WC: JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #121

This issue of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY featuring Thor was another one that I came by as part of my Windfall Comics purchase of 1988, wherein I paid a guy I had bumped into at the Post Office $50.00 for a long box filled with close to 150 Silver Age comic books. It was the best deal as a collector that I ever stumbled into. as you might expect, the titles that were the most plentiful tended to be the ones with less interest among fans and back issue collectors in the 1980s. JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY was a bit of an exception in this regard–it wasn’t held in the same high esteem that FANTASTIC FOUR or AMAZING SPIDER-MAN was, but it was still a book in demand. Nevertheless, there were a lot of JIM issues in that box.

This was all right at the point where the work that artist and plotter Jack Kirby was doing all across the line began to accelerate, becoming grander, more expansive, filled with huger concepts and wilder new creations. His artwork also took a step up, both because he was being paired with more simpatico inkers (though Vince Colletta, who delineates this book, is a subject of some controversy among aficionados for how much he simplified and left out elements of Kirby’s compositions.) Apparently, this was the end product of a small page rate that Kirby had been granted, which allowed him to make his monthly nut without having to generate quite so many pages in order to hit it. Accordingly, he could slow down a little bit and lavish more attention on each one.

so what’s going on? Well, after having been bested in the Trial of the Gods by his villainous brother Loki, Thor petitioned his father, regal Odin, to be allowed to journey to Earth to recover the enchanted Norn Stones that Loki used to cheat. With evidence of his crimes, Loki is sentenced to servitude to the warlock Ularic. But Loki overcomes his jailer and uses Ularic’s mystic laboratory to restore his earlier cat’s paw Crusher Creel, whom he had turned into the Absorbing Man, setting him upon the Thunder God once again. As this issue opens, the two fighters come together in a cacophony of explosive action.

Most of this story is simply an extended battle sequence between the Thunder God and his enemy, wherein Thor can’t seem to get the upper hand to topple his foe once and for all. But there are a couple of subplots going on as well. In Asgard, Loki schemes to overthrow his father and take the throne, and even noble Balder the Brave isn’t on the ball enough to realize what the God of Evil is doing. And on Earth, Thor’s beloved Jane Foster has been captured and imprisoned by a robed figure whose voice she vaguely recognizes. This particular subplot is a bit of a weird shaggy dog story, as the figure keeps Jane captive for what must be weeks for a relatively trivial outcome–but we’ll get to that in other stories. Point being, even while the events of this issue are playing out, Kirby and Lee are setting up other ongoing intrigues elsewhere to keep their audience coming back.

A quick pause here for one of those quad Marvel house ads showing the covers of other titles then on sale. This was a truly great moment to be a Marvel reader, as both FANTASTIC FOUR and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN were going through some key changes, and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. had replaced the lame dog Torch and Thing strip in STRANGE TALES. As an added bonus, this page also included the names and locales of 25 more fans who had sent in a buck to join the Merry marvel Marching Society, Marvel’s in-house fan club of the era. This was a pretty good gimmick to keep readers looking through the pages of every Marvel release, to see if their own names had been printed in that one.

But we’re getting to the wrap-up of this particular installment, and Thor is reeling a little bit from teh Absorbing Man’s merciless and unrelenting attacks. Creel became something of a jobber after this storyline, but in these early days, he was presented as a very dangerous opponent. Of course, Thor can’t go down in a fair fight, and so at a crucial moment, he’s forced to divert his attention to rescue a child who has wandered into the battle area. But that moment’s distraction is all the Absorbing Man needs to really clock Thor with his ball and chain. So Thor goes down, defeated–and now there’s nobody to stand in the way of the Absorbing Man’s criminal ambitions. To Be Continued!

Pretty sure that I’ve shared this ad page before, but there were some really great Annuals on sale from Marvel in 1965, almost all of them containing a new lead story as well as vintage key reprints. As such, they were always more in demand than DC’s all-reprint Annuals.

The back-up series Tales of Asgard was something of a workshop of Kirby and Lee. It was a place where Jack could indulge his love of mythology and play around with elements of the Asgardian fantasy worlds that would eventually make their way into the present day lead Thor feature. At this point, teh pair had set out on a longer saga, with Thor and Loki leading an expedition of “Argonauts” on a quest to locate and dismantle the evil forces who are massing to threaten Ragnarok, the day the Realm will fall.

Despite the fact that each chapter of Tales of Asgard is only five pages long, Kirby uses two splash pages in this one, and few panels on the remaining pages. The trade-off for the spectacularness of teh visuals is that the forward momentum o the story is severely curtailed, and so this chapter ends pretty much where it began–with the Argonauts attempting to prevent their ship from being drawn between the Pillars of Utgard, and certain destruction. As the installment ends, Balder the Brave scales the main mast with a strange horn in hand. What is he going to do with it? All True Believers would have to wait for another month to find that out!

In addition to the M.M.M.S. fan club, Marvel had begun to offer a small smattering of merchandise as well. The big push this month was for this line of cool Marvel T-Shirts that had been expanding for some time. They’re well remembered by fans of the era, and several years ago, Graphitti Designs offered reissues of a number of them.. Even the cowboy titles got a shirt (though the Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid and Kid Colt were forced to share it), though Patsy Walker and Millie the Model were never quite so lucky.

The trade-off for getting an extra page of story in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY is that the The Hammer Strikes letters page is only a single page long. But it’s crammed full of special announcements and excitement as well as the commentary from the readers.