In 2018, Marvel Comics published “Death of the Mighty Thor,” a seven-issue arc that brought an end to Jane Foster’s tenure as the Goddess of Thunder — though not, happily, to her life. No, Jane stuck around, and that was a good thing because Thor needed all the allies he could get for what happened next: a cosmos-spanning conflict known as the War of the Realms, during which Jane was one of four Thors it took to put down Malekith the Accursed and his troll, elf, angel, and fire elemental armies.
What could this mean for the future of Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Let’s examine.
[Ed. note: This piece contains major spoilers for Thor: Love and Thunder, naturally.]
In 2018, Jane Foster died. In Mighty Thor #705, she saved the Norse pantheon from a foe no other god could defeat, and sacrificed her life in doing so, succumbing to the cancer ravaging her body. If you’ve seen Thor: Love and Thunder, you’ll know that that’s pretty much what happens in the movie as well.
But in the comics, one month later, in Mighty Thor #706, Jane Foster rose again.
Jane’s powers in the comics were quite similar to the movie — Mjolnir gave her the power of a god, but exacerbated her cancer. Love and Thunder is a bit vague on why, but the comics are specific: Every time Jane let go of Mjolnir, she was restored to her human self as-is. And “as-is” meant without chemotherapy drugs, but with her cancer, which, after all, was simply an outgrowth of her own biology. With every transformation, she was erasing any progress made by her treatments.
In “Death of the Mighty Thor,” Jane’s friends finally held an intervention and got her to agree to go through with her doctor’s advice and stop being a superhero so that she wouldn’t die.
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