Issue(s): Thor #131, Thor #132, Thor #133
Cover Date: Aug-Oct 66
Title: "They strike from space!" / "Rigel Where gods may fear to tread!" / "Behold... the Living Planet!"
Credits:
Stan Lee - Writer
Jack Kirby - Penciler
Vincent Colletta - Inker

Review/plot:
I hope you like big heads, because this arc is full of them.

Thor returns Hercules to Olympus where he immediately gets into a fight with Ares. Thor ducks out, rather comically, when Ares includes Hercules' allies in the list of people he considers enemies.

    

Meanwhile, since Jane Foster has been mentally forced to go on a road trip, Tana Nile reveals her true big headed form (she's got a green costume in the reprint but purple in the original).

    

She contacts her home planet and claims Earth's space sector.

I love Rigellians. They are awesomely Kirby and full of big-headed goodness. We are really into the full blossomed cosmic Kirby period with this stuff.

Thor returns to Asgard and, after Odin finishes a game of Celestial Chess...

...he agrees to allow Thor to marry Jane Foster. There is no discussion of Foster having to pass any tests to become an immortal or anything, but when Thor happily states that he does not need to renounce his heritage, Odin agrees.

As we'll see, there's some chicanery going on here. But for now, Thor heads home to look for Jane and instead finds Rigellians in her apartment. Nile's plan to have Foster out of the picture so that Thor wouldn't interfere with the Colonizers didn't work out so well, but she is still able to dominate him with a Mind Thrust.

When Thor starts to resist the Mind Thrust, they try a Proton Coagulant Ray on him, and that works for a while, holding him in a Proton Cage.

But of course he's Thor, so he's not held for long, or he may even have just been faking long enough for them to take him to his ship.

He heads up to the front of the ship, where the Rigellians try to stop him with their power of unlimited density.

But again, he's Thor.

After knocking the Rigellian pilots out, the ship approaches their Sky-Station

...and more Rigellians contact the ship and find that it's Thor who responds.

They send additional Rigellians to get him, but again, he's Thor.

So instead they send a robot called the Indestructible (that looks a little bit like Darkseid)...

The robot arrives while Thor is further manhandling the Rigellians.

But the robot has brought its own means of defeat, an immobilizer beam that even it can't resist. So clearly Thor just has to turn it back on itself.

While all of this is going on, Tana is naively walking about the streets of New York. A cop offers to take her to their leader, and she accepts. He drives her to the police station.

Thor forces the Rigellians to pilot him to the space lock that Tana Nile was using to hold the Earth hostage. When he gets there, he meets the Grand Commissioner of Rigel.

All throughout these battles, the Rigellians have been muttering something about a Black Galaxy, the only thing that fills them with as much fear as Thor, and we've even seen scenes of Rigellian spacecraft being destroyed by the galaxy. So when Thor arrives, the Commissioner tells him they'll remove the space lock on Earth if he'll end the threat of the Black Galaxy.

Thor agrees, and he's sent into the Galaxy with a non-cellular humanoid called the Recorder.

As they travel, Thor learns that the Black Galaxy is no ordinary universe. It is a bio-verse.

Observation: You'll notice that the Recorder is not yet speaking in his characteristic style.

Statement: That will come soon enough.

For the final issue of this arc, Thor fights Ego the Living Planet!!!!!!

We've been waiting for you, too, big guy!

Sorry, i'm kind of getting ahead of myself. They don't fight him yet. First they land on the mind blowingly weird looking planet.

Click to Super-Ego size

And Ego talks to them for a bit.

It gets a little weird for a while when Ego manifests as an armored knight and stuff like that. I want to see Thor fighting a planet!

After that, Ego forms an anti-body, using Thor as his molecular template.

Watching that blows the Recorder's mind.

And that's what Ego wanted of Thor, so now Ego's presence departs...

...and the giant planet tries to drown Thor in an ocean.

Thor and the Recorder take refuge inside one of Ego's pores...

...are attacked by anti-bodies...

...and otherwise have to fight their way out.

Thor eventually unleashes his elemental fury (via a poem; i didn't know he had it in him), and Ego is forced to release them and vow that he'll never again attack Rigel or invade other galaxies. His isolationist philosophy won't last forever, but it's good enough for now.

I'd have preferred a more direct fight between Thor and the planet himself, but i guess that's not really possible. Ego is too large for Thor to just be swinging his hammer at him.

True to their word, the Rigellians release the space lock on Earth. Poor Tana Nile feels ill-used by this turn of events. Now she's just some weirdo ranting at a police station.

Meanwhile, Jane Foster meets a man on a plane named Porgia.

Porgia's head may not be the size of a planet or even as big as a Rigellians, but you have to admit he fits our big headed theme for these issues. Porgia (later Porga) introduces Jane to an associate named "Tagar".

Both are speaking cryptically, but they try to recruit Jane as a teacher. They'll turn out to be two of the High Evolutionary's New Men (Pig and Tiger, naturally).

Great art by Kirby. The big-headed Rigellians are a great visual and all the epic space battle stuff is really his strong point. There is also some of the strange photo-collage stuff that doesn't come across very well, at least in the reprints. But there's amazing concepts here that will continue to be used over the years. Ego the Living Planet is one of my favorite "characters", and i love the Rigellians and the Recorder as well.

Quality Rating: B-

Historical Significance Rating: 6 - first appearance of Ego the Living Planet. First Recorder.

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Thor annual #4, Maximum Security Thor vs. Ego

I love Ego! The majesty, the grandeur, the purpleness... and also, doesn't he look like an old Stan Lee, especially noticable in his final humiliated panel?

Thor's poem at the end of #133, btw, is composed in trochaic tetrameter. So it has this kind of rhythm:

DUM-de DUM-de DUM-de DUM-de

IN the NAME of MIGHT-y O-din --
BY the FUR-y OF the THUN-der ...

(The final "de" is omitted in three lines of the second stanza, though. And it rhymes ABCB.)

That rhythm would have been familiar to readers of Stanley Lieber's generation from Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha":

BY the SHORES of GIT-che GU-mee ...

That two-page spread of Ego's surface is really something. Also, the backup "Tales of Asgard" in these issues, featuring a story about the barbarian leader Harokin entering Valhalla, is really quite good, with more excellent work from Kirby.

Part of the visual inspiration for the scenes inside the Living Planet, for instance, where Thor and the recorder go inside a living pore, and encounter anti-bodies, may have been from the movie Fantastic Voyage which was also released in 1966.

I love this stuff: prime Lee and Kirby. I like the Rigellians although I prefer the name Space Colonizers which they no longer us. The Recorder and Ego were incredible stuff and more growth of the Marvel Universe literally.

Moved a bunch of off topic comments about movie rights to the forum.