Journey into Mystery #94

 "Out of my way, you flunky!"

Oh dear. This may well be the most terrible issue I've read in the Order so far. It's clear that Robert Bernstein isn't working out as the writer, and the title needs a major revamp at this point. It's a promising concept but has consistently failed to catch fire.

I mean, we begin with NASA firing a rocket into space which is powered by... a nuke. Yep, that would be the sort of rocket which tends to blow up on launch from time to time. Then again... Project Orion was actively being considered at around this time, so let's not blame the script for this, at least.

But the whole scene of the rocket losing control is just another excuse for Loki (still trapped on Asgard by the gods) to concoct an absurd escape plan which consists of having Thor get a bang on the head, giving him a contrived personality change which turns out to make him vehemently pro-Loki for no clear reason. Then again, of course it's absolutely possible to control how someone's personality changes by varying where and how you hit them on the head, right?

So Thor frees Loki, and rebels against a thankfully rather forgiving Odin, and it's fascinating just how undefined the All-Father's powers are at this early stage. We then move to an orgy of destruction, with several famous world landmarks being destroyed. But then the United Nations requests that Odin accede to Loki's inevitable blackmail... and it seems the delegates all accept the gods as being literally, well, gods, which... well!

And then we have a literal deus ex machina, we press a big red reset button, and that's it. The whole thing might as well have not happened. And, throughout the whole story, we only got a few panels with Thor as Thor.

Utterly, utterly awful.