The Silver Surfer #35

[cyberghostface]

"I consider [Thanos] to be an anti-hero…because he’s been the good guy as often as he’s been the bad guy in the stories. So I don’t consider him a villain. But because he’s not in that hero category I always found him more fascinating to write. I didn’t have to get restricted on where he would go and how he would react to things. I could make him not as appealing as I would have to make him if he were a hero. He could go off on his own little dark ways and it would still make perfect sense." -- Jim Starlin

Comments

[crinos]

Well to be fair, the death thing is kind of silly.

"Thanos loves the concept of Death because he considers living a horrible state of being. Now lets throw all pretense of metaphor out the window by having there be a literal physical personification of Death who is a sexy lady (who is sometimes a Skeleton) whom Thanos wants to fuck."

I mean, Darkseid developed the same problem: In the original stories the Anti Life Equation was just a thing that gives you mind control, because Anti Life is fascism, its tyranny, if you are living without free will, you aren't really living, and you may as well be a robot. But later stories made the Anti Life Equation a living thing that was destroying planets and stuff and gave it other weird powers, and the Metaphor gets lost in the shuffle.

Kind of the problem with Multiple writers. Some writers are not gonna get what the original writer was going for with a story (Of course the opposite is True: Red Hulk didn't come into his own until he was removed from Loeb's wing and lost his uber plot armor, and he went from the unbeatable bad guy OC to The guy who gets dunked on all the time for the shit he pulled when he was an unbeatable bad guy OC)

[arilou_skiff]

To be honest, I like the weird mixing of metaphor and literalness, it's quirky and weird and kind of interesting. Thanos loves Death because on some level he is suicidial (and intends to take people down with him as well) but Death is also a person that he loves. Is it incoherent? Hell yes, but it's interesting and quirky and weird in a way that I like.

It's like an Ikuhara anime, where bears are lesbians but also literally bears.

[crinos]

Well I like it too, but I think its the kind of weird concept that's hard to sell to a movie going audience that may not be familiar with Thanos' backstory.

And for the record, I actually kind of like Movie Thanos. I watched Infinity War last Saturday, and I was prepared to hate the guy, but I didn't. He wasn't smug or gloating like Comic Thanos can be, he was just tired and kind of sad. I mean he couldn't even muster a smile after he had gotten what he wanted.

Of course, I think they're saving the gloating smugness for Endgame if the voiceovers from the trailer are any indication.

[arilou_skiff]

Oh, I don't mind comics Thanos per se, but he's just not *Thanos* if you know what I mean...

Thanos particular brand of pompous snarkiness is kind of distinct.