Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving

Ok, Thanksgiving was weeks ago. But it will come again and so will the accusation that it's racist, mainly because of this image showing Franklin, the only black character, sitting by himself.

First, lets put things in context. This cartoon was made in the 60s when cartoon characters in other strips were either white or embarrassing stereotypes. Franklin was written as just another kid. That was a big thing then. Including black characters was revolutionary and having one who doesn't make us cringe decades later is unique. Instead of condemning this as racist, let's give it credit for fighting racism. If the creators where actually racists then they wouldn't have included Franklin in the first place.

That said, there are reasons Franklin was seated where he was. Things look so lopsided because the Brown family (Charlie Brown, his sister and his dog) all sat together plus Peppermint Patty who had a crush on Charlie Brown. The singles, Linus, Franklin and Marcie all sat by themselves. If Marcie and Franklin's positions were switched, people would still be claiming racism. The impression of Franklin sitting by himself is plot-driven - they needed a table that was long enough for the Browns and Peppermint Patty to sit together.

But racism is often a matter of perspective. Look at this shot.

Franklin doesn't look lonely at all here. Or in this one which was done to publicize the show.

Or in this (undated) publicity still which includes the rest of the characters.

I will admit that it's possible that the animators kept Franklin at a distance because of the wide-spread racism that did exist at the time. It's unlikely but possible. Even if that happened, it's unfair to reframe a blow for racial equality as racist. Instead let's give proper credit to the cartoon for including a black character who wasn't a stereotype.

Marvel Comics - Who Deserves the Credit?

While most obituaries for Stan Lee gave him credit for creating the core of the Marvel Universe, a did see a few that revived the charges that Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did all the work and Lee stole the credit. This is more complicated than it appears so I'll look at it from different angles.

First, no one would even care if it wasn't for Stan. Prior to Marvel, comics were either unsigned or had the writer and artist's name in a small box on the splash page. Few people paid attention to the credits. And most comic publishers (including Marvel's predecessor, Timely) had a house style to make it difficult to tell who did the art.

Stan changed that. He put the producer's names in a big box. When that wasn't enough, he made up nicknames or rhyming couplets or on-line jokes to get people to read the credits. He also allowed the artists to develop their own style. If you look at the very first Marvel comics, it's hard to tell who drew them. Kirby's distinctive style hadn't started to develop yet. A few years later you could tell who the artist was without reading the credits because they all had unique styles.

Stan also gave credit to the inker and letterer (and later the colorist). This is an interesting point because a lot of artists have a poor opinion of the contribution of the inker. Just look at the difference between Silver Surfer #5 and #6 (original run) to see how much difference an inker can make.

So, we only care about who got credit because Stan got us to read the credits.

A big argument is that the artist did so much more. Ditko complained that the artist took a bare outline of a story, fleshed it out, then broke it down by page an panel to decide the flow of the story. Then he'd decide who to include and what to show in each panel. That took a lot of time. Kirby was a very fast artist. He could produce a comic a week. Ditko was slower and did his own inking. He only produced one comic book (Spider-Man) plus two half-comics (Doctor Strange and the Hulk) per month. Lee took a fraction of that time to add the word balloons - often spending mornings working on plots with an artist then doing the dialog in the afternoon. So the artists were spending 5-10 times the amount of time on a comic as Stan did. Was it fair for him to give himself top billing?

To counter that, I'll point out that the artist probably figured out the pacing, etc. in an afternoon so his contribution to the story was similar to Stan's. Yes, drawing all the characters takes time but a lot of that is just drafting. It fills in the panel but doesn't add to the story.

And let's keep in mind what Stan did. Marvel had 4-5 comics come out every week and Stan was writing nearly all of them. In addition to that, he edited the letter's page and supervised everything else. Where Kirby might do 40-50 stories in a year, Stan was doing hundreds. Yes, he delegated a lot of the work to the artists but his part in it was still staggering.

Oh, but according to Kirby, Stan wasn't actually writing those comics. Kirby was writing the dialog in the margins and Stan copied them into the word balloons. Kirby claimed that for years. Stan's response was that Kirby's dialog was clunky and dated and he ignored it. Kirby never went back and looked at the finished books so he didn't realize that his dialog never made it to the finished page.

Who's telling the truth? I suspect that Stan did use some of Jack's dialog but I believe him when he says that he wrote most of it. Look at the other comics Marvel published at the same time. Then look at the comics Ditko and Kirby did after they left Marvel. Stan was right - neither Kirby nor Ditko did dialog as well as Stan. He was much better at giving each character his own style of speaking and his dialog was a lot punchier. Both artists' dialog sounded like lines from old movies.

So, my final point, how important was Stan's contribution? He may have made some suggestions but Kirby designed most of the characters' costumes. (Note: both Kirby and Ditko claimed credit for creating Spider-Man. Ditko claims that Kirby's creation was too similar to The Fly so they tossed that and Ditko started fresh. Certainly the costume and powers are typical for Ditko and very unlike anything Kirby did.)

Here's the thing about the characters - they aren't all that original. The Fantastic Four was all retreads. None of the characters had original powers and they wore blue jump-suits with a 4 on the chest. The Hulk was sort of Frankenstein's Monster mashed up with the Wolfman (for his first couple of appearances Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk at night). Iron Man and Thor had basically the same powers as Superman, just not on a much lower level. Marvel didn't start having characters who were really original until the X-Men.

Speaking as someone who started reading Marvel comics in the Silver Age, what really hooked me was the plots and dialog. They acted completely different than characters at DC. You never saw members of the Justice League argue and they were all pretty interchangeable. Marvel heroes argues, they told jokes, they had romances. And that was Stan.

By 1970 both Ditko and Kirby had left Marvel and gone on to DC. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted and they wrote their comics as well as drawing them. And they flopped big-time. Ditko created Hawk and Dove about a pair of brothers who were given powers. They argued a lot. It wasn't very interesting. He also did The Creeper about a reporter who could transform into a spooky character with yellow skin, green hair and a red mane coming from his shoulders. It was better but didn't last long.

Kirby made a big splash with his "4th World". He let his creativity loose, creating warring worlds of super-beings. They were all cancelled within 18 months. He tried again a few times. None of his comics were a success. One he created with Captain America co-creator was cancelled after its first issue.

Meanwhile, Marvel kept on going. Sales continued to improve until they overtook DC and the stories continued to be good. But, a couple of years after Kirby left, Stan was promoted and had to stop writing. Talented writers replaced him but you could really tell the difference. Marvel began a decline in quality that lasted most of the 70s. There were bright spots here and there but, in general, the books just weren't as good without Stan.

So that's my conclusion. Marvel survived the loss of Kirby's and Ditko's art far better than the loss of Stan's writing and neither artist was able to repeat his success at DC. Stan was indeed responsible for the success of Marvel Comics and its characters. Kirby and Ditko played a big part of that but Lee wasn't stealing credit due to them.

Defending the Ending (Of Avengers: Infinity War)

Recently someone on the Huffington Post insisted that Disney money ruined the ending of Avengers: Infinity War. He was referring to the characters who turned to dust at the end. Several have contracts for future films so he knows they will be restored. To him this ruined the movie.

I have news for this guy, I always knew that the deaths at the end of the movie would be reversed. It's not just because several of the vanished characters have upcoming movies. It's because it wasn't just them who died. It was half of everyone, everywhere. That's over three and a half billion people, just on earth - dead and gone at the snap of Thanos's fingers.

This is a comic book movie. At the end of Avengers: Civil War, Thanos won. He'd killed half of everyone, everywhere and retired to watch the sun rise.

But the bag guys don't win in comic book movies. And they certainly don't win when they've done something so monstrous. There may be some collateral damage along the way. The Ancient One or Doctor Erskine or Uncle Ben might die but the villain's plot will be foiled in the end.

That wasn't an ending, it was a cliffhanger. We know it will be reversed, Han won't stay frozen in carbonite, Jack Sparrow will be rescued from Davy Jones's Locker and half the population of the universe won't stay dead. The question is how will it be reversed and who will stay dead when it's all over?

For the record, I think that the Asgardians who were killed (plus Loki) and the people of Xandor will stay dead. There's an excellent chance that Gamora will be brought back to life because her death was so intimately tied to the Soul Gem. And there's a good chance that several more Avengers will die in the second movie and stay dead.

Starlin's Thanos - Infinity Wars

Great comic book characters seldom stay dead for long. Thanos was dead for most of a decade before returning to the realm of the living.

Unlike most resurrections, Thanos's was easily explained - Death herself sent him back. She had become concerned that the scales were out of balance and too many people were alive (there was possibly-true factoid going around at the time that half of everyone who ever lived was alive). Thanos was dispatched to correct that imbalance by killing half of everyone in the universe.

It started in the Silver Surfer. The Surfer fell asleep on a desolate world and dreamed about Death's servants releasing Thanos. When he awoke, Thanos was there, waiting for him. Thanos explained his goal and even made the Surfer complicit in killing off half the population of one world. The Surfer then collected as much background information as he could gather on Thanos. Then he went to face him. And won, surprisingly easily, leaving Thanos a smoking skeleton.

It was all a ruse. Death had warned Thanos that the Surfer could be a threat so Thanos faked his death and moved on to his real goal - the Infinity Gems.

While dead, Thanos had discovered the power the gems possessed. He convinced Death that without the gems it would take him a century to kill half the population of the universe. He then defeated a half dozen powerful beings in order to assemble the gems into the Infinity Gauntlet. This gave him total control over everything.

The only problem was that he was now Death's superior and she didn't like that one bit. Thanos spent some time trying to impress her by torturing relatives, spelling his name out with planets and removing half the population of the universe with the snap of his fingers. Death remained unimpressed.

All of this gave time for Adam Warlock to return to life along with Gamora and Pip the Troll (although Gamora had the bad luck to be in the half of the universe that was removed). Warlock assembled the remaining heroes of Earth along with the cosmic beings in a complicated plan to defeat Thanos.

The heroes were totally outmatched but Thanos thought that Death might look favorably on him if he gave them a chance so he cut off his extra senses. This almost worked. While fighting Captain America, Thanos raised his hand to strike and the Surfer grabbed for the Infinity Gauntlet. And missed.

Next the various cosmic entities tried and failed. At the end, Thanos defeated the entity known as Infinity - the personification of the universe itself - and took it's place. This left his body unguarded and Nebula, one of the relatives Thanos had been torturing, seized the Gauntlet and reversed all of Thanos's actions. That meant that she had to fight the cosmic entities all over again. While she was distracted, Warlock slipped back into the Soul Gem and used it to break the connection between the stones for a moment and rip the gauntlet from her hand. Warlock the emerged with the gauntlet and sent everyone home.

The cosmic entities complained that Warlock was too unstable to control the universe and he agreed to divide the gems up, giving them to protectors. These turned out to be Starlin's various creations - Adam himself, Gamora, Drax, Moon Dragon and Pip. The sixth gem went to someone secret (hint, Thanos). Together they formed the Infinity Watch to protect the universe from threats.

Unfortunately, the first two threats came from Warlock. While he possessed the gauntlet he exorcised himself of his good and evil parts. They proved to be as dangerous as Thanos.

Along the way, Thanos was redefined. Rejected by Death, he became a pragmatic survivor. He was similar to Magneto in the X-Men movies - someone who is very handy to have on your side but who might turn on you when your goals diverge.

Eventually Thanos gained ultimate power once more. This time he inspected the universe and discovered a cancerous hole in it. Too many people were coming back from the dead. He recreated the universe, fully expecting to perish in the attempt but managed to survive, back at his usual power level.

Starlin's exit from the character involved Thanos helping Galactus, the world-eater who had become infected. Thanos cured him, then warned him to be more careful in the future.

Considering that Galactus is at the top of the cosmic entities, that gives you an idea of Thanos's self-worth.

From there other writers took over Thanos and he was no longer just Jim Starlin's vision.

Infinity War - the mistake that isn't

One "mistake" that I've seen pointed out about Avengers: Infinity War is the scene near the end where Captain America seems to stop Thanos's hand. (note, that was in the trailer so it's not a spoiler. Everything from here on contains spoilers.)

The "problem" is that Thanos already punched out the Hulk. In fact, he beat the Hulk so bad that he refused to come out for the rest of the movie. There's no way that Cap is as strong as the Hulk so what gives?

The answer has two parts.

First, Cap has super strength in the MCU. We've seen lots of examples of it starting with him running down the Nazi spy in Captain America: First Avenger. In The Avengers he holds his own against Loki. He beats several armored aliens with nothing but a shield. By Captain America: The Winter Soldier he's jumping out of airplanes without a parachute and running rings around Sam. In Captain America: Civil War he holds back a helicopter with his bare hands then he and Bucky (who has been similarly enhanced) beat Iron Man. Clearly Cap is superhuman. He may not be as strong as Iron Man but he's able to do things that would cripple a strong man.

The second part is Thanos. We actually have no idea how strong he is naturally. He already has the power gem before Infinity War begins. The Hulk blindsides him, overpowering Thanos but then Thanos draws on the power gem and beats the Hulk up. This is consistent with the comic books where Drax and Thor were able to increase their already considerable strength by drawing on the power gem.

All during the movie we see that Thanos only uses the gems consciously. That's probably the main function of the Infinity Gauntlet - to insulate Thanos from the stones and let him exert conscious control over them. Ronan did the same thing with the power gem in Guardians of the Galaxy The gem might have been able to destroy a planet but he only used a tiny fraction of its power.

We also saw this during the battle between Thanos, Iron Man, Spider-Man, etc. They nearly overpowered Thanos and got the gauntlet. They could never have done that it he was drawing power from the gauntlet. They managed to keep him off-balance enough that he was depending on his own considerable strength rather than the gauntlet.

This also explains why the effects of the reality gem were only temporary. He wasn't actually changing reality, he was overlaying it with a different one. When he stopped, the original reality returned. The people he sliced into pieces were back together, Star Lord's gun shot energy blasts instead of bubbles, etc.

So, Cap, who has super strength, was able to hold off Thanos who was not drawing power from his gauntlet - but only for a moment.

All of this changed during the battle when Thanos had a vision of Gamora as a child. That's when he finally integrated the gems into a single force and evaporated half of everyone, everywhere.

Avengers: Infinity War and the Hard Choices

Spoilers ahead.

If there's a unifying theme in Infinity War, it's hard choices. Characters are constantly being asked to make difficult choices.

The first one is when Thanos threatens to crush Thor's head unless Loki gives him one of the Infinity Stones. At first Loki refuses but then he changes his mind. But, being Loki, he tries to have it both ways. First he sics the Hulk on Thanos then tries to stab him, resulting in Loki's own death.

The Vision and the Scarlet Witch face a couple of hard choices. They want to stay together but need to separate. More on this pair later.

Gamora asks Peter Quill to kill her if she's captured. Later she has to choose to kill Thanos, even though he raised her and she still cares for him.

Both of these characters go through with the hard choices only to have them come to nothing. By this point Thanos controls the reality stone and their actions are rendered useless.

Later Gamora is asked to choose between her sister's life and giving Thanos the Soul Gem. She fails the choice, leading him to the 5th of five stones.

Doctor Strange warns Iron Man and Spider-Man that if he has to choose between their death and giving Thanos his stone, he will let them die. When the time comes, he seems to fail this test and gives up the stone in exchange for Iron Man's life. But he has seen 14 million possible futures and only one led to victory. So it's likely that Strange didn't actually make a choice.

In the final act, the assembled heroes are trying to keep from making a hard choice - destroying the Mind Stone and killing the Vision in the process. They fail and the Scarlet Witch makes the decision to destroy the stone and kill the Vision. Unfortunately, Thanos is able to use the Time Gem to undo this sacrifice.

Several heroes engage in self-sacrifice. Iron Man and Spider-Man stow away on a space ship, knowing it's likely to be a one-way voyage. Thor goes through a lot of punishment in order to get an new hammer. When Thanos's army threatens to flank the warriors, the Black Panther orders a force field opened to let the army in, knowing they will be attacked.

Let's not forget Thanos himself. He already made the hard choice - that half of the universe's population has to die. But he also has to kill the only thing he loves to get the Soul Gem.

Starlin's Thanos - Adam Warlock

After Thanos, the character most associated with Jim Starlin is Adam Warlock. Ironically, Warlock was a collaborative creation.

He began as an artificial being known as "Him" in a Lee/Kirby issue of the Fantastic Four. Some scientists had created Him for nefarious purposes but he escaped before they were ready. At the time, Him glowed so brightly that they couldn't tell what he looked like so they came up with the idea of sending a blind sculptor to do a model by touch. They kidnapped the Thing's girlfriend, Alicia, for this. Alicia wasn't really needed. By the time she found Him in a deep tunnel, he had grown a cocoon and was no longer glowing. This was really just an excuse for a story about the Thing's frustration while Reed devised a way to track Alicia. Eventually Him emerged from his cocoon, a perfect humanoid with golden skin and blond hair. He denounced his creators and left earth. The FF showed up jut in time to rescue Alicia and the Hive where Him was created was destroyed.

A few months later Him showed up in an issue of Thor. Him had an urge to mate and decided on the first woman he met - Thor's girlfriend Sif. Thor objected, strongly, and Him ended up retreating back to his cocoon.

A few years later Roy Thomas and Gil Kane brought back the character, giving him his name, costume and soul gem. While floating in his cocoon, Him came across the High Evolutionary. This was another Lee/Kirby creation - a scientist with an evolutionary accelerator that could create human/animal hybrids. He'd appeared in Thor and the Hulk before trying the accelerator on himself and becoming god-like. Now, he decided to create his own version of the Earth but without sin (this was known as Counter Earth because it was on the far side of the sun from our Earth). Him watched all this from his cocoon and kept the High Evolutionary company. After finishing his creation, the High Evolutionary rested and some of his evil creations took the opportunity to corrupt the Counter Earth. Him emerged from his cocoon and drove them off but they went down to Counter Earth.

The High Evolutionary was ready to scrap the project but Him offered to go clean things up. He was given his name, Adam Warlock, and his soul gem and sent on his way. The whole thing became an extended Jesus in the modern world parable. It didn't last long and the plot threads were tied up in the Hulk with the Hulk acting as Peter and Warlock regenerating from his death in his cocoon.

Based on his work on Captain Marvel, Starlin was given free reign over the character. He tossed out the Jesus influence and turned to the sword and sorcery character, Elric of Melniboné instead. Elric was an albino with all the associated health problems. He overcame these with the help of a magic broadsword that stole souls. This put him in a difficult position - he needed the sword but he hated it taking souls. Elric often fought his cousin who had a matching longsword. The Elric stories also had the conflict between chaos and order which influenced Starlin.

No previous mention had been made about where Adam's soul gem came from. All we knew was that it was powerful. Under Starlin, it began taking souls, at first when Warlock was under stress but later on command. But this was a side-note to Warlock's main struggle against an inter-planetary church that worshiped a powerful being known as the Magus. Along the way Warlock picked up a couple of side-kicks. The first was a troll named Pip. The second was a green-skinned assassin named Gamora who had been sent to kill the Magus.

Things get complicated now.

The Magus was actually a future version of Warlock who would become insane then evil. This process sent him into the past where he quickly conquered a primitive world and was worshiped as a god. Warlock's fight against the Magus was the first step to him becoming the Magus.

Along the way, Gamora failed to assassinate the Magus so her master decided to take a direct hand. The was Thanos.

It seems that despite being evil, the Magus was the chosen champion of life as embodied by the forced of Chaos and Death. Thanos was, of course, the champion of Death and his goal was to kill the Magus or prevent him from existing.

The two squared off in a battle but this was actually a diversion. While the Magus was distracted, Warlock used a time portal to change his future. First he eliminated the branch that created the Magus then he made sure the shortest branch would happen. Traveling a short ways into the future he came upon his future self dying and welcoming death. To prevent his future self from regenerating, Adam had his gem steal his future self's soul committing temporal suicide.

The Magus was about to defeat Thanos when he ceased to exist. The team went their separate ways, not realizing that Thanos was the actual winner.

Warlock's run lasted a few more issues. The final one had him finally take full control of his soul gem. In the process we got the first hint of what the gems were and that there were six of them.

In a non-Starlin teamup with Spider-Man, Warlock met a being called the Gardener who was raising his garden on the moon's blue area which has an atmosphere. It turned out that he had a soul gem of his own. A character named the Stranger came looking for their soul gems. The Stranger had one and desired all of them but he was driven off.

Starlin was given two double-sized issues to wrap up loose ends. In the first one, Adam, Captain Marvel and Moon Dragon joined with the Avengers to stop Thanos.

Thanos had already left Gamora and Pip dying and, after taking their souls, Adam found out Thanos's plot from Gamora's soul. Thanos had discovered at least some of the properties of the six soul gems and had drained off energy from them (including Adam's while he wasn't looking) to build a cannon capable of destroying stars. Thanos hoped that he would win Death's love if he destroyed enough life.

During the battle, Warlock managed to smash Thanos's cannon but Thanos left Warlock dying, ready for his past self to take his soul. For Adam, being in the soul gem was paradise and an end to a toured life.

Meanwhile in the real world, Thanos defeated the Avengers and decided that he could still use Warlock's gem to destroy out sun in the hope that would be enough to satisfy Death. Moon Dragon contacted Spider-Man who came to the rescue with the Thing. Thanos easily defeated both the Thing and Thor but that gave Spider-Man time to find the soul gem and release a version of Warlock. He turned Thanos to stone, killing him and leaving his body as a lesson.

Thanos made one final appearance in the Death of Captain Marvel. After multiple cancellations, Marvel decided to start with a new character so Mar-Vel died of cancer. Thanos appeared as the emmesary of Death to escort Mar-Vel to the other side.

Thanos and Warlock remained dead while Starlin moved on to other projects. They weren't revived until the 90s,

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.

Starlin's Thanos - Early Influences

With Avengers Infinity War coming out soon, I thought I'd trace the origins and development of the character of Thanos. I'm only looking at the character as developed by his creator, Jim Starlin and Starlin's influences.

Things began back in the 1930s when an English professor at Oxford invented a new word and decided to write a book to go with it. The word was "hobbit" and the professor was J. R. R. Tolkien. His book, The Hobbit was a great success and his publisher pressed him for a sequel. It took over a decade but Tolkien eventually produced The Lord of the Rings, the best-selling book of the 20th century and the 3rd best seller of all time. It was originally published in 1954-55 (spread over three volumes which were released months apart). It really took off in the late 1960s.

Now, we jump from that to Jack Kirby. Kirby, along with Stan Lee, created the backbone of the Marvel Universe. Over his career, Kirby seldom stayed in any one place for more than a few years but he'd spent the 1960s at Marvel. While his collaboration with Stan was legend, Kirby was becoming uncomfortable. One issue was creator's rights. Marvel was a fairly small company at the time and didn't have enough money to pay royalties for characters created (and the idea that these characters would eventually be worth billions was preposterous at the time). Marvel took the position that Kirby was doing work for hire and that anything he created belonged to Marvel. They had a special 50-page contract for him that dealt with creator's rights.

In addition, Kirby's relationship with Stan had soured. One reason was the Silver Surfer. For Fantastic Four #50, Stan and Jack decided to introduce a new character who was an order of magnitude more powerful than the standard villain. This was Galactus, the world-eater. The two of them agreed on a plot, Kirby drew the pages and sent them back to Stan to add dialog. Stan got about half-way through and hit a character they hadn't discussed - a naked, bald guy on a flying surfboard. "Who's this" Stan asked. "I figured anyone that powerful would have a herald," Jack answered. The Surfer quickly became Stan's favorite character and he was very possessive of him. When the Surfer got his own comic, Jack was not assigned to it. They also disagreed on the Surfer's origins. Kirby wanted him to be space-born but Stan wrote him as a humanoid who became the Surfer through an act of self-sacrifice.

The Marvel-style of creating comics created its own problems. For most of the 60s, Stan wrote most of the comics. The traditional way of doing a comic book was for the writer to create a finished script with plot and dialog broken down by page. This would be given to the artist to draw. Stan didn't have time for that so, instead he and the artist would have a story conference where they decided on the general plot. The artist would decide the pacing and was free to add other flourishes (like the Silver Surfer) as long as it was close enough to the original plot for Stan to add the dialog to.

Somewhere along the way, Kirby started putting dialog in the margins. In his mind, he was doing the complete comic and Stan would copy his dialog from the margins to the word balloons and take credit for them. Stan insisted that Jack's dialog was clunky and dated and that Stan ignored it except as an occasional guide to what was going on in the panel.

In 1960, Kirby approached DC Comics about a job. They were thrilled. The rumor in the industry was that Jack did all the work while Stan took all the credit so they expected to get a stable of characters comparable to Marvel's. They were also able to offer a better deal on creator's rights.

Kirby was given free reign to do anything he wanted. He launched his "Fourth World" - three comics with intertwined plots.

This is where the Lord of the Rings comes in. Kirby loved to adapt outside influences. In the Fantastic Four they did takes on The Prisoner and a mash-up of 1930s gangsters and gladiators. So Kirby took the idea of a trilogy and the middle part of the Lord of the Rings where the Fellowship has broken up into three different groups, all working against the common enemy.

In the Lord of the Rings, the villain was Sauron, a powerful character who would become unstoppable if he recovered the One Ring. Even without it, his armies threatened the world.

Kirby's version of this was Darkseid (pronounced dark side). He was a large, stone-faced being powerful enough to defeat Superman. He ruled a post-apocalyptic world (named Apokolips) which was dominated by fire pits and populated by his slaves and soldiers. Fighting him were the New Gods and the Forever People from New Genesis and Mr Miracle, an escape artist on Earth. It was strongly implied that the New Gods were the survivors of the Norse Ragnarok who built a new civilization.

Years earlier New Genesis had a war with Apokolips. This came to an end with an exchange of prisoners - the first-born sons of the two leaders. Mr. Miracle was the hostage from the New Genesis. He was raised as an ordinary dog soldier, not knowing his parentage. Eventually he escaped to Earth, unwittingly ending the truce. Darkseid's son was raised to be the champion of the New Gods.

While there were several skirmishes, Darkseid's goal was to discover the Anti-Life Equation. Just as the One Ring would give Sauron control of the other rings and their bearers, the Anti-Life Equation would give Darseid control over all free will.

It was very exciting. Kirby started the story in the middle and filled in the background over the next several months. The New Gods protected the Earth as Darkseid tried to make it a beach-head for a new attack on New Genesis. The Forever People (essentially hippie gods) protected the Anti-Life Equation and Mr Miracle escaped a lot and married a hot woman with super strength.

Kirby also took over Jimmy Olsen, Superman's Friend and had some cross-overs there, too.

There was one big problem with all of this - Kirby wasn't a very good writer. His dialog often sounded like it came from the 1940s and the idea of starting in the middle and filling in the pieces later confused people. His Fourth World only lasted 59 issues (spread across four titles) and he'd backed off of the war against Apokilips before the end.

But one big fan was a kid in high school who was a natural artist named Jim Starlin.

too be continued

The Problems With Black Panther

The movie Black Panther has made a phenomenal amount of money and scored high on critic's sites like Rotten Tomatoes but, let's face it, it was graded on a curve. It was fine but I'd rank it as middle of the pack. It had a number of problems, some in the content and some in the execution.

First of all, the movie was too long. The opening act was overstuffed with two raids by the Wakandans, a challenge match for the crown, a heist a meeting between the panther and his father and a shoot-out between Klaue and Kilmonger. And that was all just setting up for the main plot. Before the movie was finished we had two more challenge matches and both the Panther and Killmonger met with their fathers in visions. Plus a civil war among the Wakandans.

The next problem was that too much was going on in the final battle. We had the Panther fighting Kilmonger, a fight between the royal guard and the rest of the cast plus a CIA agent shooting down some transport drones before a drone killed him. There was too much going on to keep track of and too many people to really be invested in any of them. This has been a problem in Marvel movies since Iron Man.

Wakanda is presented as an African paradise but it's actually pretty messed up. Income inequality is terrible. You see a gleaming, futuristic city with street vendors. Newsflash - it's really hard to make ends meet selling things from a stall on the street. Plus other parts of the country have farmers and herders living in primitive huts.

Then there's the monarchy. The country has an absolute ruler. Kilmonger's first order after becoming king is to order the patch of heart-shaped herbs to be burned. This is central to their culture but they do it without question. Then Kilmonger declares war on the rest of the world and the Wakandans go along with it with only token objections.

The challenge by combat is pretty strange, too. It's bad enough having someone who rules because of an accident of birth. It's worse when he can be replaced by anyone from the right family who can beat him in hand-to-hand combat.

The pressures of the monarchy show. By the end of the movie the Wakandan elite are engaged in a civil war.

The Wakandans are jerks. In the opening sequence we see a strike team lead by the Panther take a convoy that is obviously Christian girls who were kidnapped by Islamic extremists. But it turns out that they couldn't care less about the innocent girls. They were just there to invite the Panther's ex-girlfriend to the coronation. The girlfriend is the only one who actually cares about helping people in the outside world.

The final problem a delicate one and I'll probably offend people by bringing it up but let's face it, the movie has racism at its core. I know there is a school of thought that says that only the culture in power can be racist but, in this case, the Wakandans are the dominant culture. There is only one white actor among the leads. The Panther's sister calls him a "colonizer" which is meant as a racial insult. After all, he's American and the US never colonized Africa and Wakanda was never colonized so the term is being used as a slur against all whites. Later he's told to shut up or he'll be fed to the gorilla tribe leader's children (Just a joke since they're vegetarians). That's how minorities were treated in movies from the 30s and 40s. 

The basic conflict in the movie is between two viewpoints. Kilmonger echos the Nation of Islam in believing that white are the devil and Wakanda must conquer them. Opposing him is the traditional view that white are the devil and Wakanda must hide from them.

These problems aren't fatal to the movie but I was aware of them, especially the running time.