Ask any superhero fan who Thanos was created to oppose on DC’s side of the comic book war, and the big bad Darkseid will be the obvious answer. And it’s hard to argue any different these days, as the years spent since Thanos’ first skimpy appearance have built him into a bigger, badder answer to the Lord of Apokolips at every turn. Which makes it all the more shocking to learn that Thanos was designed as Marvel’s answer to a completely different DC Comics character.
Thanos Was Inspired By Metron, A Different Jack Kirby New God
Jim Starlin’s First Drawing of The Marvel Legend is A Massive Change
The creator of Thanos and mastermind behind the villain’s iconic Infinity Gauntlet saga, Jim Starlin, has never made any secret about influences and competition which he drew upon in the villain’s genesis. After all, it’s hard to ignore any creative inspirations when your greatest competition is the legendary Jack Kirby. The Marvel icon was fresh off the creation of his own cosmic pantheon with DC’s New Gods, when Starlin was tasked with generating his very own ideas to pitch to Marvel.
As Starlin explained in an interview with Jon B. Cooke for the trade magazine Comic Book Artist #2 (via CBR), the first sketches and concept art for Thanos bore a striking resemblance to a DC New God, but not the one everyone now assumes:
Starlin: “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.”
The similarity between the two is impossible to ignore, and while the designs of Thanos would eventually develop and change more than Metron’s ever would, the pair’s iconic thrones (and poses) are still synonymous with each character’s supreme levels of in-universe brooding.
The Final Version of Thanos Was Redesigned To Look More Like Darkseid
The Inspiration Behind ‘The Mad Titan’ Was No Secret, But Admitted Openly
It’s easy enough to accept that the scheming, manipulating, and morally questionable cosmic operator Thanos was created to be would be shaped in the wake of Metron (a DC character famed for practicing… well, all those same hobbies). But surely the rise of Thanos to the heights of Marvel’s alien conquerors and despots, his hulking mass, helmet, inhumanly scarred face, and chilling demeanor weren’t all a total coincidence, as DC practiced the same with its own Lord of Apokolips?
In the same interview, Starlin explains that Thanos was just one piece of his much larger cosmology. But he also reveals that the changes made to bring Thanos closer to Darkseid were the opposite of chance, instead an explicit directive from his Marvel Editor, Roy Thomas:
Cooke: You started to introduce concepts that you later exploited fully in Captain Marvel. Were you developing a whole mythology of sorts?
Starlin: That was the one exception where there some long term plotting on Thanos. 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… 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!”
There is a common saying that the truth is often stranger than fiction, and the creation of Thanos, Marvel’s most intimidating and single-minded alien dictator, is no exception. While it’s tempting for fans to consider just who Thanos might have become if he remained more directly inspired by Metron, there is hardly any arguing with the results.
With the truth out in the open, perhaps Darkseid will be able to claim some royaties the next time the pair face off, as a new era of Marvel and DC collaboration is officially under way. Or will Thanos spend his time bragging about his box office superiority, instead? Time will tell.
