The Avengers: Thanos

Many comic book fans would be quick to compare the Mad Titan Thanos to the superbly powerful DC Comics villain Darkseid. It is a fair comparison as both villains have certain powerful and dominating presence due to their power and stature. Thanos may mean more to the Marvel Universe then Darkseid does to the DC Universe due to the fact that when he was in possession of the Infinity Gauntlet, it took everyone in the Marvel-verse to kill him. Yet, despite the combined efforts of everyone, heroes and villains alike, Thanos held them all off by himself. He is a powerful entity even without the Gauntlet as he has superhuman strength, durability, endurance, reflexes, agility and his skin is impervious to all elements. The entity Death also "cursed" him leaving him immortal. His mind is also impervious to any kind of psychic attack from telepathy. All in all, he is the be-all to end all that is Marvel. He is the biggest of the bads. Thanos first appearance in the Marvel Universe came in the Iron Man comic book series on the fifty-fifth issue in 1973. He also is one of the few beings that has used the Infinity Gauntlet, the Cosmic Cube and the Soul Gems. Thus, he sure does love himself some power.

Thanos isn't exactly from around our planet. Thus he is not a evolved human being but instead he is a species called Eternals from Saturn's moon, Titan. He was also one of the last sons of the original colonists, Mentor and Sui-San. At birth he was different from other Eternals as he was rather monstrous and more imposing unlike his brother Starfox who was handsome, carefree and charismatic. Much like my previous article, Thanos was the second fiddle to his older brother Starfox which made him become a melancholy, brooding individual that was ultimately consumed with the concept of death. Thanos even claimed that at one point he attacked his own mother in an attempt to see how consumed he could become with the concept of death and how such a creature could have been allowed into this world. Unlike the rest of his people, Thanos sought out personal strength and in order to increase his strength he endowed himself with cybernetic implants until he became more powerful than anyone on Titan. Somewhere along the line after this he was exiled by his people, quite possibly for being the first to create a weapon. After being exiled, he roamed around the universe and grew in power and infamy. Upon his travels he came face to face with Death, the entity embodied itself into the form of a female. Thanos, with a previous infatuation with the concept of death, was elated to see the actual entity in front of him. He vowed to make himself worthy in the eyes of the being so that she would be able to reciprocate his love for her. With a newly acquired army, that he sought out, ready to attack at his command, he nearly destroyed his former home and declared himself the ruler of it. This earned him the nickname of the Mad Titan.

Thanos continued to search for more ways to increase his power to appease Death and his efforts would later bring him across the Cosmic Cube. The Cube held inside it the power to literally reshape reality around them among other possibilities like creating portals to other dimensions, transforming your enemies among other things. In his efforts to get the cube the Earth's mightiest heroes assembled to confront him alongside Captain Marvel. While tapping into the Cube's power, Thanos was able to essentially make himself into a God. With the power, he was easily able to fight the Avengers and Captain Marvel. The heroes realized that Thanos would not be defeated by overpowering him, thus Captain Marvel managed to convince Thanos that he had drained the Cube of it's power. With his exuberant amount of confidence, Thanos discarded the Cube which then allowed Captain Marvel to use the Cube to restore the universe to it's rightful order and drain Thanos of his power. Thanos was then shunned to where he had initially searched for power but he was saved by his starship, the Sanctuary. Upon his defeat, he believed that Death had rejected him thus sending him on another search for more power. His search brought him across the powerful Soul Gems.

In his search, he learned that Adam Warlock was in possession of one of the Soul Gems. This also put him in the sight of Magus, a future version of Adam Warlock who was the only one that could hinder Thanos' grand scheme. This forced Thanos to make sure that the future Adam Warlock would never come to pass. He went about a few precautions to make sure of it by first using time travel and rescuing Gamora as an infant to train her so that she would be his own personal assassin. After this, he sided with Warlock to oppose the Magus. With this alliance at his side, it helped ensure that Warlock would never go on to become Magus and at the same time he was able absorb certain energies of Warlock's soul gem that would go on to be instrumental in his subsequent plot. After obtaining the energies inside of Warlock's soul gem, he was able to obtain the others one by one and combined them into one single large soul gem. With this new power at his side, he began to destroy stars themselves in hope of extinguishing life all together in order to appease Death. Gamora began to oppose his plans and in return Thanos killed her. Warlock then learned of Thanos true plan and went to recruit Captain Marvel and The Avengers to put a stop to him.Captain Marvel was able to destroy the single soul gem that Thanos had created but he had already captured the Avengers, and killed Warlock after a intense battle. Spiderman came in to save the day with Lord Chaos and Master Order who revived Warlock with new power, enough to be able to top Thanos. The two engaged in battle once again and Warlock was able to defeat him, but not kill him. Thanos was then turned to stone, a form of ironic punishment for the being that loved Death having been denied of its embrace.