What had never been revealed before, however, was that this was evidently the same cab driver from Thor #129, as suggested by the strip's reference!
It's also a seemingly rare digression (in recent years) from any writer to pull out continuity nods like that. (The strip was still credited to Stan Lee, but Roy Thomas had been ghost-writing most, if not all, of it for about fifteen years by then.) While they did it pretty regularly back in the 1960s, the writing he's done on the newspaper strip -- while sometimes dated and stilted -- has rarely referred back at his own career like this. It's a different medium with an audience that isn't as attuned to long-term continuity as you find with comic books. It's also a pretty rare nod to continuity in the Marvel Universe overall any more. While some fans complain that there's no respecting a character's rich history, others cite decades of continuity as an albatross around their collective neck. So editorially, anything much further back than the previous storyline has largely been glossed over at most or, more frequently, completely ignored. The throwback in that particular strip is very much an anomoly, but it's a curious instance of contrasting previous storytelling norms against current ones.
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