10 Characters Who Have Lifted Thor's Hammer

8. Jane Foster

Jane Foster Thor
Marvel Comics

If it hasn't been made abundantly clear already, Jason Aaron's run on Mighty Thor is bound to go down as one of the all-time greats of the medium. The writer's marshalled the experiences of the Odinson effortlessly for years now, but while that particular Thor has come to dominate large parts of Aaron's run, it is another that captured the hearts of the character's most ardent fans.

Beginning in the immediate aftermath of 2014's Original Sin, a storyline that rendered the original God of Thunder 'unworthy' of the title, Aaron introduced Jane Foster as Mjolnir's new owner, sparking a key shift in the character's history and galvanising the franchise for a whole new generation of readers in doing so.

Jane was everything a modern god had to be: confident, self-assured, boisterous and proficient in both physical and verbal warfare. More important, however, was how she made readers forget all about the original Odinson, who only served a peripheral role in the comics until his recent return as a newer, 'Unworthy' Thor.

Her time might soon be up, but Jane has to be the worthiest character to have wielded Mjolnir - at least since the Odinson first did in 1962.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.