Jane Foster

Every Missing Thor Omnibus, Mapped | 13th Annual Tigereyes Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Poll

April 18, 2025 by krisis Leave a Comment

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for Marvel Omnibus fans – time for the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 13th Annual Secret Ballot! This post explains every Asgard & Thor omnibus that does NOT exist – all of which will appear as options on the 2025 poll.

For the next two weeks, I’ll be covering Marvel’s entire publishing history by mapping missing omnibus volumes to fill in every gap in your Marvel oversize shelf! That’s all leading to the kickoff of the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 13th Annual Secret Ballot on Near Mint Condition on April 28, 2025.

We’re getting a major Thor omnibus later this year – The Mighty Thor Vol. 5 from his classic line! That brings us just two volumes away from a continuous oversize shelf that reaches Walt Simonson’s material. Meanwhile, 2024 brought us two modern Thor omnibuses in Thor by Straczynski & Gillen and Thor by Cates & Klein – which mean we now also have continuous coverage of Thor from 1998 to 2023!

That makes Thor perhaps Marvel’s most well-collected major character out of all of its Silver Age heavyweights. What’s left to collect? A handful of classic volumes we can safely map, the 90s, and many Asgardian supporting characters… but not Loki, who has now been covered quite comprehensively in oversize format!

If you’re not sure of what to vote for, stick around for a list of books vetted by a gang of the biggest mapping nerds on the internet with explanations from yours truly – keeper of the most-definitive guides to Marvel’s collected editions on the planet.

Or, if you don’t care about omnibuses, just use this post to learn about Marvel’s history and find some great comics to read!

Captain America, Iron Man, & Thor Omnibus Mapping for the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 12th Annual Secret Ballot

March 29, 2024 by krisis

Until April 5, I’ll be loosely mapping missing and most-wanted Marvel omnibus volumes every day! Today I’ll be looking at all of the omnibuses that don’t yet exist for Marvel’s holy trinity of Avengers – Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor (including other Asgardian heroes).

This post explains titles and potential Captain America, Thor, & Iron Man Omnibus Mapping for entries on the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 12th Annual Secret Ballot. You can vote right now (until 5 April 2024 @ midnight US ET) or watch our mega-length announcement stream reviewing every single voting option.

All three of Marvel’s trinity of prime Avengers have had their own multiple-installment movie franchises, which means they uncoincidentally have some of the best omnibus coverage of every Marvel solo hero (except for Moon Knight!). But, each of these characters still need more than a handful of additional omnibuses to cover their entire comic lines from their debut to present day. Plus, we’ll look at a quintet of supporting Asgardian heroes – Beta Ray Bill, Thunderstrike, Valkyrie, Jane Foster, and Angela.

If you’re not sure of what to vote for, stick around for my explanations. Or, if you’ve already voted, learn why the team behind the poll decided on these books and titles – including some of my mistakes and regrets as one of the editors of the options on the final poll.

Or… just find some great comics to read!

Remember: These mappings are just my suggestion of how Marvel could assemble these books. They are meant to help you decide on your votes and build your personal reading list, but your vote on the poll is NOT an endorsement of my specific map. It’s a vote in favor of Marvel creating a book with that title or covering that period.

Over-the-top comics posts like this one are made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis. For less than the cost of a single comic issue a month you can fuel my in-depth comics coverage, plus gain access to dozens of exclusive collecting guides & reading orders – including all of the Crushing Comics Guide to Marvel Comics.

Guide to Jane Foster, Mighty Thor & Valkyrie – now available to the public!

July 3, 2022 by krisis

I’m happy to announce that my Guide to Jane Foster – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie is now available to all CK readers to help them get ready for Thor: Love & Thunder thanks to the ongoing support of the Mighty Patrons of Crushing Krisis.

Guide to Jane Foster – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie

Check out my original guide announcement for CK Patrons for an entire essay on what I learned from researching my Guide to Jane Foster!

This guide isn’t just a walkthrough of Jane’s time as The Mighty Thor from 2014 to 2019. It’s a reading order for every Jane Foster issue, ever. That includes a full issue-by-issue recap of all of her more than 180 appearances before becoming a hero, a full collecting guide to her time as The Mighty Thor, plus coverage of her current heroic mantle of Valkyrie.

Jane makes 198 primary appearances in her own titles or in Thor titles, plus her time as a team member in Avengers, and many guest appearances from the 1960s through the present day. If you’re just interested in the core of Jane Foster, I’ve got that covered in a “Greatest Hits” section that distills 40 years of continuity down to just 18 key appearances as a civilian prior to her time as The Mighty Thor in 2014.

Finally, if you’re after only Jane’s time as a superhero, Marvel has that covered in a pair of newly-released paperbacks:

Jane Foster: The Saga of the Mighty Thor (2022 paperback, IBSN 978-1302934873 / digital)
Collects Thor (2014) #1-8 & Annual 1 (2nd story); Mighty Thor (2015) #1-5, 8-11, 13-14, and Generations: Unworthy Thor and Mighty Thor (2017) #1. This collects all of the introduction and build-up of Jane’s story, but the climax and transformation is in the next volume.

Jane Foster: The Saga of Valkyrie (2022 paperback, ISBN 978-1302934828 / digital)
Collects Mighty Thor (2015) #702-706, material from Mighty Thor: At the Gates of Valhalla (2018) #1 and War of the Realms: Omega (2019) #1, and Valkyrie: Jane Foster (2019) #1-10. This won’t read as well as a standalone as it does with the build-up from the “Saga of the Mighty Thor” volume, but it is fantastic material!

Marvel’s Valkyrie – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Jane Foster, Mighty Thor & Valkyrie – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Doctor Jane Foster comic books as herself, The Mighty Thor, and Valkyrie in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated October 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

Jane Foster spent 50 years as a minor supporting character before becoming a full-time superhero, but being minor didn’t make her unremarkable.

(Note: This summary and guide contains major spoilers for Jane Foster and for Thor, due to the way their plots relate! If you want a quick, non-spoiler reading list, skip down to the Greatest Hits section.)

Foster was introduced in Thor’s second issue, Journey Into Mystery (1956) #84, as the attending nurse at the private practice of Thor’s human alter-ego, Dr. Donald Blake.

For a woman in Marvel’s Silver Age, nurse Jane Foster is often particularly assertive – especially compared to Marvel contemporaries like Jean Grey and the Invisible Girl. While this established Foster as her own character and an opinionated medical professional, her assertiveness often came at the cost of belittling or patronizing Dr. Blake for being disabled

Jane Foster’s period as Thor’s romantic interest is much more short-lived than you might realize – she is written out of his ongoing comic in January 1967 after a negative first encounter with Odin, less than five years after her debut! In fact, many of her memories of her time with Thor are erased.

It would be almost a decade before her return, in which Jane Foster becomes inextricably tied to Thor’s ongoing Asgardian love interest, Sif. However, this run isn’t as long as it looks on paper – Jane spends the first few issues of it comatose, and she is hardly seen or referenced after Thor (1966) #250 in 1976!

When Foster finally does make an on-panel return in 1983, it’s to be swiftly married off and shuffled off the page save for occasional recaps of her relationship. She next turns up in 1994 towards the close of the first volume of Thor, separated from her husband, caring for her son, and embroiled in a caper involving the High Evolutionary’s AniMutants.

Starting in 1998, author Dan Jurgens casts Jane in a new role – Doctor Jane Foster. There’s no on-page explanation given for when, why, or how Foster completed medical school. The change allows her to drive an ongoing subplot with Thor’s new Earthly alter-ego, as well as make appearances in Iron Man and Avengers as “token medical expert.” There are passing mentions of her husband and son, but they don’t appear.

J. Michael Straczynski and Matt Fraction bring Dr. Foster back as a key player in Thor’s adventures from 2006 to 2011, again relying on her expertise as a doctor to insert her into their subplots.

However, it is Jason Aaron that would bring Jane Foster her most memorable plot and her superheroic turn. She begins as a supporting player in Aaron’s Thor: God of Thunder, revealing to Thor that she has cancer with an uncertain prognosis. As one of several woman supporting characters in the run, she is a prime suspect as the secret identity behind the new female Mighty Thor that debuts in the final pages of God of Thunder and continues to her own Thor (2014) series.

Jason Aaron’s story for Jane and for the new Thor is complex and satisfying as it stretches across multiple series from 2014 to 2018, giving Jane Foster her first true arc as a character as drawn by industry super-star Russel Dauterman. It’s one of Marvel’s true evergreen masterworks of narrative of the 2010s. By the finale, it seems like Foster’s story is complete and completely resolved… but, Aaron and co-writer Al Ewing had more plans for her following Aaron’s Thor finale in War of the Realms, which spun Jane Foster into a new status quo as a Valkyrie!

Jane Foster makes nearly 200 appearances before she transforms into the Mighty Thor, but are any of them worth reading? I did all of the homework so you don’t have to! I read every single Jane Foster appearance, ever for this guide so I could summarize her pre-Mjolnir greatest hits for you as well as give you a summary of her action in every appearance.

Whether you want to read every appearance like I did or just get the summary so you can dive into her time as a superhero, this guide has you covered. [Read more…] about Jane Foster, Mighty Thor & Valkyrie – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order