Essential Thor volume 2

Essential Thor volume 2 reprints issues #113-136 plus Annuals #1 & #2. Issue #113-125 & annual #1 still have the formal title of "Journey into Mystery" but the logo and the contents mean that issue #126 is rather less of a change than a listing would imply. (Indeed references to earlier issues even call the series "Thor" not "Journey into Mystery" and there is no acknowledgement on the covers or strip pages that the series title has changed. This is already an-all Thor series.) Everything is by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, initially usually credited as writer and penciller respectively but from a back-up strip on #133 onwards they're always just credited together as producing the story and at this point the volume's contents page starts giving Kirby a co-plotting credit.

That credit may be lifted from the files or represent a latter-day effort to try to rebalance things given the lengthy debates about Lee and Kirby. But this volume brings up the other great controversy about Kirby and another name on the credits. For everything bar the first three lead stories is inked by Vince Colletta.

Colletta's inking has been the subject of much discussion over the years with a lot of pencillers doing their best to avoid their work going to him at the time and saying so since. Subsequently many fans have piled in to the point that Colletta has become the poster child for slapdash inking that destroys the penciller's intentions. But Colletta has his fans as well and in recent years they have become louder. There are two lines of quite reasonable defence for some of the problems. Firstly Colletta was so fast and reliable that he often did emergency fill-in issues where a rush job was essential to getting the book out on time. On such an issue it was natural to cut corners. Secondly Colletta's work suffered particularly badly in the 20th century reprints which often had crude reproduction that undermined his fine lines. Now the first defence has a lot of validity but it should not apply to a regular assignment with a reliable artist who delivered the pencils on time. The second rebuttal is mixed here because the reproduction quality is variable. Some of the pages appear to reuse remastered versions prepared for the Masterworks or other reprints. But other pages were apparently either missing or not yet remastered - this volume came out midway through the Masterworks covering the same period - and they seem to have been sourced from elsewhere, possibly including some of the 1970s reprints that went one copy generation down rather than going back to the source.

Looking at the results in this volume I begin to think that Colletta's defenders have a point. When the reproduction works well it shows some quite charming imagery that gives the artwork a mythic quality - I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say it looks like woodcuttings, but certainly it feels appropriately old worldly - but when the reproduction is poor then the ink can get fused together and it really drags the art down. But then foresight is something many in the comics industry have lacked and so one can hardly blame Colletta for working for the original printing and not taking later reprints, of which he had no control over the methods, into account. It's hard to judge the impact of his habit of erasing lines, figures and objects in order to simplify the task as this volume only offers the finished work, but this may explain why so many pencillers were critical yet editors and art directors did not see the impact and so continued to assign him. But what is clear is that Colletta's inking is an acquired taste. Leaving aside his numerous fill-ins as necessarily requiring a short cut approach, on some regular assignments it can really drag the art down but here when allowed to breathe it can really enhance it.

The use of Norse mythology continues to be expanded in this run but increasingly the task is taken on by the "Tales of Asgard" back-up strips. Some are set during Thor's childhood, showing the deviousness of Loki beginning at a very early age, but others are set at an indeterminate point during his adulthood in Asgard. (By now Thor is treated as having always been the Norse deity and this volume doesn't touch on just what he was doing as Donald Blake before he rediscovered the hammer.) There are one parters and epics, showing the warriors of Asgard in training at home and on far away quests. Amongst the characters introduced are the Warriors Three - Fandrall, Hogun, and Volstagg - and the Vizier, all of whom subsequently appear in the present day adventures. There are also debuts by other races such as the Storm Giants and the Flying Trolls or individual foes like the dragon Fafnir. We also meet some of the great objects for the first time such as the enormous Odinsword that wields great destruction. There's even the first use of the name "Mjolnir" for Thor's hammer. And we get a glimpse of the future as Odin recounts how Ragnarok will come and destroy Asgard and all the gods, but from the ashes will rise new life. (It seems that as early as the start of 1966 Kirby was thinking about the ideas that would eventually manifest themselves at DC as the New Gods.) My knowledge of Norse mythology is quite limited so I don't know how well these adventures match the tales the Vikings told, or if they had any greater research done for them than looking at a children's story book.

Although not explicitly billed as "Tales of Asgard", perhaps because it ventures outside Norse mythology, the new story in annual #1 is also set in the past to set things up for the present. For here Thor stumbles across Olympus, home of the Greek gods, and meets Hercules for the first time. There's no attempt made to explore the simultaneous existence of two different sets of gods or to show which ones have greater powers, but instead we get a source of enemies and sometimes allies starting with a rivalry with Hercules. Later on in the present day adventures Hercules returns for further fights and briefly wins over Jane Foster but subsequently he's captured by the Greek god of death Pluto (I have never understood why Marvel calls him by his Roman name instead of his Greek name "Hades") and Thor serves as his champion to save him from being trapped as the new ruler of the underworld. Hercules's father Zeus also appears, but isn't developed too much beyond a traditional ruler sending warriors on missions and passing judgement on contracts so it's hard to judge how his parenting skills compared to Odin's. In the background of the glimpses of Olympus we also meet other Greek gods such as Hera, Ares, Pan, Dionysus, Hermes, Artemis and Hephaestus whilst Pluto's underworld is guarded by Cerberus. The god of death is also aided by Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons and one of Hercules's past conquests.

The back-up strips may do a lot to enhance the mythology of the series but the lead stories don't skimp on this task either. We're now into a period when a lot of Marvel series were run as ongoing sagas with subplots dragging over multiple issues rather than the earlier set of standalone adventures. This allows a whole series of themes to run together. Early on we get the debut of one of the most powerful foes Thor has yet encountered, the Absorbing Man. With the power to duplicate the properties of any substance he touches, this ex-criminal becomes a pawn of Loki and battles Thor multiple times, often duplicating the properties of the hammer to become even stronger. Amazingly Thor never actually manages to defeat him directly, although at one point Loki extracts his pawn out of fear defeat is coming, and it takes Odin's trickery to finally exile him to space. The other significant sort of Asgardian foe to appear is the Destroyer but this is a lifeless suit of armour that can be animated by the spirits of others. Elsewhere Thor fights a mixture of recurring foes - Loki continues to be especially persistent - but also has an adventure in Vietnam where in the most overt propaganda in the volume he encounters a man twisted by Communism to the point where he guns down most of his family, only to then repent and destroy a weapons stockpile. This is probably the most generic of all the adventures and could have featured almost any hero.

On a grander scale we get some cosmic adventures with the introduction of the Rigellian colonisers including Tana Nile. It's almost comical to see Nile wandering the streets of New York trying to establish her position as the ruler of the world and dealing with police officers who think they're on Candid Camera, a prank TV show similar to Beadle's About. It leads to Thor flying off into space to tackle the Rigellian homeworld but then agreeing to Earth's release in exchange for serving them on a mission into the mysterious Black Galaxy. Accompanied by a Recorder unit, a robotic anthropologist, Thor heads there and encounters the wonder of Ego the Living Planet. Coming back to Earth Thor encounters a new Camelot in Mount Wundagore in the Balkans as he meets the High Evolutionary and his Knight of Wundagore, New Men created by a accelerated "evolution" ray carried out on animals. Lee and Kirby seem unaware that evolution isn't just about growth over generations but also about adaptation to the circumstances. Nevertheless Thor's intervention causes a distraction that leads to the over-evolution of a wolf into the uncontrollable Man Beast.

The heavy pace of the series means that Thor rarely gets a chance to relax and sometimes he finds events moving rapidly without him. He goes away for a while and comes back to discover Jane Foster has been kidnapped, leading to a mystery with few suspects and so it's no surprise to discover it's journalist Harris Hobbs in search of a story. Hobbs briefly discovers Thor's identity and blackmails his way to Asgard but is returned to Earth with amnesia. Meanwhile Donald Blake finds his practice has fallen away in his absence with his patients leaving for other doctors, whilst Thor discovers the Avengers' line-up changed while he was in Asgard for an extended period. His main remaining tie to the mortal world is his nurse Jane, with this volume bookended by major developments between them. In the first issue Thor reveals his identity to her and she retains the knowledge despite Odin's disapproval. Over subsequent issues Thor finally wins his father's approval to marry Jane, though this is delayed by first her being drawn to Hercules and then by Tana Nile using her powers to make Jane go a long way away, eventually winding up as a teacher/nurse for the New Men on Wundagore. In the very last issue Thor takes Jane to Asgard but she is forced to endure a series of tests that scare her off. Jane demands to be sent back to Earth and Odin willingly complies, dropping her at a hospital with amnesia where she is immediately drawn to doctor Keith Kincaird, who resembles Donald Blake. Odin had manipulated things all along and Thor is let angry but soon calms after a battle against trolls in which he is aided by Sif. The two reunite and walk away together.

More so than the first volume, the issues in this one represents the key foundations for the series in the long run. Thor is no longer just a hero with a name and some other cast members lifted from mythology but a well developed modern day interpretation of a key individual, existing in a universe