WC: JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #122

Here’s a very nice cover to JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY that features Wally Wood inking Jack Kirby’s cover pencils. Kirby and Wood didn’t really get to work together much during the Marvel Age–Wood was way too valuable as a penciler in his own right, given that he was capable of plotting as well, a skill set that editor Stan Lee relied on. But Wood was a huge admirer of Kirby’s, and so he took any chance he could get to ink Jack’s work. It’s an interesting cover approach. the big sales point seems to be Odin looking powerful and stern. Thor is stuck off to the side, sneaking in stealthily. And the issue’s villain, the Absorbing Man, has his back to the camera and is crammed into the lower left. Kirby or someone must have reckoned that the cosmic figure of the All-Father would be enough to get prospective buyers to fork over their dime-and-two-pennies.

At this point in 1965, one of the final elements of the Marvel approach had crystalized: serialization. So it is that this issue’s story is continued directly from the last issue, and will be continued into the next. There’s an almost unbroken chain of events that runs from JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #114-THOR #136 without any real discernable break. This soap opera approach kept readers coming back to see what happened next. Lee has also by this point codified his sales rap, and this issue also includes a gag built into the credits that’s a bit fun and clever. The only real weak link here is inker Vince Colletta, who mostly provided an interesting finish to Kirby’s work but who cut corners, simplifying backgrounds and even eliminating entire characters and elements from the finished pages. No reader could tell, of course, because they didn’t know what had been simplified, but still there was always a sense of incompleteness to Colletta’s work on the Thor strip.

The opening of this story is just a balls-out battle between the Thunder God and his returning foe the Absorbing Man, an enemy whose body takes on the properties and power of any item that he touches. Having liberated himself from captivity under the watchful eye of Ularic the Warlock, evil Loki has dispatched the Absorbing Man to Earth in a bid to wipe out his hated brother. From afar, the God of Evil watches the contest closely, and when it appears as though Thor is about to triumph, Loki teleports his cat’s paw away to far-off Asgard, where he plots his next move.

Meanwhile, in a crazy subplot that reads as though neither Lee nor Kirby knew quite where they were going with it, Jane Foster, Thor’s nurse in his earthly guise of Don Blake, has been held captive in an apartment that just happens to be directly above the battle. As the building is damaged, Thor hears Jane’s cries for help and races to her side. In order to treat her injuries, he transforms himself back into Don Blake–and in that instance, the hooded figure who’s been holding Jane snaps photographic proof that Thor and Blake are one and the same. This figure turns out to be Harris Hobbs, a reporter who had assisted Thor in his first battle against the Absorbing Man. He’s taken to kidnapping because he’s trying to get what he considers the greatest story of all time: the inside scoop on Asgard, home of the Gods themselves!

This crap pisses Thor off to no end. Now, given that Hobbs abducted Jane, Thor should probably hand him over the cops. But the idea that he’s done wrong here never comes up. Instead, Hobbs attempts to use the photographic proof of Blake’s identity to blackmail Thor, gambling that the Thunder God’s pledge never to harm a human being will prevent retaliation. Thor, though, has no truck with this. He doesn’t need to hurt Hobbs to punish him. Spinning his hammer, he takes the two of them on a journey across space and time, to prehistoric lands and cosmic vistas, threatening to strand Hobbs in one of these hostile vistas should he not relent.

Quick break here for a house ad spotlighting Marvel’s two best-selling titles of the era, FANTASTIC FOUR and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. For the record, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY/THOR was the third.

Hobbs is thus cower. But he still manages to sweet-talk Thor into taking him to see Asgard with his own eyes, even if he’ll be made to forget about it afterwards. for no good reason apart from the fact that the plot demands it, Thor agrees. Meanwhile, in Asgard, realizing that Odin’s defenses have been spread thin, Loki decides to sieze the throne directly in a frontal assault. And so he sends the Absorbing Man to attack the All-Father in his throne room. Crusher Creel scatters the remaining Asgardian Gods like tenpins before approaching the person of Odin himself. The All-Father attempts to zap the arrogant mortal, but of course his Odin-Power is simply absorbed by Creel, who sends it back at the aged warrior. And so the battle is joined–as this issue is To Be Continued!

Two more Marvel titles get the spotlight next, both of them being somewhat lesser efforts in the line at this moment. But both were continuing to grow and evolve and become more polished and better executed over time. That was the really exciting thing about the Marvel releases in this era–the quality level almost universally trended upwards.

The back-up serial remained Tales of Asgard, in which Kirby confined his imagination to Asgard and the stories of the Norse Gods that had fired his imagination. At this point, Thor and a team of fellow warriors including Loki had been dispatched by Odin to locate and eliminate a pending danger to the Golden Realm. Afraid of sailing between the Pillars of Utgard, which are said to portend certain death, Loki and the men he’s swayed to his side stage a mutiny aboard the ship, one that Thor and the newly-introduced Warriors Three battle to quell. At the apex of the fight, the battling sailors see that Balder teh Brave has climbed to the bow and lashed himself there, blowing on a great horn as the ship enters the region between the two Pillars. What will happen to our heroes next? To Be Continued!

Also new for 1965, the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page became a central clearing house for the Marvel checklist, the listing of M.M.M.S. members, plugging available tie-in merchandise and just clowning around with the readership and making the names in the credit boxes seem more like real people that you knew. Most of this stuff was exaggerated in Lee’s signature carnival barker style, but that just made it all that much more effective.

And the issue closes out with the single-page The Hammer Strikes letters page. Stan has his patter down pat by this point.