14 DAY TRIAL // In July 2014, Marvel announced that a new Thor series would reinvent the God of Thunder as we’d known him, because the Mjolnir, the mighty hammer he had wielded until then, would pass to another. To a woman, this time. So the female Thor was born, much to the outrage of many loyal fans of the comic books.
Later that year, the new Thor made her appearance, amidst assurances from Marvel that she was not “just a gimmick” to tap into the female demographic, and more importantly, that she was here to stay, so fans hoping the male Thor would return were better off forgetting about him.
In the eighth issue of the new Thor series, Marvel is ready to reveal her identity, Huffington Post reports.
Who is Thor?
The idea behind this character reinvention is that, as Marvel puts it, Thor has changed over the years and it was time for a woman to prove herself worthy of the mighty hammer for once.
So when Odinson, the original Thor, could no longer lift the Mjolnir because he was not worthy of it anymore, this mysterious woman came up and did so. Until now, fans could only speculate about her identity, following Marvel’s sometimes-misleading trail of breadcrumbs.
All speculation ends with issue 8, when, after defeating the Destroyer, the female Thor meets with Odinson again and he asks her to remove her mask so he could see her for who she really is. She refuses and flies away.
On the next page, the Thor persona is gone and all is left is the woman hiding behind it: she is Dr. Jane Foster (Thor’s mortal girlfriend from the movies, played by Oscar-winner Natalie Portman) and she is dying of breast cancer.
Being Thor is taking a further toll on her delicate state, but she promises to herself (second photo in the gallery) that she “will not stop being the mighty Thor, even though it is killing [her].” In other words, she will stop being Thor when she expires.
Tackling the cancer topic
As the aforementioned media outlet also notes, Marvel has included 2 huge elements in this issue of the new Thor: the big reveal and the cancer diagnosis.
“Most-anticipated perhaps is how Marvel will deal with Foster’s breast cancer battle, a weighty subject and a very real story for hundreds of thousands of women across the country. Comics are becoming more and more a reflection of the culture, and this will surely add an element of true humanity in an art form that can sometimes feel quite literally otherworldly,” HuffPo writes.
As for the fans who are still upset that Thor is now a woman, chances are they will remain so even though they know that’s Dr. Foster dying of cancer they hate so passionately. If Marvel really wanted to get with the times and incorporate pressing issues of today’s society, they should have just created a new character and not completely corrupt one that had already been so well established.
