Thor in 1968
There was an extremely long arc revolving around a de-powered Thor, Sif, and Balder being trapped on Earth. Naturally, Loki senses opportunity and gains new powers courtesy of the Norn Queen. Finally, Thor regains his powers and enters a pretty substantial fight with Loki.
But Odin demands a sudden need to the battle because he portends some other danger. You were so close, Lee. You almost had a compelling beginning, middle, and end. Though the clean ending was foiled, the next arc was relatively satisfactory. Not to give it complete credit, though, as the Mangog villain design is awful.
It reminds me of what a small child might doodle when inspired to draw a weird alien. But, hey, it turns out better than the average for the series thus far. No wall crawling snake villains or evil communists to menace the Norse pantheon recently.
I am somewhat nonplussed that this Mangog story makes the lower rung of fans’ top ten Thor stories fairly frequently.
I’m well aware that Simonson’s 1980s run is the creme de la creme of Thor, and I’m looking forward to that, but nothing good was happening in this series in the 1960s. That’s not to denigrate overall comics output during this decade; Spider-Man was frequently inspired throughout its run, and several other series were coming into their own.
At year end, we get the Thor/ Donald Blake origin tale. Basically, Thor is eternal. Odin makes the decision to strip Thor of his powers and send him to Earth as Donald Blake to show him humility. Thor, as Donald Blake, was unaware that he had no past or that he was actually Thor. Uh. OK.
So at no point did over his many years of medical school and residency did Blake stop and notice that he lacked parents, familial connections, high school friends, an academic transcript, a source of money, etc? 🤨 I suppose this does answer the question of why Thor entirely lacked side-characters at the onset of the series.
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