This was a promo poster to announce Walt Simonson took over Mighty Thor. He started his run off with

This was a promo poster to announce Walt Simonson took over Mighty Thor. He started his run off with maybe the most attention grabbing Marvel comic of all time up to that point. What if…someoneelse grabbed the hammer of Thor and could lift it? That sounds basic today but it never, ever occurred to anyone else before. By having an alien become Thor, and reducing Thor to nothing, all in one issue…amazing. What chip Simonson had!

What’s really funny to me is that we remember Walt Simonson’s Mighty Thor as this epoch-making event, but nobody remembers the guy Walt replaced. The guy before Simonson was Alan Zelenetz, who at one point, was viewed by the comics fandom as a whole as being in the company of guys like Frank Miller and Alan Moore. There was a Comics Journal article from 1982 called “The Three Men Who Will Change Mainstream Comics: Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Alan Zelenetz.” 

To be fair, some interesting things did happen in Zelenetz’s Thor’s run: he brought back Jane Foster, who’d been almost entirely forgotten since the Lee/Kirby days, and after an attack by Dracula, had her merge with Lady Sif. If I was going for a no-prize again, I’d say the lingering effects of this merger, though eventually undone, were the reason Jane Foster could lift the Hammer of Thor later on when it was specifically stated she was UN-worthy during her encounter with the Nameless. 

I have a fascination with Alan Zelenetz for this reason. Nowadays he’s best known as the guy who Walt Simonson replaced on Thor, or maybe for the absolutely amazing Alan Legion. But he never quite lived up to this hype.