THOR

Every god needs a mortal weakness, and Thor’s was a limp. When the Thunder God debuted in Journey into Mystery #83 (August 1962), readers met him as Dr. Donald Blake — a lame American physician vacationing in Norway who ducked into a cave to escape alien invaders, found a gnarled walking stick, and struck it against a rock to become the storm incarnate. For years, the strip played it straight: a real man, trading places with a god.

Then Thor #159 (December 1968) pulled the floor out. Recounting the exile, Odin revealed that Donald Blake had never been born at all. He was a magical construct — a fabricated man with fabricated memories, conjured by the All-Father so his banished, arrogant son could live humbled on Earth: mortal, mortal-injured, and dependent on a cane that was secretly Mjolnir in disguise. Blake had no childhood, no past, no existence before Odin willed one for him.

The construct eventually outgrew the lesson. When the Blake enchantment was transferred to Beta Ray Bill in Thor #337 (1983), Donald Blake simply ceased to exist — yet later stories kept resurrecting him as a separate, self-aware man, and later retcons muddied the water further, claiming Blake was patterned on a real medical student named Keith Kincaid, or that a “real” Blake waited in stasis while yet another construct walked the Earth. The one fixed point never moved: the Donald Blake of 1962 was nobody at all.