Thor’s Commie Crusade
Journey Into Mystery #87 "Prisoners of the Reds" written by Stan Lee and Larry Lieber, pencils by Jack Kirby, inks by Dick Ayers, letters by Artie Simek. No colorist listed.
This is going to be a short post for two reasons. The first is that the story, titled “Prisoner of the Reds,” is only 10 pages. That’s short, even for an anthology comic. Typically, these stories are about 14 pages.
The second reason this post is going to be short is that this comic just isn’t good. Thor is out of place tackling communists; dude is the god of thunder. He really needs to go out on cosmic adventures, similar to what we read in last week’s post about Thor.
Also, communists are boring villains, at least by today’s standards. In the last post, I wrote about Egghead, and while that story wasn’t great, Egghead was certainly the best part of it. Plus, Egghead continues to be a bad guy in the Marvel Universe. He’s no Doctor Doom, sure, but his future schemes are pretty villainous.
The bad guys in this story don’t even have names, not ones I remember, at least. It’s hard to say this story would be better suited for an Ant-Man comic, but it certainly doesn’t work for Thor. Enough of my rambling; let’s get into it.
Prisoner of the Reds
The story starts with this famous scientist leaving a Dear Jane letter for his wife saying that he no longer believes in the ideals of America and he’s defecting to Russia. It makes national news, and over at Dr. Don Blake’s office, he’s like, I bet Thor can do something about this.
Jane Foster is also in this scene, and she’s probably crappy to Don Blake because Stan Lee isn’t good at writing female characters. Anyway, Blake comes up with this insane plan to figure out what is going on. He goes to see this dude he knows in the army and is like, “What if I deceive a bunch of journalists into thinking I’ve made some breakthrough in germ warfare?”
The army dude is like, “Perfect plan!” At this point, Blake either lies to the press, ruining some journalist’s career, or he actually does create a biological warfare weapon. It’s unclear, but either way, it’s weird.
A photographer shows up to take Blake’s picture, but it’s actually a commie who uses a hypnosis gas on Blake and gets him to leave a note and defect to Russia like the other doctor. Blake is locked in a room with a bunch of other doctors. Turns out, the commies are hypnotizing doctors into joining their cause, but once the hypnosis wears off, the doctors refuse to actually do any work for the Russians.
Blake can’t change into Thor because of the other doctors in the room, so the commies put everyone in an individual cell. Blake changes into Thor and escapes but then immediately falls through a trap door into a pool of man-eating sharks. Thor creates a skarknado, and despite having the most awesome, powerful natural disaster at his disposal, he gets captured by the commies when they threaten to kill the doctors, who are still locked up.
Thor surrenders and is chained up. The commies take Mjolnir and just leave, which means that Thor can turn back into Blake, and since he’s so much smaller than Thor, he is able to free himself. Thor breaks the doctors out and then, I don’t remember, probably beats up the commies and wins. The comic ends back in the office with Jane still being crappy to Don Blake.
Final Thoughts
Yeah, I already said everything I had to say in the intro. No point in repeating that. Also, I’m in the middle of moving, so this is going to be the only post this week.
As part of the move, I’ve been going through Mount Comic, and I’ve found some fun stuff, which I’ll write about after I get settled.
Next time, we’re reading Tales to Astonish #39. Another Ant-Man story. Yay!