THOR

For decades the story of Mjolnir stopped at the forge: dwarves, Uru metal, Odin's enchantments. The Mighty Thor Vol. 2 #12 (2016) added the chapter the forge story left out. Long before there was a hammer, a sentient superstorm called the God Tempest — the Mother of Thunder, a cosmic tempest the size of a galaxy — came for Asgard, and Odin fought it for days without defeating it. What he finally managed was containment: he trapped the weakened storm inside a gift of raw Uru the dwarves of Nidavellir had given him, and only then ordered the metal forged into a weapon.

The prisoner let its opinion be known immediately. When Odin first tried to wield the finished hammer, it refused to be tamed, dragged him around the galaxy and hurled him back to Asgard. His famous response reads differently once you know there is something alive inside: the worthiness enchantment was crowd control for a caged storm, a lock meant to keep the weapon — and what it held — out of the wrong hands for untold ages, until a worthy bearer finally picked it up.

That hidden tenant also explains the hammer's strangest modern behavior. In Jane Foster's hands Mjolnir moved with a will of its own, at one point even taking her form to help her, because the storm within it was awake and choosing. Thor spent centuries carrying a weapon he thought was a tool. It was a cell with a handle — and every crack of thunder since has been the sound of the prisoner, still on speaking terms with the sky.