When Thor Learned That He Had a Sister, and There Was a Tenth Norse Realm

Summary

Retconning Angela into the Marvel Universe happened through a complex web of time travel and revelations about her Asgardian origins.
Legal disputes over ownership led to Neil Gaiman gaining full control of Angela, who later became a prominent Marvel character.
Her journey from being raised to hate Thor as a sister to eventually accepting her Asgardian heritage and being part of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

“Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” is a feature spotlighting notable examples of retcons that don’t fit into the framework of Abandoned an’ Forsaked, which is specifically about stories that outright “overturn” older stories. There are many examples of “retroactive continuity” that do not actively abandon the works of the past (especially cases where the overall continuity was rebooted). Some of them are minor, some of them are major. Today, we look at how Angela and her heavenly world was retconned into the Marvel Universe.

In early 1993, Todd McFarlane did a novel gimmick with his best-selling independent comic book series, Spawn. He brought in four of the most acclaimed writers of the era (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim and Frank Miller) to write an issue of the series. In Gaiman’s issue, we met a bounty hunter named Angela, an angel who was hunting down the hellspawn known as Spawn…

We see her killing a Medieval Spawn early in the issue…

Angela became a longstanding member of the supporting cast of Spawn. However, there was a legal dispute over ownership of Angela, with McFarlane later claiming that the character was created as a “work-for-hire” character, and thus owned by McFarlane. Gaiman filed suit in 2002, and won a judgment, and eventually, he and McFarlane settled in 2012, with Gaiman gaining full ownership of Angela. Since he didn’t have anything in mind for the character, he worked out a deal with Marvel with them acquiring the rights to the character. So how did she get retconned into the Marvel Universe?

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How was Angela introduced into the Marvel Universe?

The Age of Ultron crossover was based on the idea that Ultron traveled back in time from a point in the future to a point in the near-past, where Ultron took over the world, thereby altering the present as a result (and since Ultron himself wasn’t even in the present at the time, it was difficult to defeat him). So the whole world was ruled by Ultron, and things were bad for humanity. Wolverine eventually came up with an idea. He and Invisible Woman, two of the few heroes left on Earth, traveled back in time to before Hank Pym built Ultron. Wolverine’s plan was to just kill Hank Pym to avoid Ultron ever being built. The problem, of course, is that killing Hank Pym caused an even WORSE present day, since Hank Pym had helped save the universe a few times over the years, so removing him caused even MORE problems.

So Wolverine then went back in time to keep his past self from killing Hank Pym. Instead, Hank Pym just put in a back-up code that stopped Ultron instead. However, Wolverine going back in time and making so many changes weakened the Multiverse, and so things started to “leak through” reality.

In the final issue of Age of Ultron (by Brian Michael Bendis and this scene was drawn by Joe Quesada), we see a mysterious being has been “released”…

And it turns out that it is Angela, who notes that she has been brought here against her will…

Angela is now part of the Marvel Universe

Obviously, her being added to the Marvel Universe was one thing, but HOW?

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What was Angela’s connection to Asgard?

During the crossover, Original Sin, the eye of the murdered Watcher was used to reveal hidden secrets to the various heroes of the Marvel Universe, and Thor’s revelation was that he had a sister (revealed in Original Sin #5.1 by Jason Aaron, Al Ewing, Lee Garbett and Nolan Woodard)…

He rushed to Asgard to confront his mother, and the other Asgardians, who scoff at his accusations that there is a TENTH ream in Asgard (Asgard was famously part of the Nine Realms, with Earth/Midgard being one of the realms), but Thor pushes the issue, especially since he accuses his mother of hiding the fact that he has a sister…

Freyja reveals that there WAS a Tenth Realm, called Heven, which was made up of Angelic-like beings,who went to war with Asgard, and the battle was pitched…

However, the Queen of the Angels had kidnapped Thor and Freyja’s youngest child, a daughter, and seemingly murdered her in front of Odin and Freyja….

This led to Odin deciding to cut off all access to the Tenth Realm, and wiping out everyone’s memory of the existence of the Tenth Realm from the rest of Asgard, and Freyja kept it quiet because she, of course, was sad about the death of her daughter, so she didn’t see any reason to tell anyone about it…

Thor turns to Loki, and the two of them traveled beyond reality to discover the Tenth Realm, where they fight against the angels…

Angela, meanwhile, after being pulled from Heven into the regular Marvel Universe (this, of course, was almost certainly a retcon in and of itself, as I doubt they knew what Angela’s new Marvel Universe origin was going to be when she was introduced in Age of Ultron #10), had met the Guardians of the Galaxy, and become a member of that team while searching for a way back home.

She managed to make her way back in Original Sin #5.2 (by Aaron, Ewing and Simone Bianchi), where she confronts Thor (who she, of course, had been raised to hate her whole life)…

So they fight for a bunch of issues (as Thor doesn’t know Angela is his sister, of course), but in the end, Odin arrives, and reveals to everyone that Angela IS, in fact, his daughter…