Tag: Jim Starlin

COSMIC-LEVEL SPOILER ahead, so stop reading if you haven’t seen “The Avengers” — although with $775 million in worldwide box office it’s getting harder to find Marvel fans that haven’t seen director Joss Whedon’s all-star, crowd-pleasing epic. As the credits roll on “The Avengers,” moviegoers see a sinister alien revealed — it’s Thanos, a being obsessed with nihilism and death, eventually falling in love with its embodiment, Mistress Death. The Mad Titan first appeared in Iron Man #55 in 1973 and would become a signature figure in the Marvel Universe’s “cosmic level” sagas — the struggles that brought heroes, monsters, aliens, immortals and gods into conflicts that spilled across space, time and other dimensions. The character was created by artist and writer Jim Starlin, who we caught up with to talk about his Mad Titan getting a Hollywood close-up. HC: When ...

The new game Marvel Super Hero Squad: The Infinity Gauntlet has just hit store shelves, and I watched the trailer below with a bit of fascination. The reason? I continue to be surprised by the ability of Marvel and DC to create versions of their characters that are wildly different in tone. When I was a young comics fan in the early 1980s, Thanos was a murderous butcher on a cosmic scale, a guy who actually romanced death and kissed her right on the lips — or would have if, you know, death’s femine aspect actually had lips. Now Thanos is part of a video game for tykes, a sort of lightweight Skeletor who sound like he needs a cough drop. This is hardly new nor surprising in the corporate age of full brand exploitation – go to a store such as Target and you’ll find a Blu-ray copy of ...