the Silent Stalker ™.

It has a… uhm… interesting design.

Meanwhile Don Blake somehow manages to sneak into Doom’s castle and find the scientist.

Somewhat understandably, the professor doesn’t trust the first person who randomly stumbles into his laboratory.

Then we’re back to the hammer. Shockingly, a shovel is no match for a force field.

Don Blake does have a clever plan, however: he digs a hole, leaves his jacket on it, counting on Doom’s guards (or his robots, it’s not clear) to blast it.
Although it’s clever only if he knows that the guards will shoot at a jacket they found on the ground.

Once the guards leave, Don Blake sneaks into the huge hole they blasted into the ground: he wants to reach the hammer from below.

Once he’s back to being Thor, he rushes towards the castle. Doom threatens to unleash thousands of missiles unless Thor gives him the hammer, which he does.

Maaaybe Doom didn’t think this through.

But Thor also underestimated his enemy, because Doom is able to put quite a fight!

Note the Electro-Paralyzer ™. Doom has a weapon that can electrocute THOR. Just let it sink in.

Despite that, Thor still manages to break free. So far he has only destroyed the missile control panel, but he has different ideas on the missiles themselves.

Although by the way he talks about this, I wonder if Thor was tempted to destroy ALL nuclear missiles, not just Latveria’s.

All that’s left is to rescue the scientist. You’d think that was the easy part, but…

This is brilliant. This whole time Thor thought that the scientist was a saint, but it turns out that he doesn’t care at all about his daughter or about Doom’s plans: he’s only into it for the money.

To really push the idea and turn the cliché “save the benevolent scientist” on its head: he dies thanks to a stray bullet, and with his last words he curses his own daughter.

Thor then commits the ultimate crime against Doom… he basically ignores him and leaves!

Thor gives the news to the scientist’s daughter. But he can’t bring himself to tell her the truth, so he tells her two TECHNICAL truths: he died fighting, and his last words were about her.

A nice bittersweet ending.

 

Thor significance: 0/10
Doom significance: 0/10
The story has zero impact on the lives of both characters.

Silver Age-ness: 1/10
Even on the Marvel scale, there’s very little Silver Age here.

Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
The ending does most of the heavy lifting. It’s a perfect subversion of expectations: everything we know about the scientist comes from his daughter who hasn’t seen him in years, so why should we believe her? Even better: she’s not lying, she’s just seeing things differently.
The fight between Thor and Doom is pretty entertaining, but I wish it lasted more pages.
The rest of the story is pretty ordinary. The weakest part is Don Blake… he’s just not an interesting character during the vast majority of the storyline.

It was a Doombot all along
No indication one way or the other.

Take over the world & Destroy the FF!
Not this time: Doom is basically after Thor’s hammer the entire issue.

Crazy tech
Electro-Paralyzer ™ has a single panel appearance, but any device able to electrocute FREAKIN’ THOR deserves respect!