Journey into Mystery #109October 1964
"When Magneto Strikes!"
WOW! It looks like Magneto didn't get the "GET JANE FOSTER!" memo or the instructions to Don Blake's office. This story engine is not always maintained to operate at the highest capacity. It looks like we'll have to find some other way for the hero and the bad guy to meet.
It starts with Thor looking at statues of super-heroes for an exhibition. I assumed they are statues by Alicia Masters, but it doesn't explicitly say so. Thor tells his hosts that he will try to attend the exhibit when the fair opens. Then he takes off on Thor business of some kind.
Meanwhile, the evil mutants are lurking nearby, in the harbor, in a submarine disguised as a derelict tree floating in the water. Magneto is trying to find the X-Men. He is pretty sure they live in the New York metropolitan area. Mastermind is tormenting the Toad. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are just standing around. Magneto send them to the city to find the X-Men.
While the rest of the evil mutants are on this mission, Magneto takes advantage of his "me" time to experiment with his magnetism powers. This wreaks havoc in the city. All the metallic objects are floating! Doctor Blake and Nurse Foster are tending to a boy who hurt his arm playing football ... when suddenly ... all the metal objects in the office are floating in the air! They look outside ... cars, motorcycles, metal railings, all sorts of metal junk ... all floating in the air!
It ends as quickly as it began. Jane is like, Oh well. Maybe we all imagined it. Maybe it was just weird Marvel Universe New York stuff. Ho hum.
Anyway, it's closing time, and Don wants to investigate the weird phenomenon of the floating metal objects ... but he has forgotten that he has arranged a dinner date with Jane! He tells her he's too upset by all the metal objects floating around. Jane is used to this crap. It's not easy being the star of NURSE ROMANCE COMICS. Things don't ever work out for you. She presumably goes home and gets Chinese takeout and watches The Beverly Hillbillies. It's hilarious! It's the one where Jethro is a secret agent!
So Blake turns to Thor and somehow uses his hammer to track the magnetism to its source. It sounds a bit far-fetched, but it's a magic hammer that can pretty much do anything. It's like Thor is cheating every time he flies into battle. Between the hammer and Odin, Thor can do pretty much anything he can imagine.
He tracks the magnetism to the derelict tree floating in the harbor and surprises Magneto in his submarine lair. (One of the captions calls it a "submersible fort.") Magneto and Thor mix it up for a couple of panels, but Magneto stops him. He gives him the "Why should we fight?" speech. He assumes Thor is a mutant and he tries to get him to join the Brotherhood. (Magneto thinks everybody is a mutant.)
Magneto explains himself to Thor. He explains about Homo Superior and mutants and how the mutants should rule because regular Homo Sapiens humans are BAD! But Thor isn't having it. He's not a mutant! He's a Norse god! And he's pledged to protect mankind! And he knocks the goblet of wine out of Magneto's hand and they start fighting again.
They mix it up for few pages and Magneto traps the hammer in a magnetic forcefield at the same time Thor is struggling with the walls closing in on him and squeezing him. It slows him down but he manages to smash out a tunnel to get through.
And then sixty seconds pass and he turns back to Don Blake! Without his hammer! Trapped in Magneto's underwater "submersible fort" in the harbor!
Gulp!
I sometimes think Don Blake is the real hero. (Except when it's Nurse Romance Comics or GET JANE FOSTER!) In this era of Thor, a lot of my favorite scenes involve Thor turning to Blake at just the wrong moment.
Magneto wasn't watching because he had just closed a vast metal door to slow Thor down a bit. So Blake sneaks back through the hole he made in the collapsing room while Magneto wonders why Thor has stopped pounding on the door. He waits a few seconds to see what Thor will do and notices the walking stick. What is that doing here? He waves his hand and the stick flies away. Magneto then scatters a bunch of rivets into the room where he thinks Thor is and Blake manages to dodge them somehow.
Blake runs a deadly gauntlet of falling vents, murderous rays, sharp metal arms and falling drills. He does OK. His clothes are a little ripped. He's probably got a few scrapes and bruises. But he's not really making any progress.
But Magneto is distracted by a cry for help from the rest of the Brotherhood. They succeeded in their mission. They found the X-Men!
Or did the X-Men find them!?
This has never been of my favorite Thor issues from this period, but I'm actually kind of digging it this time through. One of the things I like is how little we see of the X-Men. But they're here! We see one of Cyclops' ruby-red blasts scattering the members of the Brotherhood. And Angel's shadow and the Beasts hairy wrists.
While Magneto is distracted, Blake manages to find the stick and very soon he's Thor again! So Magneto and Thor are fighting again! But Magneto manages to evade Thor and he sets up a bomb to blow up the complex and kill Thor!
But now the X-Men are here! Iceman freezes the bomb so it's inoperative. We don't see him but we see his ice powers and we hear him taunting Magneto. The master of magnetism manages to escape in a mini-sub, and he seems rather philosophical about the whole thing. Ah well. He will rejoin the Brotherhood and they will all survive to fight another day. (This issue came out between X-Men #7 and #8.)
That didn't really take that long, so Blake shows up at Jane's apartment to see what she's up to. Apparently, The Beverly Hillbillies is over and Jane is reading as she eats an apple or a cupcake or something. (I guess I was wrong about the Chinese takeout.) She forgives Don and they eat ham and cheese sandwiches and they look out the window at the New York skyline and she calls him a silly goop.
Jane seems to be in a very good mood since this is a very nice Nurse Romance Comics ending and not a GET JANE FOSTER! adventure, which seems to me might be rather exhausting.
Commentary: I mentioned before that this one was not one of my favorites, but I have come around it. Reading the whole series like this and digging deep into each issue one by one, I find so much to like that I didn't always notice before. Like Blake holding his own in Magneto's submersible fort. Like the X-Men and their efforts to be discrete in someone else's comic book series. Like Jane Foster's relief at having some time for romance with Don that doesn't involve getting abducted by evil gods or super-villains. OR COMMIES!
I think the main reason I used to have a problem with it is just how little really happens. There's no grand plan from the Brotherhood. Magneto is just messing around with his powers. The Brotherhood isn't in it very much, and I love the Brotherhood! Pietro, Wanda, the Toad and Mastermind are so much fun! I love the team dynamic! They are all such jerks to each other! But with no affection like you get between, say, Johnny and Ben in the Fantastic Four.
And then there's the way Magneto just writes off another secret base! How does he keep doing that?!
But ... that stuff doesn't really bother me that much anymore. It's just more dumb comic book stuff. With great art from Jack Kirby and Chic Stone!
Comic books are stupid.
Tales of Asgard: "Banished from Asgard!": And then in Tales of Asgard, we get the tale of the time Odin was BIG MAD and he banished Thor! (Well, one of the times he banished Thor.) And the Asgardian named Arkin the Weak ran off to tell Knorda, the beautiful (and normal-sized) queen of the mountain giants so they could ambush Thor while he is out of favor with Odin. With Thor unable to defend Asgard, the fabled city will soon fall to the giants and the forces of evil.
But ... it's a set-up. A fake banishment. Thor leads Knorda and her mountain giants into a trap. You see, Odin suspected there was a traitor among them and he set up this trap to smoke him out. One assumes that Arkin was very dreadfully punished because, as far as I know, he has never appeared again.