Thor 128 Tales of Asgard page: Aftermath!

1966: Kirby puts a marker down on the idea of a new race of gods arising in the wake of Ragnarok, an idea which would bloom into his magnum opus about five years down the road.

In this magical year (Revolver! Pet Sounds! Blonde on Blonde! Star Trek! Endless Summer! Spidey 31-33!) Kirby’s imagination had reached escape velocity. He had started evolving the Inhumans the year before and ’66 would bring the Galactus trilogy, Wakanda, the Cosmic Cube…you get the idea. In his spare time at home he drew the first concept drawings of Orion, Lightray, Mr. Miracle, Darkseid and Metron, though I’m not sure he had yet linked all those characters up with his idea for a sequel to Norse mythology.

Stan mostly follows Jack’s notes in the the top tier, except for leaving out the single most interesting idea, that the new gods “arise in the image of Thor.” The circular caption in panel two, with its note of manifest destiny, sounds like pure Stan.

Tragically, none of Jack’s notes for the bottom panel survive, so we can only speculate based on hindsight and Lee’s revision. I would guess that panel three follows the pattern of panel two, with the top caption being adapted from Kirby, and the second caption, based on content, being all Stan. “New race,” “new civilization,” new golden age,” “new rebirth”—one imagines Jack may have been more concise. In particular, the phrase New “Rebirth” seems faintly redundant. I’ll always wonder if Jack, efficient writer that he was, may have jotted down a different word there, under the city of the new gods—something both more expansive and at the same time evocative of the biblical imagery above.

I know it isn’t customary to trash one’s own collection on CAF—and don’t get me wrong, I’m ecstatic to own this page—but it must be said that Colletta’s inks here are a crime against humanity. Besides the overall carelessness of his mark making, he’s erased a couple of small figures and several architectural details in panel three. But the real atrocity is panel one. Kirby is the absolute master of scenes like this, elemental forces at monumental scale. The pencils must have been awe-inspiring. To get a sense of how the panel should look, I’ve added an (admittedly larger) FF panel from three years later in the additional images. The dynamic structure of the water, the play of energy krackle, the interesting crater-like forms in the rock: pencil traces of all this can be made out beneath and between Vinnie’s faithless brush-stabbings, dumb holding lines, and compensatory white-out.

Rewritten by a bullshit artist, redrawn by a pimp...but still the grandeur of Jack’s conception can be felt: a continent emerging through a fog.