La très, très, très grande période. À tous niveaux.
Au départ, c’est pas Miller qui refile un traitement écrit pour le cinoche (ou la téloche) à Romita Jr, parce qu’il n’a pas le temps de lui écrire un truc ?
Ça dépend si la recolorisation des « Tales of Asgard » te dérange ou non (celle dont parle Soyouz).
Ça tâtonne pas mal au début (entre JIM #83 & JIM #113), et puis ça décolle peu à peu suite aux débuts du back-up (Kirby est plus impliqué à partir de là), et l’impact qu’à cette partie « B » (les « Tales of Asgard ») sur la partie « A » (Journey into Mystery/Thor). Puis l’ascendant du King continue avec le remplacement de Jane par Sif (et un Don Blake parfois absent pendant plusieurs numéros d’affilés).
"One of the myths about the Marvel Age of Comics is that it pretty much happened all at once–that as soon as FANTASTIC FOUR #1 hit newsstands coast-to-coast, the paradigm of comic books changed completely. And that’s clearly not the case. In fact, it took a few years for the Marvel approach to storytelling to completely crystalize into a unified approach. Prior to that, while it was clear that certain strips–FANTASTIC FOUR and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN in particular–were being given a lot of love and attention, much of the rest of the line was simply being churned out in assembly line style, much like the interchangeable fantasy stories whose positions in several ongoing titles the new Marvel heroes had taken over. This issue of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY is a good example of that phenomenon in practice. It wasn’t particularly memorable in any respect, nor was it all that different in style and execution from what all of the other super hero publishers of the time were putting out. In summary, it was just another crummy comic book designed to fill some young reader’s time for ten or twenty minutes and be forgotten. But here we are, six decades later, still looking at it.
The Thor strip was an addental series to begin with. The first Thor story had been crafted as a one-off, with the potential for a sequel (the Marvel monster stories had been doing occasional sequels at that time, it was easier than coming up with a new monster every month.) But when super heroes were hitting, it was immediately launched as the first of a series. What this means is that nobody involved with that first story–not artist Jack Kirby, not editor Stan Lee, and now scripter Larry Lieber–had given much thought to what an ongoing Thor strip would be like. And so the early Thor adventures are pretty rocky affairs. Thor battles a lot of Communists, the creators decide on the fly that he’s not just a guy who found Thor’s hammer but is the actual Norse god, a cookie-cutter love interest is introduced in the person of nurse Jane Foster. But it wasn’t a series that anybody was using a lot of brain cells on. The fact that it was Lieber who was called upon to script these stories rather than Lee doing it himself gives a clear indication as to how important the assignment was viewed. And then, Kirby was needed elsewhere to launch books with more potential, and he stopped drawing (and largely plotting) Thor."
« This issue of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY represents the beginning of the fully-formed period of Thor’s adventures. While launched over a year before in issue #83, the strip was swiftly handed over by editor Stan Lee to other creators to write and draw–Jack Kirby’s talents were needed elsewhere, it seemed–and consequently, the series wasn’t working as well as some of the other Marvel books. Eventually, Lee took over writing THOR himself, and introduced the running subplot of Thor wanting to wed Jane Foster but being rebuked by his father Odin to create some drama in the series. At the same time, Kirby had come back to inaugurate the TALES OF ASGARD feature in the back of the book, which at least initially focused on retellings of the genuine mythology on which the character was based. But it gave the series more of an epic flavor overall. And with this issue, Kirby returned to the strip full time and wouldn’t leave it until he was done with Marvel completely in 1970. »
"This issue of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY was situated right at the transition point between the early Marvel style of storytelling and the more mature and measured approach the firm would take through its glory years. By this point, artist and largely plotter Jack Kirby had received a rate increase that permitted him to slow down just a tiny little bit and spend more time on each individual page. He was also largely set free from teh constraints of doing single issue stories, as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s experiments with broader serialization in the Hulk strip had proved worthwhile. So Kirby’s ambitions became vaster, his vistas became more ever-expanding, and his subject matter became more intense and at teh same time, more personal.
For his part, scripter Stan Lee had found his sweet spot on THOR as well, steadily infusing the strip with more colorful speeches that channeled the olde English of Shakespeare. While events on Earth were still of some import in the series, the focus would hereafter more largely be on Asgard, the home of the gods, as well as the entirety of the cosmos, as Lee and Kirby sent the Thunder God off on adventures of cosmic proportions. It’s really no wonder that THOR became the third-best selling title in the Marvel line for the duration of the 1960s, selling behind only FANTASTIC FOUR and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN."
« By the time this issue of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY was published, he series had crystalized into its final form. The short one-off adventures of the Thunder God Thor now gave way to an impressively long serialized story that ran consistently from issue to issue without a break for several years. In addition, the character’s background as an immortal of Asgard was being featured more prominently, with his adventures growing in scope and scale as a result, both within Asgard and throughout the cosmos. And finally, like his work or not, Vince Colletta was now in place as Jack Kirby’s regular inker on both Thor and Tales of Asgard, cementing the look of both strips for the rest of the decade. It was a thoroughly grown up project. »
Epic/Masterworks/omnibus (ou les numéros individuels d’origine pour les puristes fortunés).
Ou les intégrales VF (puisque cette recolorisation ci-dessus ne concerne QUE le back-up).
