Let's Talk About Thanos

Hi, I’m David Harth, and this week, we’re going in for some lighter fare. Well, I mean, relatively lighter fare. This week we’re going to talk about the Mad Titan, Thanos. I feel like Thanos is a villain that Marvel kind of screwed up a lot over the years, and I’m going to talk about why in this little diatribe. So, strap in, relax, and prepare to go on a journey with me.

It began in 1991.

I was at Kash n Karry, a grocery store chain that went out of business sometime in the early 2000s. This is in the days where the check-out lanes had comics, and as we were going through, a comic caught my eye- Infinity Gauntlet #4. It’s an awesome cover, with Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet gesturing at the reader, telling them to, “Come And Get Me.” It’s iconic and also the first time I saw a George Perez cover, so this was a great day. I picked it up and thumbed through it. My God. Just my God.

Even without reading it, seeing Thanos just waste everyone was amazing. I had to have it, but I don’t think I got it that day. That didn’t come til later. I finished up the rest of IG as it was coming out and then got the first three issues from the comic store in 1992. I was eleven. It was awesome.

Infinity Gauntlet became my favorite non-X-Men #1-3 or Wolverine #50 story. I read it all the time, eating buttery popcorn, something that kills my current collector self. I mean, do you have any idea how bad paper quality was in 1991? Terrible. There was me, with greasy fingers, reading these comics. God, I was dumb. All that said, I don’t have those copies anymore; like many of my ‘90s comics, my mom traded them to a drug dealer for some painkillers. That’s not a joke; we went to the same drug dealer, and I saw them at their house and identified them by the way they were worn. Back to the story.

So, Thanos was a big deal to me in those days. I kind of loved the ending to the story; that Thanos, after all of these years of trying to kill everything so a girl would like him, decided that he was going to retire and be done with it. Just live on a farm and do G shit. That was pretty great. He had done something terrible, learned not only that it was terrible but also that it was stupid, and was never going to do it again. Dude, character development is awesome.

Now, unbeknownst to me at the time, Jim Starlin wrote IG, and he was Thanos’s actual creator, and this story represented his next step in the story he wanted to tell about Thanos, which makes it even more special. He’d continue this story in Infinity War, where Thanos would be the one to actually learn about the Magus’s threat and warn Adam Warlock. He was the guy who started the whole thing. Thanos, who not a summer before had been trying to destroy everything, was the one who made sure the day got saved. It was awesome because, again, character development.

Starlin was transforming Thanos from the generic universe destroyer, and he’d keep going for the rest of his stint at Marvel, in Adam Warlock And The Infinity Watch, The Warlock Chronicles, Infinity Crusade, and The Mighty Thor. It was really cool that Starlin was making an effort to take a character that everyone saw as a monstrous villain and show him as something different. As I learned more about the history of Thanos that Starlin had laid out, this whole thing made sense.

So, Thanos 101, for those who don’t know.

Thanos is a Titanian Eternal, the son of the Mentor, and Sui-San, the leaders of that sect. He was born looking like a purple monster, and immediately, his mother hated him. That was the beginning of people hating Thanos for how he looked; pretty much every Eternal on Titan thought he was a monster and hated him. They mocked him, and that mockery molded him. He embraced nihilism and hatred, experimented on himself to become even more powerful, and became the Mad Titan we all know and love. In fact, Thanos’s love of Death, much maligned by MCU fans because what those movies did is so much better (oh, don’t worry, we’re going to get to that), is actually just the ultimate embracing of nihilism; nihilists believe in nothing and no one. Who else would a nihilist love, if not Death?

It’s such a great metaphor, and it’s one that a writer writing for younger readers like comic fans traditionally were at the time would use. As a kid, I didn’t get it, but now I do. That’s what makes it so much better. Thanos grew with me, and there were hidden depths to the character for me to discover. That’s why comics are so great, especially the older ones; so much was metaphor and subtext. I mean, go back and read Claremont Uncanny X-Men comics. He had to hide so much from Comic Code censors, and he did such a great job of it.

Anyway.

Starlin told the story he wanted with Thanos, and eventually, Thanos just kind of disappeared. Like, we had the memories and all that, but everyone just sort of left the character alone. When Starlin came back in the early 2000s, he brought Thanos back, and it was, well, okay. Like, he undid all of the character development he put into Thanos in the ‘90s. I read most of it, got bored, and was done with Thanos. Now, I was okay with it because it was Starlin doing it, regressing his character, but it wasn’t for me. I just kind of went a different way. The problem comes later.

The MCU and I have a very checkered relationship. Like, on the one hand, I find most of it entertaining, and I watch, at this point, mostly out of rote. That said, I’m less interested in some of the newer stuff because I don’t care that much about the characters, like Shang-Chi. In thirty years of comics reading, I’ve read three stories with Shang-Chi- an X-Men story where bone claw Wolverine punks him out in three or four panels, Hickman’s Avengers books, and… okay, the third one I’m drawing a blank. My point is I don’t care about him. I love the Eternals, but I feel like the MCU is going to butcher them, which is a good enough reason to watch that movie, just for the cringe factor of watching them ruin a beautiful concept. I feel like Stan Lee left it in his will to mess with the Eternals as one last F you to Jack Kirby. I am interested in Blade, but it had its release date canceled, possibly because Marvel can’t figure out how to make the African-American guy less important in the movie, so CCP censors will let it play in China.

I find the MCU formulaic and kind of unimpressive for the most part, and I honestly think its fans are the worst fans on the planet (something you’d know if you read last week’s column). That said, in 2012, when The Avengers came out, I hadn’t really developed my MCU cynicism yet. I was thrilled that Thanos was going to be in those movies. He was half the reason I kept coming back to them, even as things got way more formulaic. He started showing up in the comics again, this time in non-Starlin-written comics, and… well, he was so cliche. Like, he was the version of Thanos that everybody knew from IG, but not after that.

That’s my problem.

See, part of me can get down with it if Jim Starlin undoes all his character development. He finished one story with Thanos and started another one. That’s okay to me, especially since Marvel let him do it. Marvel, at least that iteration of Marvel, let him do what he wanted with that character and didn’t mess with it. That’s cool. Then, you get Quesada/Brevoort/Alonso era Marvel and things change. Thanos is back to being the cliche again, and everybody is allowed to use him if they can find a place for him. At first, it was just Annihilation books. Then Hickman got to use him. Then he got thrown in the beginning of Civil War II and got punked the F out. I mean, sure, he killed War Machine, which was terrible, and destroyed She-Hulk, but he got beat by some heroes that shouldn’t have had a chance against him. It was terrible.

He got his own book, and I never read it, but Jeff Lemire wrote it, so it’s probably awesome. Then, “Thanos Wins” happened, and I did read that because Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw are awesome, and I loved God Country. It’s a great story, and while it didn’t really say anything new about Thanos, it was just a lot of fun. I still felt weird about it, though. Marvel is known for milking things, and I got the feeling that they were milking Thanos, and that doesn’t sit well with me.

And, look, let’s be real, MCU Thanos is cool, but he’s also kind of terrible. Like, Josh Brolin killed it, but the whole “killing half of all life to save the universe” is dumb. I got into an argument on Reddit where someone brought up that Thanos told Silver Surfer, in the IG tie-in issues of Surfer’s book, that he was doing it because Death says that there are too many living and that there needs to be a balance or something, but that’s different than the faux profundity of the movies. Comic Thanos wasn’t doing it to save the universe. He had no illusions about his altruism like movie Thanos did. He just wanted the woman he loved to love him back because his life sucked. The MCU wanted to make Thanos sympathetic in a way because he was literally the main character of Infinity War, and making him a nihilist who believed in nothing wasn’t going to fly with their audience. This is an audience so stupid that they sympathized with Thanos, the guy who was trying to kill half the universe.

Also, as an aside, have you ever noticed that while the MCU tries to get that woke street cred, the stories are basically the most anti-left, limousine liberal BS ever? Like, Thanos believes the only way to save the universe from using up all the resources is to kill half of everyone. It subtly reinforces the conservative argument that anyone who wants to conserve nature and resources is secretly some kind of monster who is going to take away the lives of many. And don’t even get me started on The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, which I mostly love, where you have an entire subplot about how bad racism is but Cap tells everyone they should work within the system to make things better, ya know, the same system that kills BIPOC and members of the LGBTQIA+ community in massive numbers, disenfranchises them, and basically does terrible things to everyone who isn’t white and rich. Yeah, work with those people. I’ll be honest, the Flag Smashers are the most morally pure people in the show because they’re just about bunch of poor folks who want to be allowed to move around and work, get the best value for their labor to use the capitalist parlance, and they get labeled the bad guy because they had the audacity to fight back.

Seriously y’all, that show is so messed up.

Thanos in the MCU is just kind of infuriating in a lot of ways because they went for faux profundity, but Thanos is profound on his own. He’s a person who was treated terribly by members of his family and his people and became the monster they believed he was. He fell in love with Death because all he believed in was emptiness, and Death is the ultimate emptiness. That’s profound. That says something about what society can do to someone. Thanos’s actions are his own fault, sure, but all of those same actions can be laid at the feet of the people who brutalized him mentally and physically as a child. Thanos’s story is about society failing a child and that child taking his pain out on society. That’s a way more interesting story than we got, but the MCU isn’t going to tell that story because it’s not some rah-rah BS about how great following the rules is.

So, where am I going with all of this? I think I just got there. See, this isn’t like the other articles. I literally just wanted to talk about Thanos for a little but. Thanos is one of my favorite Marvel villains because he’s such a fascinating character. For people who just know him from the last few years, your view of Thanos is so limited. Go out and get Infinity War. It’s excellent; I’m pretty sure it’s in print, and you’ll see a new side of Thanos. Go hunt down those other ‘90s Starlin Marvel books. Hell, if you can, find some old ‘70s Starlin and read those. Starlin is amazing. If you only know Thanos from the MCU, go out and read some Thanos comics. He’s such a great character, and the version you know about is bargain basement compared to the comic version. I want people to love Thanos like I do. He’s amazing and has so many more layers than just a powerful villain who kills everyone.

Anyways, that’s all for this week. I hope everyone is enjoying our little weekly column. Follow me on Twitter and come on back. I think next week, I’m going to write about realism in comics and why it’s kind of BS.