STORM

Thor is not the only Marvel hero who has carried an enchanted thunder hammer out of Asgard. In X-Men Annual #9 (1985), by Chris Claremont and Arthur Adams, Loki has the dwarf smith Eitri forge a second uru hammer, Stormcaster, and presents it to a Storm whose mutant weather powers had been stripped away. The moment Ororo takes it up she is transformed — Asgardian armor, a winged helm, and the thunder and lightning that used to answer her own mutant gift now answering the hammer instead.

The gift was never generosity. Loki wanted a goddess of thunder in his debt and a weapon aimed, eventually, at his brother — Ororo was being recruited as a beautifully dressed act of sibling sabotage. She used Stormcaster's power in the fighting against Hela's forces, felt exactly how good borrowed godhood feels, and then did the thing Loki's plans never budget for: she recognised the hook inside the present and rejected the hammer, choosing a powerless mortal life with the X-Men over a throne built by the god of lies.

Stormcaster refused to stay rejected. Decades later, in X-Men Gold #25 (2018), the hammer — believed destroyed years earlier — flew back to Ororo's hand in a moment of crisis, and she took up the Asgardian mantle a second time before laying it down again. Plenty of heroes have lifted Mjolnir for a panel or two; Ororo Munroe is the rare case of a hero Asgard tried to issue a hammer of her very own, twice.