In my youth – a period which ranged from sometime before my teens to sometime after I dropped out of Washington University – I was a Marvel Comics fan. We need not recount the various titles I followed, because this post is about only one of those titles, only one member of the Marvel pantheon. I speak to you of the mighty Thor: God of Thunder, son of Odin, golden-tressed prince of Asgard…
What’s that? Thor of the Norse myths had red hair, you say? Well, yes, and good on you for knowing that, but that was a different Thunder God. You see, Thor of the Æsir was the redhead, Thor of the Asgardians was the blond(e). It’s all explained in the Celestials saga which culminated in Thor #300; you might want to go check it out. However, we’re wandering well off-topic, and must now go back.
So: me, youth, Thor. One of my favorite Thor volumes, one which I read more times than I care to share, was a 1976 reprint of four issues from the fabled Stan Lee/Jack Kirby days, issues 154 through 157 originally published in 1968. This oversized reprint was Marvel Treasury Edition #10, and its cover price in 1976 was a whopping $1.50. This storyline concerned the coming of the indescribable Mangog, a monstrous creature possessed of the strength of a billion, billion beings (yeah, that’s right) and possessed by one single objective: the death of the entire universe.
Loved that book. Years after buying it, I could recite it for you, line for stirring, bombastic line, down to every quasi-Shakespearean ‘thy,’ ‘thine,’ and ‘thou.’
I actually owned and enjoyed another Marvel Treasury Edition featuring the Thunder God – #3, guest-starring Hercules and that whole Greek/Roman crowd – but the Mangog epic was the more compelling of the two. So, of course, that issue was the one I lost due to unforgivable negligence on my part.
Years passed. About twenty years, I think, bringing us to, oh, just a few days ago: I sat at my desk at work, processing the stuff I process while at work. My mind wandered, as it will at times, and I found myself thinking of my long-lost Thor reprint.
A thought came to me then: I was working. That is, I had a job. Which meant that I had income. Also, I was an adult – nominally, at least. I could spend my hard-earned dollars on anything I wanted. Even a long out-of-print comic…assuming, of course, that I could find it for sale.
Enter eBay.
Having this comic restored to me, after so many years, makes me happier than you might think reasonable for someone who is closer (much) to fifty than he is to fifteen.
Now: if only I had time to read it.
Note: The cover of Marvel Treasury Edition #10 is extremely misleading, as it features Thor battling not Mangog, but rather Ulik, mightiest of the Trolls. In fact, Ulik plays but a brief (and, for the universe, rather unfortunate) cameo role in the events of this storyline. The following image is a proper introduction to the true villain of this piece:
I like Thor but have not read a comic in ages... the shock at the price with the amount of actual reading material contained/advertisements put me off.
-unrelated- the Star Trek book cover seen as a side bar on one of your pages was a book I received in '72 -I had just started 5th grade at Maple Grove Elementary School in Dittmer, Mo.
Seem to remember the blurb above the title being "A chilling journey through worlds beyond imagination."
Even then, I knew that the USS Enterprise did not have engines where the hangar deck was located... that book was a big deal to me at the time.
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