MYTHCOMICS: INFINITY GAUNTLET (1991)

Jim Starlin rose to prominence at Bronze-Age Marvel like the proverbial comet. After he took over writing and drawing Marvel Comics’s moribund CAPTAIN MARVEL title, he spun an inventive tale of the mad demigod Thanos, who worshiped a feminine incarnation of Death and ascended to godhood with the help of a Lee-Kirby artifact, the Cosmic Cube. Indeed, it could be argued that this was the first multi-issue narrative that rivaled those of Lee and Kirby. Captain Marvel defeated Thanos by playing on the villain's ego, but though the hero later passed away, the demigod proved far more durable. During Starlin’s tenure on the feature WARLOCK—one portion of which I reviewed here—the artist-writer arguably pursued his cosmic vistas to even greater effect. It was in the stories devoted to Warlock—a reworked version of a Lee-Kirby character known only as “Him”—that Starlin slightly pilfered motifs from the work of Michael Moorcock, and evolved the idea of a “soul gem.” Though Thanos was largely left alone by other Marvel raconteurs, possibly in deference to Starlin, over time one soul gem multiplied into several, all with different properties from the jewel used by Warlock. By the early nineties, Starlin apparently decided to weave a tapestry capable of dovetailing all of these continuity-additions into his own cosmos of personal concerns.

Though in the early nineties I was still keeping a weather-eye on Marvel comics, I didn’t read INFINITY GAUNTLET or any of its subsequent spin-offs. I was far from pleased by either Marvel’s exploitation of the concept of the “multi-series crossover,” or with Starlin’s dubious Metamorphosis Odyssey, one part of which I negatively reviewed here. So I ignored this saga of the “soul gems,” which, when placed upon Thanos’s glove, bestowed on him the power of “the Infinity Gauntlet.” To the extent that I even was aware of the series’ basic plotline, I probably would have thought it to be little more than a reworking of that first “Cosmic Cube” story.

Now that I’ve read GAUNTLET, I think this is an accurate judgment, but in this case, Starlin improved upon the earlier story. The CAPTAIN MARVEL narrative is a fun cosmic superhero tale, but it shows little insight into the master villain and his perverse fascination with a feminine version of Death. Further, GAUNTLET, despite being prefaced by several issues of a Starlin-scribed SILVER SURFER feature, and being tied in to various other Marvel features, shows a surer mythic discourse than the big-screen film it inspired, AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.

One superior aspect of Starlin’s narrative is that the initiating action of the story begins on a metaphysical plane too ambitious for the live-action movie. It’s Death herself, not Thanos, who gets the idea that the universe has become too prolific with living beings, and needs to be culled. In the movie Thanos is given a more “realistic” motive, that of wanting to prevent suffering by thinning the universal herd, but this putative realism is one that begs not to be examined too closely. In this case, a strong metaphysical myth—“Death Gets Tired of Too Much Life”—proves far more resonant than a weak sociological extrapolation. At any rate, Death resuscitates Thanos from whatever grisly fate he last met, and sends him out to gather the Infinity Gems. With these, he crafts the Gauntlet, with which he can wipe out half of all living beings with one snap of his fingers.

“The snap” which received so much emphasis in INFINITY WAR appears for just one panel in GAUNTLET. Still, like the movie-makers, Starlin gets a lot of mileage out of the resultant drama, as various Marvel characters lose friends and loved ones, though to be sure Starlin devotes less attention than the movie does to rank-and-file humankind. But then, Starlin takes far more time than the movie did to explore the villain’s psychology, suggesting that Thanos's eroticization of the force of Death reveals his basic fear of failure in life. Not that psychology is in the driver’s seat here. The forces of life are championed by most of Marvel’s major heroes, as well as almost all of Marvel’ quasi-omnipotent beings, from the famed Galactus to the obscure Living Tribunal (who, in a demonstration of cosmic legalism, chooses not to join the fight against Thanos because it’s the nature of life to devour life).

In contrast to, say, SECRET WARS, where all of the combined heroes share roughly the same narrative emphasis, most of the champions in GAUNTLET come “on stage” just to speak a few lines and toss a few blasts, fists, or adamantine claws at the god-powered evildoer. Thanos gets so much attention from Starlin that he’s almost the star of the show. However, Starlin subtly allows the narrative to be dominated by the hero who functioned most often as Thanos’s nemesis following the demise of Captain Marvel: the aforementioned Warlock. With this character, Starlin may have been subconsciously influenced by another myth from the Lee-Kirby bag of tricks. Lee and Kirby gave readers a dynamic opposition between the angelic Silver Surfer and the planet-devouring Galactus, and Starlin uses similar motifs, contrasting the arrogant, world-destroying “false deity” Thanos to the calm, almost Christ-like mien of Warlock. Nevertheless, Starlin’s variation on this metaphysical myth has its own organic charms. When Thanos’s would-be mistress Death spurns him for the act of assuming godhood, he tries to scorn her in return by creating a female version of himself, but one who mirrors his own desires. You certainly wouldn’t catch Galactus creating an erotic double of himself in order to stroke his ego.

There are flaws. Starlin devotes considerable space to a character he didn’t invent, Nebula, the granddaughter of Thanos. But though she manages to steal the Gauntlet from her ancestor, she remains a flat character, both here and in most of her appearances. In this particular case the Marvel Studios films improved on Nebula in terms of her dramatic impact.

In my review of AVENGERS: ENDGAME, I called attention to the way in which the filmmakers used the event of “the Snap” to evoke the tragic sense of “survivors’ guilt” following a great catastrophe. Like most cosmic Marvel sagas, the events of GAUNTLET have no more lasting impact than sweeping the pieces off a board in order to initiate a new game. INFINITY WAR borrows the ending of GAUNTLET—the scene of a contented Thanos, satisfied to live a bucolic existence and give up being a super-villain. In both stories, this conclusion is designed to be shattered at some future time. Nevertheless, whatever Starlin chose to do with Thanos in his next big cosmic extravaganza, the narrative within GAUNTLET is so impressively coherent that one may choose to believe that within this one story-arc, Starlin really did bring his massively insecure malefactor a measure of peace.

ADDENDUM 11-26-2020: The more I think about it, the more I believe that Thanos really IS the star of this particular show, not least because he passes on his burden to Warlock. That would explain why Warlock, despite being the master organizer, is to some extent outmaneuvered at the conclusion-- for all that Starlin had another epic on the horizon.