Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and sixty-fourth week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
Click here for Part 1 of this week’s legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week’s legends.
COMIC LEGEND:
There is a panel of a paramedic picking up Thor’s hammer.
STATUS:
False
In this week’s episode of The X-Files, there was a very funny episode about the concept of the Mandela Effect (or the Mengele Effect in the episode itself, which suggests that people forgot that the Mandela Effect was really the Mengele Effect).
From the website, Know Your Meme, here is a definition of the Mandela Effect…
The Mandela Effect refers to a phenomenon in which a large number of people share false memories of past events, referred to as confabulation in psychiatry. Some have speculated that the memories are caused by parallel universes spilling into our own, while others explain the phenomenon as a failure of collective memory.
In the world of comic book fandom, probably the most famous example is a panel people insist that they’ve seen of a paramedic picking up Thor’s hammer. The panel became a major issue when people online were arguing (shocker, I know) about who was better, Thor or Superman, and people kept referencing that panel to show that picking up the hammer wasn’t that big of deal.
Anyhow, the panel doesn’t exist.
However, the closest I’ve seen to something that would at least explain why people would THINK that it is existed would be in Dan Jurgens and Andy Kubert’s run on Thor. In Thor #34, Thor is fighting Gladiator and is separated from his hammer and is then punched to Earth, where he turns into his alter ego at the time, which was paramedic Jake Olson…
The next issue, Jake’s partner, Christine Collins, appears to pick up the hammer, but in reality, she uses Jake’s own hands to pick up and hit the hammer, thus transforming him back into Thor.
But it sort of looks like she is picking it up. However, Christine Collins was actually the Enchantress in disguise anyways, so she wasn’t really a paramedic.
Anyhow, that’s the likely source of a panel that does not exist.
Another possibility is a bit where Eric Masterson picked up Thor’s hammer before Thor merged with him…
Yet another possibility is this moment in DC vs. Marvel #4, where Wonder Woman picks up the hammer and gives it to Thor…
It is sometimes cropped like this…
So yeah, it is not a real thing. Never happened. I am sorry to dash some dreams here.
Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed – Did the Wachowskis risk their entire initial budget for the Matrix on just the opening scene to get Warner Bros. to fund a bigger budget?
OK, that’s it for this week!
Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week’s covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!
Here’s my most recent book, Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? The cover is by Kevin Hopgood (the fellow who designed War Machine’s armor).
If you want to order a copy, ordering it here gives me a referral fee.
Follow Comics Should Be Good on Twitter and on Facebook (also, feel free to share Comic Book Legends Revealed on our Facebook page!). Not only will you get updates when new blog posts show up on both Twitter and Facebook, but you’ll get some original content from me, as well!
Here’s my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. — half of them are re-worked classic legends I’ve featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).
The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it…
If you’d like to order it, you can use the following code if you’d like to send me a bit of a referral fee…
Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed
See you all next week!