A Sense of Doubt blog post #3693 - The Troubled Birth of Thor via Tom Brevoort
Even though Comic Book Sunday is tomorrow, I wanted to share this because it's quick and easy and of great interest to nerds like me.
Would I have discovered things Dad introduced me to without Dad?
https://tombrevoort.com/2025/03/15/lee-kirby-the-troubled-birth-of-thor-169/
Lee & Kirby: THE TROUBLED BIRTH OF THOR #169
It’s no great secret that the relationship between editor and scripter Stan Lee and artist and plotter Jack Kirby had grown fraught by 1969. Having at least co-invented the characters who ad saved the company and done the lion’s share of the story work that continued to make the Marvel books he worked on shine, Kirby had grown increasingly frustrated by the amount of credit lavished on Stan Lee for their joint accomplishment. Additionally, he’d also found himself sidelined in recent months, pushed off of characters and storylines that he’d initiated, or forced to change the intent and the direction of the stories he was doing. This had most notably happened with the Silver Surfer, whose origin Kirby had been building up to depicting when he was shocked to discover that a SILVER SURFER title had been added to the publishing schedule that he wasn’t working on–and that its first issue would reveal an entirely different origin for the character he had created.
Kirby had already begun to keep himself in check, holding back on creating any new characters or concepts for Marvel in the hopes of being able to negotiate a better deal for himself, either there or at some other rival publisher. Every once in a while, he wasn’t able to help himself and an Annihilus or an Agatha Harkness would show up in a new story, but for the most part, he refrained. In the meantime, he continued to fulfill his monthly commitment to Marvel by revisiting characters and concepts that he’d already put forward. One of those characters was Galactus, who had been introduced in three very popular issues of FANTASTIC FOUR. Kirby had embarked on a sequence of stories involving Thor seeking out the mysterious origins of the planet-devouring titan, but throughout these issues, strange things kept happening. That ongoing quest kept getting sidelined for other business, as though Kirby was being diverted from delivering on what he was trying to do.
Matters all reached a head in THOR #169, the issue in which Galactus’ origin and backstory was meant to be revealed. And it was–though not exactly the way that Kirby had intended it to be. This issue is one of the strangest and most labored in the run. For one thing ,it was being produced right during the time when Kirby and his family were relocating from their longtime home on Long Island to the West Coast in order to bring their daughter to a better climate for her asthma. Additionally, inker George Klein passed away while working on this issue, and so portions of the final book had to be ghost-inked by Bill Everett and John Verpoorten and others. So already it would have been a bit of a patchwork job. But there are a horde of discarded pages intended for this issue, enough to raise some questions concerning what was going on here.
Some of these pages, an elaborate action sequence, concern events transpiring back on Earth. In the previous issue, Kirby had set up a new menace, the Thermal Man, a catastrophically powerful robotic entity created by the Communist Chinese as a weapon against the West. Thor’s comrade Balder had been wounded and left in hospital on Earth a couple of issues beforehand, and here, he’s joined by the Warriors Three as they offer their services to the U.S. Military in the hopes of stopping the Thermal Man’s destructive rampage. (A number of these pages were used as inking samples after they were discarded, which is why some of them are inked here. None of them are were inked for the issue in question.)
At this time, there was a strong push going on at Marvel Comics to eliminate the extended multi-issue stories that had become the firm’s bread and butter. Publisher Martin Goodman had fielded complaints that the haphazard nature of Marvel’s distribution during this period made it difficult for many readers to locate and purchase subsequent issues of a given title. Martin’s response was to tell Stan Lee to get rid of multi-part stories as quickly as possible. This directive would only last a couple of months, but it was going on as THOR #169 was being put together. So I think that one of the factors that resulted in the book being so changed from what Kirby had intended was a push to get the big story beats wrapped up more expediently. In what we can reconstruct of Jack’s version of the issue, much of the action would have revolved around Balder and the Warriors Three confronting the Thermal Man and being unable to defeat him, requiring Thor and Galactus to resolve to journey to Earth and render assistance on the final page. But Lee or somebody wanted the Galactus business wrapped up in this issue, and the Thermal Man story simplified as well. Once Thor does get back to Earth in #170, scant mention is made of Balder or the Warriors Three–it’s treated as very much a straightforward Thor vs Thermal Man fight.
What saw print in the final THOR #169 as Page 19 appears to have originally been drawn as Page 14 of the original story. It’s also possible that something had been excised here from the top of the page in favor of the big establishing shot of the Thermal Man. Ignore the lettering and simply look at the artwork and the story flow, and it appears to fit in perfectly here.
This discarded page, Page 18, was clearly made up of two half-pages that had been taped together, indicating that even before this point, sequences were being modified and changed as part of the production process.
It’s also possible that the top portion of what saw print as Page 20 of THOR #169 was intended to be Page 19 of Kirby’s original version, with the bottom shorn off and three panels of Thor returning to Earth substituted instead. Again, ignore the lettering here and just look at the images and storytelling, and it seems like it flows pretty well.
The thing is, none of these excised pages have much to do with the origin of Galactus at all, The shift away from them seems to be much more about Lee or somebody not wanting to spend this much real estate on Balder and the Warriors Three rather than the book’s main character. And indeed, in what we can see here, Thor spends a huge portion of this story standing around and watching television with Galactus for some reason. It’s clear that the Thunder God and the World-Devourer have reached some manner of accord, but exactly what form it was to take is a bit shrouded in mystery.
There are also a couple of pages in the final version of THOR #169, such as this one, that feel like empty calories, time-wasting, in which the central plots and conflicts aren’t materially moved forward. No doubt, some of these pages exist to fill out the necessary 20-page length after it had been decided to discard a huge chunk of the back half of Kirby’s original draft and to attempt to wrap up the Galactus material in this one issue.
But getting back to the crux-point of what changed in terms of the Galactus origin, it helps to have an understanding of what Kirby had in mind all along. In Galactus’ first appearances in FANTASTIC FOUR #48-50, he has an established relationship with the Watcher. The two know one another and are familiar with one another, but the exact nature of this relationship is treated as a mystery. This is because Kirby’s concept was for the origins of these two giants to be inexorably linked. But that idea ran afoul of Marvel continuity and was the fulcrum upon which certain changes had to be made to the Origin of Galactus.
Kirby had mentioned to his assistant of the period Mark Evanier that he’d recycled an extended sequence with the Watcher that related to the origin of Galactus into an issue of THOR. I believe the page above was one of those pages, and there are a few more to follow. There are some indications that the figure that Thor is speaking with in these sequences wasn’t originally Galactus at all, but rather the Watcher. In the printed book, there’s one small panel where Galactus strangely is wearing the Watcher’s cloak, as though somebody forgot to remove it when making changes, and a number of close-up shots of Galactus narrating his origin has been Watcher heads initially, such as on the page below. The impression given is that it was the Watcher who is narrating the origin of Galactus to somebody (not necessarily Thor in the original version of these pages)–an origin that he’s well aware of because it’s also his origin as well.
Galactus is wearing the Watcher’s cloak in Panel 4 here, and that was likely the Watcher in Panel 1 originally. The Galactus head that narrates in the final panel was also originally drawn as the Watcher–there’s the remnant of a border note on this scan indicating that the face should be changed to that of Galactus.
And here we get to the crux of the matter. because Kirby’s version of the origins of Galactus and the Watcher are linked. In Jack’s version, Galen of Taa (Nirak in Jack’s version) had been transformed by cosmic radiation. The Watcher, then a mere scientist, happened upon the being’s downed spaceship, and used his knowledge to help stabilize this new entity, little realizing that it would go on to become a scourge of galaxies. Because of his great guilt, this is what caused the Watcher to make his vow of non-interference. In Kirby’s mind, the Watcher wasn’t one of a whole race of similar beings, he was singular and unique, and his vow was a reaction to his Samaritan actions having inadvertently caused the creation of a powerful menace.
Here we see a couple pages that ran in THOR #168 the previous month that visually establish the pre-Watcher as merely an inquisitive scientist who comes across the wreckage of Galactus’ ship and realizes that the entity at the center of the carnage has survived by consuming the life force of everything else within the ruins. Lee here scripts this as though a plague was responsible, but that’s him making a different choice than what Kirby had intended.
The problem here, of course, is that the origin of the Watcher had already been told, in a comic that Kirby had nothing to do with. It had first appeared in the Tales of the Watcher strip in the back of TALES OF SUSPENSE #53 several years earlier. I can’t say whether Jack was simply unaware of this fact, or if he’d forgotten it, or disregarded it, but it definitely hasn’t penetrated his consciousness. His conception of the Watcher had been the same all along. Lee’s origin, though, revealed that there was an entire race of almost-identical Watchers, and that they’d taken a communal vow of non-interference after their attempts to raise up the people of an underdeveloped world instead caused those beings to annihilate themselves. The original story had been written and drawn by Larry Lieber, reputedly from a plot concept by Lee.
And where had that story recently been reprised? Why, SILVER SURFER #1, of course, the same release that Kirby had been left in the dark about and whose origin of the Surfer severed his emotional connection with his creation. In the back of that issue, Lee and artist Gene Colan produced an expanded version of that story from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53. It was recent, so it would have been fresh in the minds of the Marvel staff members who may have been looking over pages of THOR as they were coming in. So this was a second way in which the publication of SILVER SURFER #1 impacted on Kirby’s story plans.
There were a number of full page splash images that Kirby produced while working on the origin of Galactus issues that wound up discarded along the way. Jack would frequently plot and pencil entire multi-page sequences and then shuffle them around as needed, building each issue as we went. Discarding a splash image to reach the necessary page count was sometimes necessary–the splash was often the simplest thing to jettison since it didn’t move the story ahead in a meaningful manner.
As can been seen on the surviving border notes on this page from THOR #169, Galen/Nivak’s flight to the stars and transformation didn’t happen in response to a plague sweeping the galaxy, but rather the aggression of a hostile alien armada armed with a weapon that absorbed the life force of its target. Kirby’s border note at the upper right of this page reads THE WAR (cut off) FAR GALAXIES
And that adds some context to this sequence from THOR #162. This alien fleet that’s approaching the planet before which Galactus’ Incuba-Cube floats is the very one that has been causing such devastation throughout the universe. But the newly-emerged Galactus casually destroys this threat with a wave of his hand. (I wonder if that splash page of Galactus emerging from the Incuba-Cube was meant to fall between these two pages originally.)
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- Days ago: MOM = 3558 days ago & DAD = 212 days ago
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