 Okay, here I am again two days after publishing my big depressing video about how I'm not going to be spending time on these videos anymore, but this is something that I should have done weeks ago. I should have done it years ago. In fact, I started work on it years ago, but I really need to tell you about Thanos. This is the big weekend of the Avengers Infinity War movie and people won't shut up about it. So here I am, not shutting up about it. Before I get into his fictitious history, the number one thing you need to know about Thanos is that the man who created him, the writer-artist Jim Starlin, has not been paid by Marvel. He is not getting money. I've said this many times over the course of the years that I've been making these videos. If you love the product, you should extend that love to the artists. People in Disney have a terrible history of taking other people's work and not including them in the profits. I'll talk more about that at the end of the video. Meanwhile, here's the big deal about Thanos. He made his first appearance in Iron Man number 55 of all places. It was 1972, I think. Here's page one of that book, which is the first appearance of Drax the Destroyer. Now, this doesn't look like the Drax that you know from the movies, because the Drax from the movies has nothing to do with the Drax from the comics. Drax the Destroyer was originally an artificial being created by Kronos, the patriarchal father god of the Titans. Yes, the Greco-Roman mythological characters, the Titans. He was created for one purpose, and that was to hunt down and kill Thanos. In this issue of Iron Man Thanos was on Earth. Drax recruited to help from Iron Man. They fought Thanos. It turned out they'd been fighting a robot. The stories continued from there in Iron Man and in Marvel Feature, I think, and then Jim Starlin became the writer and artist on the Captain Marvel series. So he picked up the story there. Now, in this particular issue, I think it was issue 25, maybe 24, 26, whatever. Here's the picture. The origin story of Thanos is told when Zeus and his brother gods defeated the Titans and drove Kronos and the others from Olympus and from Earth. One of Zeus's brothers was this character named Alars. He had a disagreement with Zeus about how to govern the new Olympians. So he left Olympus and Earth and went looking around the solar system for another place to live. He found the planet Titan, which is the moon of Saturn that we're all familiar with. In On Titan, he found the wreckage of a society that had destroyed itself through war. He moved in. He took a wife. He had children. One of those children was Thanos. His other son, he named Eros, and yes, that is the ancient Greek word for love. The name Thanos is, of course, a reference to Thanatos, which is the ancient Greek word for death. So you've got two brothers here who are love and death and they are nephews of Zeus. As far as I know, this telling of the origin of Thanos was never revisited. In fact, in subsequent decades, the Titans were rewritten to be descended from the Eternals, who are superpowered genetic cousins of humans living among us here on Earth. The Eternals were created by Jack Kirby and everything in comics eventually always comes back around to Jack Kirby. I'll be mentioning him again. Going back to the story, Thanos was on Earth looking for the cosmic cube. He had heard about this device invented by human supervillains called the Cosmic Cube, which is a crystalline machine that allows its user to directly access the fabric of reality. It's a terrifying idea. It's not like a wishing machine. Thanos does call it, quote, an Aladdin's lamp, unquote, but that's really not what it is. It's more difficult to use apparently. The supervillain who had used it originally was the Red Skull. He didn't have much luck with it. He was so inept that Captain America was able to just throw his shield and knock it out of the skull's hands. The cube was lost in the ocean. Thanos came to Earth accompanied by this eerie figure in a black cloak who is death. Now it's not crazy to think of Thanos consorting physically and personally with death when you consider him to be descended from the ancient gods. It kind of fits when you look at it that way. When he's not descended from the Olympian gods, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But he did locate the cube. He did retrieve it and in Captain Marvel number 31, which was published in 1973, this was a comic book that I bought when I was seven or eight years old. This was long before I was a collector, but I bought this one book and I read it and it blew my mind. As much as I loved it, I did not seek out the next issue. And here's why. During the story, there's a lot of great fighting going on and there's a lot of great psychedelic art by Jim Starlin. Look at this stuff. Thanos makes a show of tossing away the cube. He's enveloped in energy and he tosses away the cube because he doesn't need it anymore. And the Avengers look up in the sky and Thanos has turned himself into God. That cliffhanger was so perfect and so over the top. I think that even as a child, I felt like the story could never live up to that. And years later, when I started collecting comics, I went back and bought those issues and I was right. In subsequent issues, there was just some more fighting. I mean, why when Thanos has become God himself? Why is there more fighting? But anyway, here's how this fight ended. Captain Marvel realized that it had been a trick, that the cube was the key. He went back to destroy it even as Thanos was making him die. And when the cube was destroyed, this happened. Death has clearly taken Thanos at this point. But then after this, Jim Starlin was moved over to Strange Tales where he was writing and drawing the story of Adam Warlock. And Warlock finds himself being assisted by a shadowy figure who won't reveal his identity. But it turns out to be Thanos. And Thanos reveals that when the cube was destroyed, he reverted back to his mortal form at the center of the universe where he was retrieved by his starship, the crew of his starship. It was just kind of a throwaway little thing. But then in 1977, the year Star Wars came out coincidentally, Thanos is back. He has collected a series of six gems that he calls the Soul Gems. They didn't call him the Infinity Gems at the time. But he is using the power of these gems combined to destroy stars. He is trying to get back into the good graces of death. He is determined to destroy every star in the universe one at a time. And he actually starts doing it. But in Avengers Annual Number 7 that summer, Thanos reveals something else about how he survived. This is the thing, if you ask me, that separates Thanos from other run-of-the-mill supervillains. He's not just another Joker or a Lex Luthor or a Dr. Doom. Death had abandoned him. That death had turned her back on him. He couldn't die. He was not just your average death worshiper. He literally loved death. He was literally personally in love with death. And being separated from death was the most hurtful thing that death could do to him. Now see, this is mythology stuff. This is great stuff. The first time Thanos appeared in the Avengers films at the end of the credits, I think it was at the first Avengers film, this other character said to him, to fight them would be to court death, and then Thanos grins. That was an in-joke. It was a reference to Thanos' past in the comics. He was literally courting death. I haven't seen the new movies, I haven't seen them in some time, I don't know what Thanos is actually doing, I doubt they're including any of this interesting history. Anyway, at the end of the battle, the Soul Gems, Adam Warlock, thoroughly killed Thanos this time. Thanos was dead. This was 1977. That was the year that I really started buying and collecting comics. So throughout the whole decade of the 80s, when I was a real comics fan, Thanos was dead. He never came back. There was no talk of him coming back. But then in 1987 or 88, the big battle of the Soul Gems in Avengers Annual 7 and Marvel 2 and 1 Annual 2 had brought in all the big characters from all over Marvel comics. It was the first big crossover event. Marvel started doing that all the time. All through the 80s, every summer, there would be a big crossover event that would involve every character and every series that they were publishing. In 1987, they brought Jim Starlin back to Marvel and they wanted him to bring back Thanos to start doing these bigger and more interesting crossover events. And that's where the Infinity Gauntlet came from. It was a six issue miniseries that involved hundreds of characters and every series that Marvel was publishing at the time, which was a lot. This was the 1980s. Basically the story was that death sitting there on her throne in the realm of death, she had decided that there wasn't enough death going on in the living world. So she sent her greatest warrior of all time back to the living world. That's it. That's how he got back. That year, there was the Infinity Gauntlet miniseries. The next summer, there was the Infinity War miniseries. The summer after that, there was the Infinity Crusade series. By this time, I was sick of it, even though Jim Starlin was writing them. In the early 90s, I stopped buying comics really altogether and I don't read them very much anymore. I do know that in the late 90s, Jim Starlin did a couple of interesting miniseries with Thanos, one called the Affinity Abyss, and another really interesting miniseries called The End. If you're really interested in Thanos and want to read some of his back stories, read The End. Anyway, that's the real origin and early history of Thanos. If you're wondering why Thanos looks so much like the big villain in the upcoming DC movies, whose name is Darkseid, I mean, you've got two purple, stony-faced super villains from outer space here. They look almost exactly the same. If you're wondering why they look so much the same is because at the time when Jim Starlin created Thanos, he was inspired by the work that Jack Kirby was doing at DC Comics at the time. See, I said I was going to mention Jack Kirby again. Jack Kirby had created a series over there called The New Gods, and they were literally New Gods. They had nothing to do with ancient mythology. They were just new stuff that Kirby invented. And the big evil villain of The New Gods was this character named Darkseid. Jim Starlin was inspired by that. He thought there should be a new generation of gods in Marvel, except he made them literally a new generation of the Greco-Roman gods, which has unfortunately been written out of the story. The main inspiration for Thanos though was this character in The New Gods called, I forget his name right now, Metron was his name. That's right. It's Metron. But Metron was a scientist. He sat in his big cosmic outer space chair and flew around the universe learning stuff. He was uninvolved in any conflicts, he didn't care. That was what Jim Starlin was inspired by. And you can tell in this early drawing he did of Thanos. One of the editors, according to Jim Starlin himself, one of the editors at Marvel at the time told him, and I'm misquoting him here, but basically said if you're going to rip off Jack Kirby, then rip off Darkseid. So over the course of his next few appearances, Thanos became beefier and bigger and more stony-faced and that's where his look comes from. And the fact that Marvel ultimately rewrote the Titans to be descended from the Eternals, which were later created by Jack Kirby at Marvel, there's some vicious irony for you there. Beginning back to what I was saying at the beginning, Jim Starlin has not been compensated for his characters and his stories. He also created Gamora and Drax the Destroyer, if you didn't know that. Steve Engelhardt who created Star-Lord has never been paid for Star-Lord. You've got Gary Friedrich who was the first artist to draw a Ghost Rider. He's never been included in any of these profits. In fact, recently Jim Starlin had a final falling out with Marvel. He walked away from them and said that he's never coming back. He revealed that there is a minor character in the Batman V Superman movie. He's a Russian mobster named Anatoly something. This was a character that was created by Jim Starlin, a throwaway minor character that he created over at DC Comics, but that character apparently appeared in the Batman V Superman movie. Jim Starlin tells us that DC Comics paid him more for that one appearance by that one character in that one movie than Marvel has ever paid him for Thanos ever. I tell people this all the time and they shake their heads and say that's terrible and then they go see the movies. And I want to say again, if you love these stories and you love these characters you should extend that love to their creators. Even if you don't know them personally, you should concede that the creators should be included in the money that's coming from these movies. These movies bring in a billion dollars in their first week. That's how profitable these movies have become. And for the creators to not be included at all, that's more than just a shame for you to shake your head at. That's evil. And that's the one thing that you need to know about Thanos. And I know you're going to go see the movie, okay, bye.