IRON MAN #55 (1972)
script by Mike Friedrich
everything else by Jim Starlin
Considering the vast majority of their history, it may sound strange that the Marvel Cinematic Universe end up with Iron Man being the final obstacle for Thanos.
It’s actually quite fitting, since Thanos debuted on his title.
Jim Starlin is credited for “plot, pencils and character conceptions”. I’ve never seen credits to include the latter.
As if having all this space stuff on Iron Man wasn’t weird enough already, the story is structured out of chronological order. We begin with Drax the Destroyer, in his first appearance, already captured and calling for Iron Man.
Iron Man himself is fighting a couple of super-strong aliens calling themselves the Blood Brothers.
Iron Man’s role in this part of this story is being unceremoniously knocked out before he has any idea of what’s going on.
Drax is arguably the real protagonist of the story.
Starlin will eventually make a big deal about the fact that Thanos constantly creates the means of his own defeat. It could be argued that he’s been doing that since his first appearance.
Now Drax begins narrating a flashback to explain how we got to this point. Starting with him sending a telepathic message to Tony Stark.
If you’re only familiar with Drax’s later incarnations… not just the movie version, but the braindead brute of the 90s or the vicious anti-hero of the 2000s… you would be surprised not just by the fact he has telepathy, but that his mind is SO powerful it overwhelms Stark’s brain.
The logistics of Iron Man’s armor are always changing, including how he puts on the suit.
The 70s had a very weird way to handle this: he only wears the red parts of the armor, while the gold ones just slide up and don’t become super durable until he “polarizes” them.
Admittedly this helps us by that he could store the entire armor inside a suitcase, but I’ve always hated this way of handling it.
The reason why Drax wanted to warn Iron Man is that the Blood Brothers are coming to Stark Industries. Wearing the foolproof coat+hat disguise that ALWAYS works.
Drax could just tell him “some scary aliens are going to attack you”, but instead he decides to narrate his entire backstory.
When the story was first published, all the people of Titan had the same purple skin of Thanos (but not his Skrull-like chin).
The reprints were changed to have Mentor and Eros (the future Avenger Starfox) having pink skin. That’s because Thanos being different from other Titans originated in Starlin’s run on Captain Marvel.
One of the things that made 70s Thanos dangerous has been lost over the years: the fact that he used to have his own army of ruthless space pirates.
It makes sense why it was dropped… Thanos is an army on his own… but it’s a pity.
Thanos was such a problem that his father Mentor had to ask the godlike Kronos for help.
There is no mention in this that Kronos is Mentor’s father and Thanos’ grandfather; it’s possible that Starlin already had the entire Titan mythology in mind but he didn’t find a way to tell everything (this is already a sizeable infodump).
So Kronos created Drax to destroy Thanos. This story treats Drax as if he was a completely artificial being; future stories will tell us that Kronos actually put inside this new body the soul of a human. He’s the father of Moondragon, who debuted in the previous issue.
Poor Drax can’t catch a break in the 70s. His entire deal is that he’s supposed to kill Thanos, but he’s always the guest-star in other people’s books so he can never be the one to save the day.
Drax wouldn’t get the chance to kill Thanos until 2006 (!!!).
He got better since, you know. Thanos.
The flashback ends and we’re back to the status quo of the beginning of the story: both Drax and Iron Man have been defeated.
Something that doesn’t exactly seem to break Mentor’s heart.
However all this telepathic tampering has awakened Iron Man, who manages to defeat the Blood Brothers with ease.
Which is actually kind of impressive: the follow-up story will see them fight both Iron Man and the Thing at the same time, so these guys are quite tough.
His attempt to rescue Drax doesn’t have as much success.
Even worse, Thanos is definitely out of his league at this point.
The comic has done a good job so far at keeping Thanos in the shadows, hyping his eventual reveal.
And here he is, in his very first pantsless costume that he’ll ditch in his second story.
I think too much has been made about Thanos being inspired by Darkseid… the similarities are mostly superficial… but admittedly his first look DEFINITELY looks like Discount Darkseid.
Mentor is the one to save the day, because he fires a beam FROM TITAN that manages to PRECISELY hit Iron Man’s chest plate!
Keep in mind that Titan is a real Saturn satellite, which on average is 1.2 BILLION KILOMETERS (or 746 million miles) FROM EARTH.
Eat your heart out, Hawkeye!!!
(also: “Holy Toledo”? WTF!?)
Thanos is still a bit of an old-fashioned villain here, so he threatens to just blow up his entire base to get rid of the heroes.
After defeating the Blood Brothers AGAIN, Iron Man is eager to fight Thanos… but turns out Darkseid is not the only Jack Kirby villain he’s ripping off.
So Thanos really does blow up his own base. Something that Drax is really, really proud of predicting would happen.
And so we end with Drax leaving for his next set of appearances where he will not be the one to defeat Thanos and will in fact get defeated multiple times.
Historical significance: 7/10
Thanos is obviously a HUGE deal, but you can easily skip this one and begin reading him from his Captain Marvel appearances.
Silver Age-ness: 10/10
Both Drax and Thanos come out of absolutely nowhere and have basically nothing to do with Drax.
Does it stand the test of time? 6/10
This is not an Iron Man story, it’s a story where Iron Man happens to be a bystander. Why would Drax contact him of all people? Why not the Fantastic Four, who have FAR more experience fighting aliens? Why not Thor, who is definitely more in the same league?
The infodump takes up the majority of the story, the Blood Brothers (while entertaining in the follow-up against the Thing) are utterly bland, and Iron Man is shockingly fine ending up in the middle of all this. Yes he’s been involved in crazy plots before, especially with the Avengers, but it’s not like he’s fighting alien overlords every other week.
But it’s not all bad. The tension works perfectly: you really get the sense that Thanos is a BIG DEAL even when he personally does very little. And the backstory, while a little on the nose, hints at a larger mythology in place that is quite tantalizing.
How close is this to the modern character? 7/10
Compared to his later incarnation, even as early as his Captain Marvel stories, he feels a lot more generic. There are hints of greatness there, and he definitely has stage presence, but his motivation is a generic quest for power.
He also doesn’t look quite right. He’s gone through multiple looks over the years, but thankfully this is the only time he shows his legs… that REALLY makes the Darkseid parallel on the nose.
It could be because it’s how I first read him and it’s the outfit he’s worn the most, but all the various adjustments to his classic costume have missed the mark for me.
Some things just don’t need improvements!
Unlike most villains, we actually have a precise idea of how Thanos came to be.
I had him from a psyche class that I took. I went to college between the service and getting work in comics, and there was a psyche class and I came up with Thanos… and Drax the Destroyer, but I’m not sure how he fit into it, just anger management probably. So I came up to Marvel and Roy (Thomas) asked if I wanted to do a issue of Iron Man. I felt that this may be my only chance ever to do a character, not having the confidence that my career was going to last anything longer than a few weeks. So they got jammed into it. Thanos was a much thinner character and Roy suggested beefing him up, so he’s beefed up quite a bit from his original sketches from Iron Man, and later on I liked beefing him up so much that he continued to grow in size.
JIM STARLIN
Not only that, but we can put to rest the idea that he was created to rip off Darkseid. While the visual callbacks of his original design are undeniable, he was inspired by a different Kirby character.
Kirby had done the New Gods, which I thought was terrific. He was over at DC at the time. I came up with some things that were inspired by that. You’d think that Thanos was inspired by Darkseid, but that was not the case when I showed up. In my first Thanos drawings, if he looked like anybody, it was Metron. I had all these different gods and things I wanted to do, which became Thanos and the Titans. Roy took one look at the guy in the Metron-like chair and said: “Beef him up! If you’re going to steal one of the New Gods, at least rip off Darkseid, the really good one!”
JIM STARLIN
And now you know why Thanos is always sitting down.
It was fascinating to learn that Starlin is ex-military. (Further research shows he was in Vietnam with the US Navy.) For some reason I’d always seen him as the biggest hippie in the ’70s Bullpen – possibly based on his depiction as a thug in an early MASTER OF KUNG FU story.
Thanos isn’t the imposing figure here that he later became, but to be fair, Darkseid didn’t look all that fearsome in his earliest appearances either.