M003--Thor

Thor
Real Name: Thor Odinson
First Appearance: Journey Into Mystery #83 (August 1962)

In the eighties there was a man known as Donald Blake working at a joint government/university think tank in upstate New York known as Project PEGASUS.  Blake worked alongside a fellow physicist Jane Foster with whom he had developed a relationship with.  But Jane Foster developed terminal breast cancer while working on their project, and on her death bed Blake revealed the truth about himself to her, something no one else had ever known--Blake was in actuality a being from another world known as Asgard, where he was the eldest son of Odin, the Asgardian king.  His real name was Thor Odinson, and he was a mighty warrior who wielded a special hammer forged in the heart of a dying star that allowed him to control lightning and thunder as if he was a god.  But, over a century ago by Earth's reckoning, Thor was banished from Asgard, stripped of his strength, and separated from his hammer, Mjolnir, of which he was no longer worthy.  He spent the next century wandering the world, taking new identities as the decades passed, vainly searching for a way back to his home world, his accrued knowledge eventually leading him to Project PEGASUS where he had hoped to open a wormhole to Asgard.  But his search was fruitless, he found no return, he had only found love, which was going to be soon taken from him.  Donald Blake disappeared that day.

Fast forward to modern times and people all around the world tell the tale of a man who wields the thunder itself in his hands, saving those he can but always disappearing before anyone can properly thank him.  But SHIELD, beginning their Avengers Initiative, manage to track him down as they had connected the dots in the story, as Jane Foster had also disappeared when Donald Blake had gone missing.  When pressed for his story the man calling himself Thor states that Jane Foster had gone with him to Asgard, and he would say nothing more on the matter, nor why he had returned to Earth.  Thor accepted the offer to join the Avengers Initiative, not knowing that SHIELD partially did it to keep an eye on him.

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See, told you I had a few more to upload today.  Regarding SHIELD keeping an eye on him, they don't really trust his story to be true, but of course it all is, they just don't know it when the Avengers are first forming.  But I kinda wanted his backstory to be sort of mythic seeming, so the *exact* nature of how his hammer came back to him and such is intentionally left a mystery.

Design wise you can see he's pretty heavily based on Ultimate Thor, with some elements taken from his mainstream comic designs, like his boots and his armor on his arms, as well as his hammer of course.  He was kind of an important character to design as he sorta defines Asgardian fashion going forward, which I decided to make more "comic book-esque" compared to my more grounded designs with a quasi-sci fi angle.