r/YourComicBooks

JIM #109, #115, #116, #119, #121, #122 + Thor #133, #164.

The highlights: JIM #109 is Kirby drawing Magneto against Thor — one of the earliest cross-title villain appearances in Marvel. Thor #133 is the first Ego the Living Planet, one of Kirby’s wildest cosmic concepts (a face in a planet, years before anyone else would try something that unhinged). And #164 wraps the Pluto/Netherworld arc with Kirby pushing his collage technique hard.

The JIM run (#115–122) fills in a chunk of the Trial of the Gods / Destroyer / Absorbing Man era — peak Lee/Kirby Thor before the title changeover. All reader copies, all getting cracked and read.
Archive sits at ~430 objects across 15 publishers. Thor coverage now spans from JIM #109 (October ’64) through Thor #169

Last DD I needed aside from #2 & 5 for 1-25 then have gaps from there to 200 but have a lot of em. Newer books are reads.

I'm curious how these books arrived in the mail in the 70's & 80's. Were they bent up?

First appearance of the Space Phantom — and the issue where Hulk quits the team, setting up his replacement by Cap in issue #4. Only the second issue and Kirby’s already reshuffling the roster, establishing that the Avengers lineup is volatile by design rather than fixed like the FF.

The Space Phantom’s body-snatching concept is pure Kirby sci-fi horror — an alien who duplicates you and sends the original to Limbo. Simple, creepy, effective. What’s easy to miss is that this is also an early template for the “enemy within” plot structure that becomes a Marvel staple.

Kurt Busiek pulled off one of the better deep-cut retcons with this character in Avengers Forever (1998-2000, with Carlos Pacheco). He revealed the Space Phantom wasn’t a single villain but one of many — inhabitants of Limbo transformed and deployed by Immortus as agents across time.

It retroactively connected the throwaway shapeshifter from issue #2 to the entire Kang/Immortus time-war mythology, giving a one-off monster real structural weight in Marvel continuity. One of the cleanest examples of a later writer honoring early Kirby material by building on it rather than overwriting it.