Hi Tolworthy--are you saying your copy of the Essential Thor v. #1 doesn't have a table of contents that includes the credits for each issue in the volume? The credits list the plotter, scripter, pencil artist, ink artist and letterer for each issue. If it's not in your volume I can send you a list or maybe scan it.

Oh, you're right--I see what you mean.  Fwiw,  for the pre-JiM #97 issues (when Tales of Asgard started as a back up feature), here's a little cheatsheet:

JiM#83-91: Lieber's credited as the scripter 
JiM#92-96: Robert Bernstein (R. Berns) is credited as the scripter 

(you probably already know all this but I don't want you to have to go foraging for your glasses and/or a flashlight!  )

Journey Into Mystery 86: Thor is Superman



Hurrah! The jury is in. "super advanced" it is. What looked like crazy story telling last issue was just the same story moving at ev ever faster pace. And this issue the rate speeds up!

The plot: Odin! Time travel! Thor showing he can fly faster than a speeding rocket, withstand a nuclear bomb blast, etc! It's like every issue is ten times faster than the previous one!



And the art is beautiful. I thought last issue's scene with Thor on top of the Empire State Building was good, but Kirby's excelled himself here, with Thor calling on Odin.



I'm trying to resist the temptation to analyse this in detail: there is just so much to say, but I promised to make this just a "first time read through reaction". So I'll just say how much I'm loving this, and make just two observations:



1. Each issue leads to the next.



JiM 83: Blake gets the powers, and we realise he will deal with cosmic level threats.



JiM 84: Blake learns more of his powers and we see this is not just sci fi, this is bigger than that: he waill also deal with international politics.



JiM 85: We jump ahead about ten stages with his powers: Thor is now an expert, and we begin to meet the other gods. Science, politics, religion, what next?



JiM 85: his power set reaches its ultimate stage (see next point). And we see that the story ranges across not just spatial dimensions but time as well.



2. Thor is not about superheroes.

Thor seems to be about the infinite: taking everything to the extreme and beyond. JiM 86 makes it clear that he can defeat any regular threat: he can withstand a nuclear bomb, throw someone through dimensions, travel through time, and call on even more powerful gods as needed. So this is not about regular fights! These four issues have established who Thor is, and what he can do, so now I have to know: what happens next? Where do we go from here?



This may get the title for the world's fastest moving comic, and all in ten pages or so per story. I love it!

Journey into mystery 88: the bigger story revealed

Plot: Loki discovers the significance of Thor's hammer.

Six issues in, we have enough clues to see the backbone of the story (of which each issue of JiM is just a chapter). It's Thor versus Loki. But we still only have glimpses of the reason behind the battle. We know that for some reason Loki has been allowed to escape after many centuries. I think it's Odin's long term plan to survive Ragnarok*. As the wild card, the one god who won't fight alongside the others, the creative, lateral thinking one, the one with the self preservation instinct, Loki is the only hope for the gods' genes.

Loki is behind every issue:

Loki has now returned twice in four issues, and when he isn't there he may be behind the scenes. Flicking ahead, this will soon be made explicit. In this issue we see that he was watching Thor throughout the previous issue. Presumably he arranged the communist plot in order to test Thor's power. So while the first four issues covered Thor discovering his powers, these issue show Loki discovering Thor's power:

JiM 85: Loki tries random stuff to see how Thor will react.
JiM 86: Loki will have sen the full extent of his power.
JiM 87: Loki arranges further tests, looking for a weakness.
JiM 88: Loki learns what he needs: it's in the hammer.

I speculate that Odin focused the power in the hammer so that, when the gods are all killed, some aspect of them can return through artefacts like this. Just guessing. But everything in Norse mythology is about the inevitable destruction at Ragnarok, so it makes sense.

Other repeated themes:

We're starting to see many other subplots develop, issue by issue: Thor's growing realisation, his relationship with America, Odin's thinking, Don and Jane, etc. To keep this short, I'll just discuss one: the nature of the gods. When Loki first appeared his first act was to turn people into negative versions of themselves, like photographic negatives. This was so wild, so crazy, that I seriously began to doubt the sanity of the story (see my notes to JiM 85). But the fast pace of other events persuaded me that this was no accident. Sure enough, this time Loki does something very similar: he turns people into blank outlines. How does he do that? What does it tell us? And another thing: notice how Thor so quickly finds inferior duplicates of himself? Flicking ahead, this is another repeated theme. What does it mean?

If we just go by the dialog then the reason for both phenomena is that the dialog writer lacks ideas: throw crazy stuff at the stories, and having made Thor too strong the only serious threat is another Thor. But remember that I distrust the dialog and I'm focusing on the art. I have always found that Kirby's art tells its own story, and that story always makes sense. I don't think Kirby planned it consciously, but he has enough experience to intuitively make wise choices. I think that this is one of those cases: all this crazy stuff becomes simple when we remember that this is about alternate dimensions.

The gods as higher dimensional beings

We know that Thor can throw Loki to Asgard, even though we cannot see Asgard either in the clouds or nearby space. We know that Thor can communicate with Odin simply by thinking. We know that Thor (with Odin's help) can travel through time. We know that Thor can stand next to an exploding nuclear bomb without serious harm. All of this argues for the gods being higher dimensional beings. This agrees with the standard view of gods, e.g. in the Bible: they are "above" us, yet not in a way that we see, and (crucially) they can see everything at once. As Edwinn Abbott Abbott (so good they named him twice) observed, all of this can be explained if these beings are in the next dimension above us.

Imagine if we, three dimensional beings, interacted with a two dimensional world. Like, looking at pages in a book. We could easily jump in and out of that world, step forwards or back in time (move to a later page without reading every word in between), and see everything that is going on. This explains Thor's bomb survival: the worst a 2D bomb could do would be mess up one zero thickness plane of your body, leaving everything above or below it intact. Thor would think he could probab survive that fine. And making duplicates would be easy: a 3D body is like an infinite stack of 2D bodies. It also allows Thor to draw electricity and water from apparently nowhere. It all fits. I think Loki's first trick, the negative people, is the clue: it's like us finding a 2D picture of a person and flipping it over or filling it in. Later creating blank people is a reminder that this was no accident.

Kirby as master planner

This shows how Kirby can be right even without realising it. To a 3D person, creating 2D art, negatives or blank shapes are trivially easy to imagine. And Kirby is acting like a god: he has all power over these drawn figures. So anything godlike that Kirby imagines (blank people, time travel, surviving a bomb, etc) makes sense because that is exactly the power that Kirby (the god) has over his creations. All  Kirby has to do is act naturally and as long as he cares about the story, it will fit together over the long term, even though he may not consciously know how. This is not true for the official writer, because the writer is thinking about other 3D people, not 2D people. And it is not true for other artists who see it as "just a job" and just slavishly copy the writer without adding their own ideas.

Another example of how Kirby can be right without consciously thinking about it is in his art that looks solid and his science that machinery that connects to the real world: Kirby spent his life fighting and reading, the stuff had to work ion his mind, so it worked on the page. And the way that Kirby's stories move forwards (superheroes in 1940s, gangs, westerns and monsters in the 1950s, science and existential crisis in the 1960s): they reflect the culture that was developing in the real world. I do not want to pretend that Kirby planned any of this in conscious detail, but the facts that he cared so much about stories, and spent so long on the art, he was stubborn enough to contradict a writer of he wanted to, he was such a close observer of reality, he was such a thinker, these are what creates the unique and consistent Kirby effect, regardless of who is writing. In my opinion.

I could write ten times more about this issue, but that's enough writing for one day.

Footnote

* Odin made it so Loki could be released when people shed a tear for him. So Odin foresaw a day when either

(1) the old gods are dead and future beings shed a tear for them: they even miss Loki. Loki, safe inside the tree, could presumably survive. (Especially if Loki could make some connection with Yggdrasil, which spanned more than one world: being Loki, and having plenty of time, that was a given).
(2) the gods would be too distracted by other events: this is what happened, allowing Loki to trick a fake tear. What events were they distracted by? Well Earth was changing rapidly: accelerating technology, the threat of alien invasions, nuclear war, etc. So that is the obvious answer.
Both scenarios suggest Ragarok. Norse mythology is all about fighting to delay this inevitable end that is always on the gods' minds.

tl;dr

Thor is one continuous story. Every issue of JiM is an essential chapter that builds the bigger narrative.

The non-Kirby issues

We now have a few issues with no Kirby. The stories have little to redeem them, with or without the dialog, so I won't waste much time on these.

Journey Into Mystery 90: the "Carbon Copy Man" combines the aliens and duplicates themes that I mentioned in earlier reviews.

Journey Into Mystery 91: "Sandu, Master of the Supernatural" repeats the "Loki is behind all this" theme. And repeats copies Kirby's dramatic "giant Odin face" image, but this time it's just cheesy and devalued. I wonder if the "Sandu", the villain secretly being controlled by the REAL bad guy, is influenced by Kirby's story "Sando and Omar" from Captain America 1 back in 1941? That story may have been on Kirby's mind, as he updated it in 1965. Which raises the question, did these issues have any Kirby influence at plotting stage? He still did the covers, so was not completely detached. 

Journey Into Mystery 92: "Loki Stole Thor's magic hammer" this develops the theme established in JiM 88: Loki knows about the hammer and wants it. Was Kirby involved at the initial discussion stage? Who knows. But the rest of it is forgettable. It's always interesting to see Sinnott pencils though. He is excellent at cleaning up other pencillers, but he doesn't quite get the layouts or faces right on his own, in my view. A perfect example of how inkers and pencillers have different skill sets.

BTW, I'm never comfortable with the word "magic" in Thor. I accept that its a convenient shorthand, but if religion or mythology are any good they should be something different. The word "magic" suggests "no need to try to understand". But with good stories (and real religion and real mythology) understand where it comes from is where the pleasure lies. Because the attempt to understand always unlocks bigger, more interesting stories. Or at least, that is true whenever Kirby is involved. I don't see that with other writers. If it's not Kirby then I agree with the mainstream view, that it's best to just say "it's just magic" and not think about those details.

Speaking of Tales of Asgard, I was just reading an interview with Neal Adams and I thought this bit was an interesting perspective on the the Kirby/Lee question:



BTW, in case anyone gets the wrong idea, I don't read that as a put-down of Stan Lee: on the contrary, I think it confirms my own feeling that Kirby's potential might never have been unleashed but for his collaboration with Stan.