Thor is one of the greatest superheroes in comics. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were able to take a god, humanize him exceptionally, and find a way to take mythology and make it into sci-fi. Since then, we’ve gotten so many great Thor era, taking the ideas of Thor and superheroes and taking them to new places. Now, everyone has their opinions on which Thor era is the best. Some people like the original, when Stan and Jack (mostly Jack; Thor fits the stories that Kirby told on his own more than Stan) created the mythos. Some people like the Walt Simonson era, which took what Stan and Jack did and intensified it. Some people enjoy the Straczynski era or the Aaron era. However, there’s one era that doesn’t get the love that it should, and that’s the short era of Thor we got from Donny Cates.
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Right now, we’re in a Thor renaissance. Immortal Thor has been reminding people of Thor’s greatness, and Mortal Thor feels like it’s taking the character in all-new directions. However, the Cates era of Thor laid a lot of groundwork for what we’ve been seeing. Some people look at Cates’ Thor as the ultimate powerscaler Thor, but under the surface, there was so much more going on there. It took some old Thor ideas and changed them, taking classic concepts that we rarely thought about and recontextualizing them. There have been many versions of Thor, but I’ll go to my grave hyping up Cates’s unfortunately truncated run, and it still hurts that real life robbed us of its conclusion.
Donny Cates Set Up an Amazing Tale for Thor
So, right off the bat, Cates understood the scope that a Thor story needs. In his first story arc, titled “Herald of None”, Cates established a new threat for the Marvel Universe, the Black Winter (and destroyed the DC Multiverse), and had Thor join up with Galactus to gain the power to win. We also got a tease of what was to come, with Thanos waiting in the wings, holding Mjolnir, the Infinity Stones, and a black gauntlet of some kind. Thor started the story at one of his most powerful incarnations.
Odin had died and gone to Valhalla, making Thor the King of Asgard and the wielder of the Odinforce, and even that wasn’t enough to deal with the Black Winter, which is why he went to Galactus, gaining the Power Cosmic on top of all that. Thor was even able to kill Galactus at the end of “Herald of None”, which wasn’t something we’ve ever seen anyone else do. This was an insane Thor run, and the first story is seriously amazing. However, what I think really makes Cates’s run so great is the next story in his run, “Prey”. “Prey” went in a direction that no one ever thought about going before, and it has played a big role in the events of the end of Immortal Thor.
Donald Blake was a very important part of the Thor mythos. Odin sent Thor down to Earth and bonded him to Blake to teach him humility. Eventually, Blake and Thor would be separated, and the character disappeared until the Straczynski run, and then was gone again. However, Cates took the idea of Donald Blake and decided to take it in an entirely new direction. Donald Blake wasn’t actually a human who had always existed, but Odin had created him to be the body of Thor.
Blake eventually found out about this and went mad, targeting Thor and Asgard out of anger over his existence. “Prey” is the centerpiece of Cates’s run, and it excited me for what was coming next. “Prey” was nothing like any Thor story I’d read before, and it remains pretty unique in the pantheon of Thor comics. Blake became Thor’s dark mirror and even got his own hammer, and is now the Asgardian God of Lies, and played a big part in Thor’s resurrection at the end of Immortal Thor. On top of all of that, there are some amazing character moments in the book, and one of the coolest Iron Man/Thor scenes we’ve seen in years. Cates was willing to go in new directions with the Thor mythos, and this potential is one of my favorite things about the run. However, it only had potential, because Cates never got to finish his run on Thor.
Cates’ Thor Was Cut Short and We Lost Everything It Could Have Been
Donny Cates was becoming one of Marvel’s hottest writers when a tragic car accident shut it all down. Sadly, he was badly injured and lost whole sections of his memory, and his Thor run was cut short before he could even get to the big Thanos story at the end, robbing Marvel of one of its most beloved writers. I think that’s why Cates’s Thor doesn’t really get nearly as much credit for how good it was; we got a bunch of good stories meant to go somewhere interesting, but never got to get the story that we were promised.
I also think that the fact that Cates never got to finish the story helps explain why I love it so much. Endings can be a huge problem for many writers, and Cates wasn’t always able to stick the landing. He was building something with his run that could easily have gone to not-so great places. We got all the good memories of it without the reality of its ending, possibly disappointing us. Cates was building something special, and we’ll never know exactly what it could have been. However, we did get some excellent Thor stories and moments from it.
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