Starlin's Thanos Part II

Marvel was expanding rapidly in the early 1970s and brought in a bunch of young talent. Jim Starlin was one of these. He joined Marvel in 1972. One of his first assignments was three issues of Iron Man. He already had a stable of characters created along with a plot arc. He used his time on Iron Man to introduce them.

The issue began with a call for help from Drax, the Destroyer. At the time he was normal size and intelligence. He had been captured after a battle with Thanos and needed Iron Man. Iron Man assumed that he needed to use his repulsor rays on Drax's restraints. That failed and the backlash knocked him off his feet. Our first glimpse of Thanos was his foot stomping Iron Man's hand with pieces flying off. Obviously he was a force to be reckoned with.

Our first full view of him showed a massive, stone-faced being with a hooded woman at his side. He referred to "having death at my side".

There were numerous similarities between Thanos and Jack Kirby's Darkseid besides the physical similarities. According to Roy Thomas, Starlin was originally going to make Thanos look like Metron, another of Kirby's New Gods but Thomas suggested Darksied himself. When Thanos returned in the 1990s, he spent a while using a floating chair like Metron's.

Kirby's characters were gods living on a city, floating above a ruined planet. Starlin's were Titans, living on Saturn's moon, Titan. Darkseid was after the Anti-Life Equation. Thanos was in love with the physical personification of Death. At one point, Thanos's father referred to him as being attracted to the dark side (a possible Darkseid).

While there were lots of similarities to Kirby's Fourth World, Starlin did quite a bit of world-building on his own. He already had a whole back-story for the characters. Thanos was son to Mentor, the leader of the Titans. Thanos had a brother, Eros. All of these are Greek concepts - mind, love, and death. Thanos had become enamored with Death years (possibly decades, the continuity was spotty) before. He had attracted an army of followers.

On one scouting run his spaceship was seen by a family returning from an Elvis concert. Thanos ordered the family killed. Their daughter survived and was raised in martial arts and telepathy, later becoming known as Moondragon. The father's soul was intercepted and given a powerful new body, becoming Drax.

Anyway, it eventually turned out that Drax only needed Iron Man's armor as a focusing point for an energy beam from Titan. After that, Thanos, Drax and company moved on.

Now it's time for another digression - Captain Marvel.

The Golden Age Captain Marvel was a newsboy who could say a magic word and become a Superman clone. DC comics spent years suing over the similarities and ended up with the rights to this character when the Golden Age ended and super hero comics weren't worth the court costs. DC didn't do anything with the character and let the trademark lapse. Another company introduced an android named Captain Marvel in the Silver age but that only lasted a couple of issues.

After the trademark lapsed again, Marvel comics introduced their own Captain Marvel. This was was a captain named Mar-Vell, an alien in the Kree milirary, sent to spy on Earth after the Fantastic Four defeated one of the Kree's sentinels and Ronan the Accuser (the guy from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie). 

Mar-Vell wore a white and green uniform that had built-in rockets and a "unibeam". Coming from a larger world, he was stronger than humans. Mar-Vell was part of a love triangle with the captain and medical officer. The comic was not very successful and after a few years they changed it completely. His girl-friend and commanding officer were killed, he was given a new red and black costume and a new set of powers. The idea was to bring him closer to the Golden Age Captain Marvel so Mar-Vell was trapped in the Negative Zone and could only be released for an hour by switching places with Rick Jones, Stan Lee's answer to annoying teen side-kicks. The revised Captain Marvel didn't last long but was brought back fairly quickly. This is the version that Starlin took over for.

Starlin managed to work both Rick Jones and Mar-Vell into the story arc. Thanos needed Rick Jones and Mar-Vell had been selected for enlightenment by a cosmic entity. As a lead-in to this, Mar-Vell was characterized as stubborn and too quick to react. This got him through some fights but after the Controller dropped a house on him, he was spirited away and given Cosmic Awareness.

Even this wasn't enough to stop Thanos. Years earlier, Rick Jones had been stimulated by the Kree Supreme Intelligence to stop a war with the alien Skrulls. As a backup measure, the Supreme Intelligence had placed the location of the Cosmic Cube in Rick's brain. Thanos's grand plan began with recovering the Cube since it had nearly unlimited power. Thanos managed to find the cube and transferred all of its power to himself making him a god.

Thanos seemed unbeatable but Mar-Vell's Cosmic Awareness let him realize that Thanos was still drawing power from the Cube. Mar-Vell managed to destroy it (or at least cut Thanos off from it), defeating the mad god.

Starlin did a couple of more issues of Captain Marvel before moving over to a different comic, Warlock. And that's a good time to end this entry.