I do like that, as Thanos explains how the Gems work, he's also revealing how the Gems basically act as power multipliers for each other. The Mind Gem can affect minds, but it takes the Space Gem to affect minds on a wide scale, with the Power Gem to increase the range to nigh-infinity. The Power Gem can make you superhumanly strong, but it also takes the Reality Gem to keep this power from destroying everything you're touching by accident.
@@hariman7727 And yet Thanos just chastised Mephisto for being petty when taunting the Silver Surfer as payback. I don't think he was trying to be petty so much as use the planet's bureaucratic nightmare to further delay him from becoming a barrier to his goals.
Thank you!!! I have spent years arguing with so-called experts, who think Thanos glove has special properties. My counter was that it could just as easily have been the Infinity Codpiece.
Big credits to Ron Lim on his artwork on Silver Surfer and the rest of the infinity saga. No-one can draw cosmic characters (particularly The Surfer) quite like he does.
One of his FF appearances that same year had him pull a bowler hat look in one panel too. Again, this was when the two companies were allowed to slip stuff like that in, before the executives were literally burning down parts of their own fanbases to try and one up each other.
These are the stories that got me hooked in the early 90s. Thanos was the coolest character to this ten year old and when Starlin writes him, he's still captivating and complex. One minor note: the Impossible Man didn't only appear in Fantastic Four, Chris Claremont frequently used him in the 80s, creating a love interest for him in Spider-Woman and sending the X-Men on a scavenger hunt across the Marvel Universe in a rather memorable 80s annual. The character may be a bit one note, but having a living cartoon in the super serious Marvel Universe is actually a nice change of pace. Look at Deadpool.
I remember when Avengers 1 came out and the tease with Thanos, how his servant's remark on "challenging the earth is courting death" got him to turn and smile. Combine that with Hela in Thor Ragnarok and I think some of us were guessing that this would be a 1:1 adaptation of Thanos. Boy did we back the wrong horse come Infinity War and Endgame.
True, it wasn’t a 1:1 adaptation, but I think he was still closer to the comics than he appears at first glance. He’s still in love with death, just the concept rather than the literal personification. That’s why violence and murder are his first resort, rather than trying to ration or grow new resources.
On what was going on in the pages of 'Quasar" at this time: I kind of feel bad for the writer of the Quasar comic then, Mark Gruenwald. I was reading both comics at the time, and enjoying both stories. Maelstrom was slowly building himself up to Godlike power levels in his own scheme, that to me was just as interesting as what Thanos was doing. However, it seemed that what Starlin was doing with Thanos (and the build up to the Crossover Event of "Infinity Gauntlet") put what Gruenwald was doing on the back burner, and in the end the schemes of Maelstrom just seemed sub-par. If he could have done this story a few years before Thanos and his quest for the Gems, I think it would have become just as big of an event as "Infinity Gauntlet" turned out to be (and remember, it was Gruenwald who introduced the 'New' cosmic entity of Infinity in the pages of Quasar, as the representation of the Spatial aspect of the Universe, and sister to Eternity, the Temporal Aspect, at least, how he described them) Its a shame Gruenwald and Starlin couldn't have worked together on some project, as he sadly passed away not long after his Quasar run, as I recall.
I fully agree, and I feel that Chuck isn't representing Maelstrom fairly because during that storyline he was written as nearly pragmatic and collected as Thanos. Even if Maelstrom was definitely a sadist, that issue with Thanos is basically the first moment where he goes full classic supervillain. And just like Thanos, he didn't just get "ultimate power"... through a very complex series of machinations, he exploited the weaknesses of several cosmic players to get the power of Anomaly, which made him possibly the only thing that could not be affected by the gems by the way. I kind of get the feeling that maybe Chuck read only the issue with the Thanos appearance and not the full Cosmos In Collision storyline.
The issue seems to be that Marvel writers need a guy to be their Mongul or even their Darkseid, and Thanos definitely *looks* the part, so all of Starlin's characterization is ignored so we can have him as the big tough cosmic villain. (Which is in and of itself a misunderstanding of Darkseid and the New Gods.)
To be fair, in the original Starlin stories, he wanted to cause stellar genocide simply because he was obsessed with death. That's pretty easy to put in the 'big ultimate villain' role. Didn't help that Thomas advised Starlin to basically rip-off Darkseid in the first place.
Yes, technically. No, in reality, because human beings are inherently selfish. 38% of the world's population is obese and that number will reach 50% by 2035. Or in other words, ''half of the people on Earth are eating the f-k too much.'' If those people gave their extra food to the poor and the starving there would be no poor and the starving. But they don't want to. They just sit at home blaming others because blaming others is the greatest cope of them all.
The claim is that there will be less suffering if there's more to go around, and as long as an irresistable force does the culling, suffering will be reduced. Mind, it's also true that that's the stupidest, most destructive, and least ethical means of kicking the can down the road (because the only permanent solution is to end all life and ensure it never starts again.)
Thanos' arrogance is the same arrogance as any other man who thinks himself a god. He has declared what will happen, that there is no hope of a better way and that only violence and death at his hand can solve it. Humanity, much to his anger, continues to prove him wrong.
If Phase 4 and 5 MCU had been half as good as this, we'd still be riding the high of the Superhero genre. Or at least the movies wouldn't be tanking horribly.
Interestingly, Thanos Quest was used to setup the Ego Gem revelation, that the being that created the universe was, in fact, still alive within a SEVENTH Infinity Gem, the aforementioned Ego Gem. By bringing all Seven Gems together, you'd basically collapse her(And while Reed opines that she's an it, not a female, she identifies herself with female pronouns...again just a reminder that Reed Richards is an asshole), and all the universe together into a single being again, not her original body, she admits, but it would free her from the limitations this reality has put on itself, and she claims would make everyone blissful forever. The BEYONDER of all people is the one to deal with her, as this was when his backstory was still that he had that as his origin, that he's a living universe, and was thus, the same sort of being as her, just one that languished until he found this place. Of course, he couldn't bring himself to destroy her, and put her in a space between universes, where she's get knocked out when the Ultraverse merged with the main Marvel Continuity(Marvel had bought them for the printing technique they were using at the time), and thanks to the universe she's in no longer being just her, they're able to destroy the Ego Gem, and we don't talk about it anymore.
Beyonder actually tried killing her, learned that death is part of life and by ending death he was actually causing more chaos in his quest to be a protector like the superheroes, and was forced to exhaust a lot of his power to kill a man, thus bringing death back. I mean it's Secret Wars II and we don't like to talk about it apparently but it still happened.
I'll admit, the opening 2 issues confuse me as to Thanos' purpose. I get they wanted a message book about overpopulation, one that worked so well by the time the movie came out our population increased 50%, but in universe, all it did was tip the surfer off to his threat with a pitch he had no chance of selling. Maybe it's part of Thanos' self sabatouge habit about to come up.
I think it's more that he's the perfect Agent of Death. Remember that it is not the madman shouting in the street some wild theory or decrying the unknowable controllers of reality that you should fear. It is the madman who can sit across a table from you and preach his insanity in perfect clarity that is the real terror. Thanos is, after all, first and always, the Mad Titan.
It's sadly a view that hasn't been born out by reality (first world countries ALL have declining birth rates), but it's still believed by some who take the "population bomb" mentality as stronger than the Gospels... to everyone else' detriment.
As an ecologist, I grind my teeth every time writers give a "message" about overpopulation (which is a real problem, with 8 billion humans and growing) to the _villain_ and make his methods of "solving" it utter idiotic. Don't get me started.
@@TF2CrunchyFrog it angers me because we have people in the world whose solution to overpopulation is to demand that we stop using nitrate fertilizers and also demand that we go back to an agrarian lifestyle which can't support the world's population and will cause billions to die. It also angers me because the decreasing birth rate in first world countries is completely ignored for population bomb ideology, instead of accepting that humanity can innovate and produce enough to support the people if governments and billionaires would stop screwing with our ability to operate and function.
I always liked the idea that MCU Thanos just thought there was an overpopulation problem, but there really wasn’t. It’s just something that only existed in his crazy purple head.
I honestly think a lot of people took MCU Infinity War Thanos at his word too much. Sure, he might believe he’s doing things for the right reasons, but that’s just a lie he tells himself. The truth is, deep down, he loves death and destruction. It’s why he was excited to fight Hulk, why he tortured Nebula, why he doubled down when the Avengers tried to reverse the Snap. Thanos didn’t want to save the universe, he wanted a justification for his desire to bathe it in blood. He’s a monster who wants to believe he’s a hero.
@@magnusprime962 That makes more sense than a quixotic attempt to 'save' the universe by halving the population, when given an abundance of resources life just survives (and multiplies) even faster. A doubling in one generation isn't hard; even with something with as slow a life cycle as humans means you only put off whatever problem you see by less than a century.
No he adamantly believed in his stupid plan that’s why he destroyed the gems after retiring as he didn’t see a further use for them and to remove temptation to do anything different with them . They wanted to keep the killing half the universe thing from the comics but give it a different context and what they decided on makes him look like a shortsighted idiot despite also being portrayed as a master schemer good at being a step ahead of everyone else.
i wonder if you'd review Thanos Rising and how it could fail to understand the character. You seem like a fan of him and i am one too, so i would love to see your thoughts in that series. Also the Thanos series by Donny Cates, as i am intrigued if they got the character right or not.
Thanos Rising (2013) is not a good Thanos story Plenty of people praise the Thanos Rising story by Jason Aaron, thinking he did something profound with Thanos, when in reality, he badly streamlined both Thanos and the society of the Titanian Eternals as estabilished by Jim Starlin and really, it served more as a prologue to Hickman's Infinity event. I dislike this comic. I dislike it so much as a fan of Marvel Cosmic and Jim Starlin's works. It undermines decades of established character history. I refuse to consider it canon at all and neither should any Thanos fan. It is among the worst things Marvel has ever produced. I say this without exaggeration. Up there with Captain America being a HYDRA agent and Spider Man's One More Day and Thor becoming a jobber with multiple hammers who is suddenly weaker than She-Hulk. 1) It’s like Jason Aaron had a checklist for writing Thanos’ backstory and he went through it as fast and put as little thought and effort into getting it done as possible. It lasts only five issues. As soon as Thanos does one thing, the issue is over. It’s only in the very last two issues that Thanos starts to be an evil overlord, at no point does Thanos take any sort of initiative. Even then he’s just going around slaughtering random planets aimlessly. 2) Instead of Thanos’ mother being a member of a highly tolerant and enlightened society of ancient superhumans, she was crazy and tried to kill Thanos at birth because he was ugly (and the thing about this comic is that it says she was right.) Instead of Titan being this highly advanced science world with demigods from greek mythology and related to the Eternals, it looks straight out of the Jetsons, and its people die as easily as normal humans. Can you imagine the outrage if someone makes a Gandalf or Sauron origin Story where he was a former Drug addict in a mundane urban setting? Or if It turns out the Force from Star Wars is supplied by a bunch of micro-org....uh, nevermind. 3) Chronos, the God of Titan and Thanos' grandfather, can casually show up at Mentor and Thanos’ breakfast table. He knows that Thanos is murdering people, but says nothing. It’s almost like Aaron forgot that Titan had a holographic super computer called ISAAC who could have fulfilled this role, instead of having Chronos, Titan’s God just hanging out with the titans and gossiping. 4) Instead of Thanos being fascinated by nihilism and finding Death in a forgotten temple on Titan, she manifested as a hallucinatory and diabolical teenage girl that strung him around by his balls his whole life. Instead of Lady Death being silent to Thanos, something that caused great frustration in Thanos, she instead never shuts up, constantly nagging “When are you going to kill more people? Come on. When you’ve killed enough people, then we can do the nasty!” Death would not say this. This is utter blasphemy. She also wouldn’t cackle like a mad woman and relish in the agony of people dying. Death does not like suffering. Death is a soother of pain and a impartial force of nature. 5) Instead of Thanos killing his mother on Titan with the nuclear bombardment, which is something Starlin reiterated again and again was the official way that Thano’s mother died, Thanos vivisects her while she’s wearing her most sexy lingerie. 6) Instead of Thanos swearing to have never children,because a faithful servant to Death would never create life, he instead sleeps around and has many illegitimate children. 7) Instead of Thanos touring the universe, honing his mystical and scientific skills and mastering his powers, we learn he was a common dock worker for a small band of pirates. Instead of acquiring power and authority by force, Thanos accidentally becomes a space pirate captain when he swings his sword at the previous captain with his eyes closed because he’s too scared to fight. 8) this Thanos is so stupid that he never realizes who the teenage girl who has followed him around everywhere, the one that no one else can see is. When he finds out she’s actually Death, he’s horrified and attempts suicide. The Thanos i'm used to read would smile and say “I always knew who you were. Why did you hide your true self from me all this time? You are the keeper of my heart, and I love you as you truly are.” 9) Death even tells him that she’ll love him once he “becomes the God who holds Infinity in the palm of his hand.” That’s funny. Did Mr. Aaron not read Infinity Gauntlet where a major plot point was that Death absolutely hated Thanos after he acquired the Infinity Gems and had the audacity to become more powerful than her? Was he too busy making Jane Foster an invincible Mary Sue and turn Odin into a colossal jerk? 10) And then to add more inconsitencies, it tells the reader Death might not even exist, except in Thanos’ mind. Which is weird since Eros saw Lady Death in Infinity Gauntlet too, along whit many other characters. 11) Speaking of Eros. Yeah. He’s not in this comic. I think he’s just in one panel at the breakfast table with Chronos, Thanos and Mentor. It’s almost like the author realized that the younger brother of Thanos would be a problem if Thanos’ mother was crazy and she would be terrified of producing another monster like Thanos. If so then just when and how was Eros born and conceived? It doesn’t matter, because Mr. Aaron doesn’t care about such a pivotal character in Thanos’ backstory. It’s sad when I have to point out continuity errors to an author who was paid to pay attention to continuity. 12) Even taking away the horrible portrayal of Thanos, it makes no sense continuity wise. According to this story, Titan was destroyed YEARS ago. So how do all the stories that have taken place on Titan exist in continuity? And Death even used Marlo for a period of time to hide from Thanos, so at least Marlo, Rick, and Hulk know Death exists as well as Warlock, the Surfer, etc. 13) the comic ends with Thanos winning Death’s love, and he just walks away from her. HE walks away from HER. What next? Sauron finds the One Ring, and sets it down on a rock and walks away because it got some rust on it and it doesn’t quite fit his finger anymore? It’s just as plausible as the idiocy I’ve just witnessed. 13) Tegan O'Neil was right! whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com/2013/04/sir-thanos-rising-1-marvel-made-mistake.html I get that Thanos is a tough character to write - full of inconsistencies and contradictions. This story line is not the way to resolve the inconsistencies and contradictions. It would’ve been better to just deal with them the old fashioned way: don’t think about them too much and write a good adventure story with Adam Warlock, pshychedelic artwork and metaphysical philosophy. There is no logic or reason to Thanos’ craziness. That’s why crazy is called crazy and Thanos is called “The MAD Titan.” This attempt to impose a dark psychological background story onto Thanos to explain his madness just feels wrong and stands in stark contrast to the best Thanos stories told to date. Would you accept a Batman origin story where it was revealed that Bruce Wayme was a hobo named Crazy Steve who built Alfred as a robot butler, created Joker in a lab and tortured Dick Grayson to make him Robin and couldn’t actually fight without the aid of his Batsuit, even if DC considered it canon? This wasn’t Thanos. This was a bad remake of Derf Backderf's My Friend Dahmer. The sad thing is the younger comic book reader or someone who wants to learn more about Thanos is going to pick this up and regard it as official; this Thanos Rising portrayal of a confused, easily manipulated, sexually frustrated, weak, whiny little jerk. Why didn’t Jim Starlin write this instead?! Or even Ron Marz or Keith Giffen? Basically, this book is an embarrassment to the Thanos characterisation and continuity. Thanos Rising is at best the distorted memories of a Thanosi clone dying in Thanos' laboratory. I'm relieved that the Russo Bros. ignored this story for the MCU version of Thanos. Oh, and the comic also implies that Thanos sleeps with rotting female corpses on a regular basis. Because that’s a mental image that comic book readers need in their heads.
Bringing up the Doom/Arcade incident is kind of ironic since Sterlin has since then earned the reputation of retconning any incident of Thanos being defeated (leading to [in]famous Squirrel Girl panel). Having read the lead-up to Infinity Gauntlet before Infinity War (thanks to Marvel Infinity) the Betweener bit did irk me, since what Chuck doesn't mention here, Thanos for some undisclosed reason is "beyond fate" and Master Order and Lord Chaos can't perceive or effect him (So Inbeetweer trying to throw the blame on Thanos falls on deaf ears). At the same it funny in another way Thanos has to fall victim to later power creep as a fighting Champion he says he avoided direct contact with powerhouses as that elder or the Hulk. Spoilers for Infinity Gaultlet: And as seen here and for quite some time in the event itself THanos is not really interested in killing half the universe outside of pleasing Mistress Death. He spends a good while being drunk with the Gem's power before he summons Death again and remembers that was supposed to do something. And with a bit theartic snaps his finger and kills half of the universe, as an afterthought.
At least up to and including Infinity Gauntlet, Starlin made a serious effort to use all the characters as characters and give everyone a fair share. Starting with Infinity War and definitely on his later stories, unless you're Thanos, Warlock or part of the Infinity Watch (and Dr Strange for some reason), basically every other single character is written like an idiot. I wonder how far Chuck's retrospective is going to go, because I'd like to see what he thinks of how Starlin treats other characters later in his career.
@@randomhourglass5687 I'd say it starts with IG, since the only reason Thanos loses is because he (subconsciously) doesn't want to win. So he's not beaten (and never will be from that point is Starlin can help it).
I’d say that Doom scene is great it’s one of the reasons that character is as beloved as he is today because you had writers like that talking a second to realize when he was misused and do something with it to build him up rather than letting him be a jumbled confusing mess of a character like Magneto was during this time
After Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos was no longer a villain according to Starlin. The Ka-Zar and Thor stories that got retconned in Infinity Abyss regressed Thanos back into a villain with no explanation.
I actually saw someone on reddit suggest using the Impossible Man as a character on Loki just the other day, someone involved with the TVA in some fashion.
Infinity Gauntlet does give him a weakness later on. But after that, Starlin gets stuck in a cycle of "I must make Thanos the most impossibly undefeatable character in the history of fiction" for a while.
I do like that, as Thanos explains how the Gems work, he's also revealing how the Gems basically act as power multipliers for each other. The Mind Gem can affect minds, but it takes the Space Gem to affect minds on a wide scale, with the Power Gem to increase the range to nigh-infinity. The Power Gem can make you superhumanly strong, but it also takes the Reality Gem to keep this power from destroying everything you're touching by accident.
I find it fitting that Silver Surfer, a character that had stayed on the backbenches for years, is forced to get a job.
It's so evilly petty, and yet effective.
@@hariman7727 And yet Thanos just chastised Mephisto for being petty when taunting the Silver Surfer as payback. I don't think he was trying to be petty so much as use the planet's bureaucratic nightmare to further delay him from becoming a barrier to his goals.
Thank you!!! I have spent years arguing with so-called experts, who think Thanos glove has special properties. My counter was that it could just as easily have been the Infinity Codpiece.
Big credits to Ron Lim on his artwork on Silver Surfer and the rest of the infinity saga. No-one can draw cosmic characters (particularly The Surfer) quite like he does.
Fun fact about Impossible Man...as a gag or a nod, in a Superman book, it's implied that Impossible Man is actually...Mr Mxyzptlk!
One of his FF appearances that same year had him pull a bowler hat look in one panel too. Again, this was when the two companies were allowed to slip stuff like that in, before the executives were literally burning down parts of their own fanbases to try and one up each other.
These are the stories that got me hooked in the early 90s. Thanos was the coolest character to this ten year old and when Starlin writes him, he's still captivating and complex.
One minor note: the Impossible Man didn't only appear in Fantastic Four, Chris Claremont frequently used him in the 80s, creating a love interest for him in Spider-Woman and sending the X-Men on a scavenger hunt across the Marvel Universe in a rather memorable 80s annual. The character may be a bit one note, but having a living cartoon in the super serious Marvel Universe is actually a nice change of pace. Look at Deadpool.
I remember when Avengers 1 came out and the tease with Thanos, how his servant's remark on "challenging the earth is courting death" got him to turn and smile. Combine that with Hela in Thor Ragnarok and I think some of us were guessing that this would be a 1:1 adaptation of Thanos.
Boy did we back the wrong horse come Infinity War and Endgame.
True, it wasn’t a 1:1 adaptation, but I think he was still closer to the comics than he appears at first glance. He’s still in love with death, just the concept rather than the literal personification. That’s why violence and murder are his first resort, rather than trying to ration or grow new resources.
On what was going on in the pages of 'Quasar" at this time:
I kind of feel bad for the writer of the Quasar comic then, Mark Gruenwald.
I was reading both comics at the time, and enjoying both stories. Maelstrom was slowly building himself up to Godlike power levels in his own scheme, that to me was just as interesting as what Thanos was doing.
However, it seemed that what Starlin was doing with Thanos (and the build up to the Crossover Event of "Infinity Gauntlet") put what Gruenwald was doing on the back burner, and in the end the schemes of Maelstrom just seemed sub-par.
If he could have done this story a few years before Thanos and his quest for the Gems, I think it would have become just as big of an event as "Infinity Gauntlet" turned out to be (and remember, it was Gruenwald who introduced the 'New' cosmic entity of Infinity in the pages of Quasar, as the representation of the Spatial aspect of the Universe, and sister to Eternity, the Temporal Aspect, at least, how he described them)
Its a shame Gruenwald and Starlin couldn't have worked together on some project, as he sadly passed away not long after his Quasar run, as I recall.
I fully agree, and I feel that Chuck isn't representing Maelstrom fairly because during that storyline he was written as nearly pragmatic and collected as Thanos. Even if Maelstrom was definitely a sadist, that issue with Thanos is basically the first moment where he goes full classic supervillain. And just like Thanos, he didn't just get "ultimate power"... through a very complex series of machinations, he exploited the weaknesses of several cosmic players to get the power of Anomaly, which made him possibly the only thing that could not be affected by the gems by the way.
I kind of get the feeling that maybe Chuck read only the issue with the Thanos appearance and not the full Cosmos In Collision storyline.
Dude looks like a jobber and that scene with Thanos looks like the writer having a hissy fit over knowing he’s about to be upstaged
I really love the exploration of thanos character it’s super fascinating in my opinion.
The issue seems to be that Marvel writers need a guy to be their Mongul or even their Darkseid, and Thanos definitely *looks* the part, so all of Starlin's characterization is ignored so we can have him as the big tough cosmic villain. (Which is in and of itself a misunderstanding of Darkseid and the New Gods.)
To be fair, in the original Starlin stories, he wanted to cause stellar genocide simply because he was obsessed with death. That's pretty easy to put in the 'big ultimate villain' role. Didn't help that Thomas advised Starlin to basically rip-off Darkseid in the first place.
Except Thanos was no longer a villain at the end of Gauntlet.
shockingly there is more than enough stuff to support life, even without space travel.
Awaiting the sequel where Thanos has a face-turn and decides to erase all billionaires.
Yes, technically. No, in reality, because human beings are inherently selfish. 38% of the world's population is obese and that number will reach 50% by 2035. Or in other words, ''half of the people on Earth are eating the f-k too much.'' If those people gave their extra food to the poor and the starving there would be no poor and the starving. But they don't want to. They just sit at home blaming others because blaming others is the greatest cope of them all.
The claim is that there will be less suffering if there's more to go around, and as long as an irresistable force does the culling, suffering will be reduced. Mind, it's also true that that's the stupidest, most destructive, and least ethical means of kicking the can down the road (because the only permanent solution is to end all life and ensure it never starts again.)
Dread it, read it...
Thanos' arrogance is the same arrogance as any other man who thinks himself a god.
He has declared what will happen, that there is no hope of a better way and that only violence and death at his hand can solve it. Humanity, much to his anger, continues to prove him wrong.
If Phase 4 and 5 MCU had been half as good as this, we'd still be riding the high of the Superhero genre.
Or at least the movies wouldn't be tanking horribly.
Interestingly, Thanos Quest was used to setup the Ego Gem revelation, that the being that created the universe was, in fact, still alive within a SEVENTH Infinity Gem, the aforementioned Ego Gem. By bringing all Seven Gems together, you'd basically collapse her(And while Reed opines that she's an it, not a female, she identifies herself with female pronouns...again just a reminder that Reed Richards is an asshole), and all the universe together into a single being again, not her original body, she admits, but it would free her from the limitations this reality has put on itself, and she claims would make everyone blissful forever.
The BEYONDER of all people is the one to deal with her, as this was when his backstory was still that he had that as his origin, that he's a living universe, and was thus, the same sort of being as her, just one that languished until he found this place. Of course, he couldn't bring himself to destroy her, and put her in a space between universes, where she's get knocked out when the Ultraverse merged with the main Marvel Continuity(Marvel had bought them for the printing technique they were using at the time), and thanks to the universe she's in no longer being just her, they're able to destroy the Ego Gem, and we don't talk about it anymore.
Beyonder actually tried killing her, learned that death is part of life and by ending death he was actually causing more chaos in his quest to be a protector like the superheroes, and was forced to exhaust a lot of his power to kill a man, thus bringing death back. I mean it's Secret Wars II and we don't like to talk about it apparently but it still happened.
I'll admit, the opening 2 issues confuse me as to Thanos' purpose. I get they wanted a message book about overpopulation, one that worked so well by the time the movie came out our population increased 50%, but in universe, all it did was tip the surfer off to his threat with a pitch he had no chance of selling.
Maybe it's part of Thanos' self sabatouge habit about to come up.
I think it's more that he's the perfect Agent of Death. Remember that it is not the madman shouting in the street some wild theory or decrying the unknowable controllers of reality that you should fear. It is the madman who can sit across a table from you and preach his insanity in perfect clarity that is the real terror.
Thanos is, after all, first and always, the Mad Titan.
It's sadly a view that hasn't been born out by reality (first world countries ALL have declining birth rates), but it's still believed by some who take the "population bomb" mentality as stronger than the Gospels... to everyone else' detriment.
As an ecologist, I grind my teeth every time writers give a "message" about overpopulation (which is a real problem, with 8 billion humans and growing) to the _villain_ and make his methods of "solving" it utter idiotic. Don't get me started.
@@TF2CrunchyFrog it angers me because we have people in the world whose solution to overpopulation is to demand that we stop using nitrate fertilizers and also demand that we go back to an agrarian lifestyle which can't support the world's population and will cause billions to die.
It also angers me because the decreasing birth rate in first world countries is completely ignored for population bomb ideology, instead of accepting that humanity can innovate and produce enough to support the people if governments and billionaires would stop screwing with our ability to operate and function.
@@hariman7727 Look at Japan. Some people are worried they're about to go extinct as a culture if not a country because of the current low birth rate.
I always liked the idea that MCU Thanos just thought there was an overpopulation problem, but there really wasn’t. It’s just something that only existed in his crazy purple head.
I honestly think a lot of people took MCU Infinity War Thanos at his word too much. Sure, he might believe he’s doing things for the right reasons, but that’s just a lie he tells himself. The truth is, deep down, he loves death and destruction. It’s why he was excited to fight Hulk, why he tortured Nebula, why he doubled down when the Avengers tried to reverse the Snap. Thanos didn’t want to save the universe, he wanted a justification for his desire to bathe it in blood. He’s a monster who wants to believe he’s a hero.
@@magnusprime962 That makes more sense than a quixotic attempt to 'save' the universe by halving the population, when given an abundance of resources life just survives (and multiplies) even faster. A doubling in one generation isn't hard; even with something with as slow a life cycle as humans means you only put off whatever problem you see by less than a century.
No he adamantly believed in his stupid plan that’s why he destroyed the gems after retiring as he didn’t see a further use for them and to remove temptation to do anything different with them . They wanted to keep the killing half the universe thing from the comics but give it a different context and what they decided on makes him look like a shortsighted idiot despite also being portrayed as a master schemer good at being a step ahead of everyone else.
Where is part 5
i wonder if you'd review Thanos Rising and how it could fail to understand the character. You seem like a fan of him and i am one too, so i would love to see your thoughts in that series. Also the Thanos series by Donny Cates, as i am intrigued if they got the character right or not.
Thanos Rising (2013) is not a good Thanos story
Plenty of people praise the Thanos Rising story by Jason Aaron, thinking he did something profound with Thanos, when in reality, he badly streamlined both Thanos and the society of the Titanian Eternals as estabilished by Jim Starlin and really, it served more as a prologue to Hickman's Infinity event.
I dislike this comic. I dislike it so much as a fan of Marvel Cosmic and Jim Starlin's works. It undermines decades of established character history. I refuse to consider it canon at all and neither should any Thanos fan. It is among the worst things Marvel has ever produced. I say this without exaggeration. Up there with Captain America being a HYDRA agent and Spider Man's One More Day and Thor becoming a jobber with multiple hammers who is suddenly weaker than She-Hulk.
1) It’s like Jason Aaron had a checklist for writing Thanos’ backstory and he went through it as fast and put as little thought and effort into getting it done as possible. It lasts only five issues. As soon as Thanos does one thing, the issue is over. It’s only in the very last two issues that Thanos starts to be an evil overlord, at no point does Thanos take any sort of initiative. Even then he’s just going around slaughtering random planets aimlessly.
2) Instead of Thanos’ mother being a member of a highly tolerant and enlightened society of ancient superhumans, she was crazy and tried to kill Thanos at birth because he was ugly (and the thing about this comic is that it says she was right.) Instead of Titan being this highly advanced science world with demigods from greek mythology and related to the Eternals, it looks straight out of the Jetsons, and its people die as easily as normal humans. Can you imagine the outrage if someone makes a Gandalf or Sauron origin Story where he was a former Drug addict in a mundane urban setting? Or if It turns out the Force from Star Wars is supplied by a bunch of micro-org....uh, nevermind.
3) Chronos, the God of Titan and Thanos' grandfather, can casually show up at Mentor and Thanos’ breakfast table. He knows that Thanos is murdering people, but says nothing. It’s almost like Aaron forgot that Titan had a holographic super computer called ISAAC who could have fulfilled this role, instead of having Chronos, Titan’s God just hanging out with the titans and gossiping.
4) Instead of Thanos being fascinated by nihilism and finding Death in a forgotten temple on Titan, she manifested as a hallucinatory and diabolical teenage girl that strung him around by his balls his whole life. Instead of Lady Death being silent to Thanos, something that caused great frustration in Thanos, she instead never shuts up, constantly nagging “When are you going to kill more people? Come on. When you’ve killed enough people, then we can do the nasty!” Death would not say this. This is utter blasphemy. She also wouldn’t cackle like a mad woman and relish in the agony of people dying. Death does not like suffering. Death is a soother of pain and a impartial force of nature.
5) Instead of Thanos killing his mother on Titan with the nuclear bombardment, which is something Starlin reiterated again and again was the official way that Thano’s mother died, Thanos vivisects her while she’s wearing her most sexy lingerie.
6) Instead of Thanos swearing to have never children,because a faithful servant to Death would never create life, he instead sleeps around and has many illegitimate children.
7) Instead of Thanos touring the universe, honing his mystical and scientific skills and mastering his powers, we learn he was a common dock worker for a small band of pirates. Instead of acquiring power and authority by force, Thanos accidentally becomes a space pirate captain when he swings his sword at the previous captain with his eyes closed because he’s too scared to fight.
8) this Thanos is so stupid that he never realizes who the teenage girl who has followed him around everywhere, the one that no one else can see is. When he finds out she’s actually Death, he’s horrified and attempts suicide. The Thanos i'm used to read would smile and say “I always knew who you were. Why did you hide your true self from me all this time? You are the keeper of my heart, and I love you as you truly are.”
9) Death even tells him that she’ll love him once he “becomes the God who holds Infinity in the palm of his hand.” That’s funny. Did Mr. Aaron not read Infinity Gauntlet where a major plot point was that Death absolutely hated Thanos after he acquired the Infinity Gems and had the audacity to become more powerful than her? Was he too busy making Jane Foster an invincible Mary Sue and turn Odin into a colossal jerk?
10) And then to add more inconsitencies, it tells the reader Death might not even exist, except in Thanos’ mind. Which is weird since Eros saw Lady Death in Infinity Gauntlet too, along whit many other characters.
11) Speaking of Eros. Yeah. He’s not in this comic. I think he’s just in one panel at the breakfast table with Chronos, Thanos and Mentor. It’s almost like the author realized that the younger brother of Thanos would be a problem if Thanos’ mother was crazy and she would be terrified of producing another monster like Thanos. If so then just when and how was Eros born and conceived? It doesn’t matter, because Mr. Aaron doesn’t care about such a pivotal character in Thanos’ backstory. It’s sad when I have to point out continuity errors to an author who was paid to pay attention to continuity.
12) Even taking away the horrible portrayal of Thanos, it makes no sense continuity wise. According to this story, Titan was destroyed YEARS ago. So how do all the stories that have taken place on Titan exist in continuity? And Death even used Marlo for a period of time to hide from Thanos, so at least Marlo, Rick, and Hulk know Death exists as well as Warlock, the Surfer, etc.
13) the comic ends with Thanos winning Death’s love, and he just walks away from her. HE walks away from HER. What next? Sauron finds the One Ring, and sets it down on a rock and walks away because it got some rust on it and it doesn’t quite fit his finger anymore? It’s just as plausible as the idiocy I’ve just witnessed.
13) Tegan O'Neil was right! whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com/2013/04/sir-thanos-rising-1-marvel-made-mistake.html
I get that Thanos is a tough character to write - full of inconsistencies and contradictions. This story line is not the way to resolve the inconsistencies and contradictions. It would’ve been better to just deal with them the old fashioned way: don’t think about them too much and write a good adventure story with Adam Warlock, pshychedelic artwork and metaphysical philosophy. There is no logic or reason to Thanos’ craziness. That’s why crazy is called crazy and Thanos is called “The MAD Titan.” This attempt to impose a dark psychological background story onto Thanos to explain his madness just feels wrong and stands in stark contrast to the best Thanos stories told to date.
Would you accept a Batman origin story where it was revealed that Bruce Wayme was a hobo named Crazy Steve who built Alfred as a robot butler, created Joker in a lab and tortured Dick Grayson to make him Robin and couldn’t actually fight without the aid of his Batsuit, even if DC considered it canon?
This wasn’t Thanos. This was a bad remake of Derf Backderf's My Friend Dahmer.
The sad thing is the younger comic book reader or someone who wants to learn more about Thanos is going to pick this up and regard it as official; this Thanos Rising portrayal of a confused, easily manipulated, sexually frustrated, weak, whiny little jerk.
Why didn’t Jim Starlin write this instead?! Or even Ron Marz or Keith Giffen?
Basically, this book is an embarrassment to the Thanos characterisation and continuity. Thanos Rising is at best the distorted memories of a Thanosi clone dying in Thanos' laboratory. I'm relieved that the Russo Bros. ignored this story for the MCU version of Thanos.
Oh, and the comic also implies that Thanos sleeps with rotting female corpses on a regular basis. Because that’s a mental image that comic book readers need in their heads.
@@MinscFromBaldursGate92a bit long, but well said.
Bringing up the Doom/Arcade incident is kind of ironic since Sterlin has since then earned the reputation of retconning any incident of Thanos being defeated (leading to [in]famous Squirrel Girl panel).
Having read the lead-up to Infinity Gauntlet before Infinity War (thanks to Marvel Infinity) the Betweener bit did irk me, since what Chuck doesn't mention here, Thanos for some undisclosed reason is "beyond fate" and Master Order and Lord Chaos can't perceive or effect him (So Inbeetweer trying to throw the blame on Thanos falls on deaf ears).
At the same it funny in another way Thanos has to fall victim to later power creep as a fighting Champion he says he avoided direct contact with powerhouses as that elder or the Hulk.
Spoilers for Infinity Gaultlet:
And as seen here and for quite some time in the event itself THanos is not really interested in killing half the universe outside of pleasing Mistress Death.
He spends a good while being drunk with the Gem's power before he summons Death again and remembers that was supposed to do something.
And with a bit theartic snaps his finger and kills half of the universe, as an afterthought.
At least up to and including Infinity Gauntlet, Starlin made a serious effort to use all the characters as characters and give everyone a fair share. Starting with Infinity War and definitely on his later stories, unless you're Thanos, Warlock or part of the Infinity Watch (and Dr Strange for some reason), basically every other single character is written like an idiot. I wonder how far Chuck's retrospective is going to go, because I'd like to see what he thinks of how Starlin treats other characters later in his career.
@@randomhourglass5687 I'd say it starts with IG, since the only reason Thanos loses is because he (subconsciously) doesn't want to win. So he's not beaten (and never will be from that point is Starlin can help it).
I’d say that Doom scene is great it’s one of the reasons that character is as beloved as he is today because you had writers like that talking a second to realize when he was misused and do something with it to build him up rather than letting him be a jumbled confusing mess of a character like Magneto was during this time
After Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos was no longer a villain according to Starlin.
The Ka-Zar and Thor stories that got retconned in Infinity Abyss regressed Thanos back into a villain with no explanation.
I actually saw someone on reddit suggest using the Impossible Man as a character on Loki just the other day, someone involved with the TVA in some fashion.
Geez, Thanos is utterly _boring._ He is impossible to beat, he doesnt have to overcome any personal obstacles, yawn.
Infinity Gauntlet does give him a weakness later on. But after that, Starlin gets stuck in a cycle of "I must make Thanos the most impossibly undefeatable character in the history of fiction" for a while.