Thanos Annual 2018 - "Exhibition" & "The Comfort of the Good"

[laughing_tree]

He gets (understandably) the Darkseid comparison, but that's only ever a surface one. They couldn't be further apart to write. Darkseid is cold. Thanos is hot. Darkseid's genocide is math. Thanos' genocide is poetry. In short, Thanos is basically a purple Lord Byron. -- Kieron Gillen

"Exhibition," by Kieron Gillen and Andre Araujo:







"The Comfort of the Good," by Al Ewing and Frazer Irving:

Comments

[thanekos]

Far-Gone Future Frank got some pathos before his spinoff mini.

Funky.

[cyberghostface]

It is kind of funny how this comic goes out of its way to make Thanos a dick given how the movie humanized him.

[starwolf_oakley]

One BIG similarity between Thanos and Darkseid? They are both spiteful.

In the Hal Jordan SPECTRE series, Darkseid banished one of his "disrespectful" subjects to Earth, where her artwork was constantly rejected.

Of course, Darkseid is spiteful if you cross him. Thanos is spiteful if you are there.

[crinos]

For the Specter thing is, I think the point there is that Darkseid considered giving that subject her freedom as punishment because he considers having choice and free will to be a terrible state of being, just as Thanos considers living to be a horrible state of being (Hence his love of death).

Sure, that lady is getting her work rejected, but her life is now her own, and even though she now has to deal with hardships aside from being a servant to Darkseid, she still gets to live her life her own way.

We see something similar in an arc of Young Justice. Where Darkseid punishes Secret for not joining him.... by making her a normal person again. Because Darkseid considers just being "Ordinary" to be a punishment. It doesn't occur to him that he just punished her by giving her exactly what she always wanted.

[silicondream]

I don't remember Thanos being particularly spiteful in most of his appearances. The recent comics have him doing a lot more petty dickery than I'm used to from him.

He'd show occasional flashes of spite toward people he had a personal grudge against, like Eros or Warlock, but with ordinary folks he either killed them or ignored them. Wasn't big on inflicting pain and suffering, either.

[mindsweeper]

Thanos' interests should probably be above this, but it seems like writers enjoy doing a petty villain toying with regular people story. DC does it with Lex and Joker, which makes more sense.

Now, if he ended Mr. Sinister's impossible-to-kill status, I might enjoy that.

[blueprintstyles]

Did Thanos just say he destroyed the afterlife? Because I feel that should be a bigger deal and have major repercussions.

[onsokumaru]

It's just the afterlife of that one species.

[crinos]

I think the implication is that this particular alien species had built some sort of cosmic super computer which acted as their afterlife, and Thanos destroyed that.

That doesn't really preclude the existence of other afterlives (Since we've seen that places like Valhalla, Hades, and Niffelheim all exist. I don't think Thanos could destroy all those without dealing with some blowback from a ton of guys way above his pay grade).

[draganoche]

That afterlife was a technological one made by a cosmic being for that race.

[nyadnar17]

After the movie the only thing I can think of when I see comic Thanos is "incel".

Even now that he is more of a Nihilist than a really aggressive "suitor" it still rings hollow because he is always shown as a negative Nihilist. For a true Nihilist positivity should be on the table as well.

[zachbeacon]

"incel"

And once again real life ruins some perfectly good comics.

[arilou_skiff]

I kind of agree that they are different people in a lot of ways. (partially, I think, though Hickman and others have kind of muddled the waters, in that Thanos isn't an empire-builder: He occasionally has minions or henchmen, but he usually just sort of waddles along on his own, while Darkseid is the ruler of a world)

While I do like movie Thanos, he is weirdly unlike comics-Thanos, in how their goals and means and personalities interact. Comics-Thanos isn't a "hard man making hard choices for the Greater Good", his sympathethic qualities (when they show up) are almost entirely personal: His relationships with Gamora and sometimes Adam, his occasional self-defeating streak, his longing and loneliness. He is never a "for the greater good" kind of guy (even when he did team up with the good guys, it was usually for personal, rather than ideological reasons)