Thanos Is God

Posted by Nostalgiaholic | on March 3, 2008

I’m telling ya, if you like comics with far-out themes and Hawkwind album-style visuals, you owe it to yourself to track down this series.

I just had my mind blown by the online trailer for the new Iron Man movie, and it occurred to me that I haven’t contributed much to the “Comics” section of this yellow submarine we call Nostalgiaholic-dot-com. Cover of Infinity Gauntlet #1

Now, I had quite the love affair with comic books during my formative years (you know, the usual campy spandex-wearing super hero stuff), and I believe they had an enormous impact on my developing (and now completely over-active) imagination. I remember dropping way too much money on different comic titles in grade school, but only a handful of those stories really changed my perception of what a comic book could be. Alan Moore’s DC series Watchmen was one, and Shade : The Changing Man. The first Marvel graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel was another, and who can forget Neil Gaiman’s reality-bending Sandman series ? All these illuminated newsstand manuscripts broke the mold when it came to complexity of storytelling, and artistic creativity… but the one that I’ll always remember completely blowing my mind was a six-issue mini-series by Marvel comics called The Infinity Gauntlet.

Cover of Infinity Gauntlet #2 Written in 1991 by the deep-space-loving Jim Starlin, and drawn by Ron Lim and George Perez, the series of six comics were massively acclaimed. There were reports that comic geeks (myself included) were having religious awakenings by simply reading the damn things. The heavy Sci-Fi and mythological overtones of the story were stretching the perception of comics as “lowbrow” and allowing them to rise to the vistas of imagination that before then were the exclusive domain of hard sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Hogan, and Heinlein.

See, the whole six books focus on this short purple alien dude named Thanos who just got back from a galaxy-wide crime spree. He lifted these relics called “Infinity Gems” right out from under the noses of some pretty powerful cosmic beings. These six gems each control an aspect of existence (ie. space, time, reality, the soul, power, and the mind) and when Thanos welds ‘em onto his left glove, he becomes the absolute master of all reality. He becomes, in essence, God…. There’s only one problem….

….brother is completely insane….

Yep, the ridgey-chinned weirdo is the ultimate nihilist, he loves death and destruction so much that he assembled this vast amount of power just so he could win a date with Death herself (in the Marvel universe death is a lady). Unfortunately for our purple potentate, Death isn’t interested in short men, no matter how much god-like power they wield. So what is a potential suitor have to do to impress a cosmic concept like death you ask ? You gotta kill….. a whole freakin lot.

So at the end of the first issue (yeah, ALL these unbelievable concepts were packed into just one book) Thanos gathers his undisputed power over everything around him and simply snaps his fingers… Killing half of the population of the universe.

Now obviously an act like wiping out half the galaxy can’t go unnoticed, so the remaining super heroes in the Marvel Universe ban together to try and stop the mad titan from doing anything else that’s hazardous to universal sanity. Everyone from Spiderman to the Incredible Hulk, to Captain America, to Satan himself tries to take down Thanos, but he’s a pretty savvy God, and easily beats, kills and mutilates them all. Try to understand that these characters had been a part of my life since I could first read, so seeing them laid to waste by a power-mad midget with magic fingers was kinda traumatic… but also a shattering introduction to thinking waaaaaaaaaaaaaay outside the box.

Thanos taking names…

A climatic “I dropped the glove” routine finishes off the series where everyone gets a crack at becoming God, and somehow everything gets put back the way it was before Thanos went on his power-bender. Does our mad villain get to finally get fresh with lady death? Does he get to do le petit mort with madame mort ? Can I possible find a stranger more obscure innuendo to use here ? I wont tell. It might spoil the ending for those of you are willing to track it down.

The art is a blend of classic comic book muscley-goodness (more in the later issues when it’s just Lim’s art) and reality warping head-trips. It was some of the first comic books that I remember reading that completely dispensed with the classic “left-to-right, everything in neat little panels” format. It was almost as if Thanos’ ability to warp reality in the story was actually tearing apart the structure of the comic book itself. He actually kicks off the series back in issue #1 by pulling apart the pieces of the comic’s letterhead to help form one giant word “GOD” on the first page. Who’s ‘yo purple daddy ?

THanos figure from Diamond Select

The series spawned two other six-issue spin-offs The Infinity War in 1992 and The Infinity Crusade in 1993, which were met with met with an overwhelming “whatever”. More recently Capcom brought out a video game featuring the characters from the Infinity Gauntlet series beating the bejezzsus out of each other surrounded by flashing seizure-inducing lights. And for the geek who has it all, check out this figure pic I scored from Diamond Select toys showcasing the mad God himself poised to bring the house down. (at right).

I’m telling ya, if you like comics with far-out themes and Hawkwind album-style visuals, you owe it to yourself to track down this series.

I think my younger brother has got my comics hidden around our parent’s house in Belleville somewhere. Maybe I should give him a call.

Much love…

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