Can someone help me understand why so many say he's a darkseid knockoff? They seem to fulfill kind of similar roles, is that it, or are we talking much more? They seem to have different personalities. I much prefer Thanos, myself
They look at him and judge by his appearance as a bulky guy. Its that simple. DC people like comparing characters because they feel threatened by their inadequacies. J/k about the last part.
I prefer Darkseid (mostly because I think Thanos looks ridiculous) and the similarities between the characters are pretty much undeniable. But Thanos's motivations are, admittedly, more compelling than Darkseid's, and I think enough differences have developed over the years that simply calling Thanos a "knockoff" would undermine the character.
Writer-artist Jim Starlin originally conceived of Thanos of Titan during college psychology classes. As Starlin described:
“
I went to college between doing U.S. military service and getting work in comics, and there was a psych 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 [editor] Roy [Thomas] asked if I wanted to do an 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 ... and later on I liked beefing him up so much that he continued to grow in size.
Starlin has admitted the character is influenced by Jack Kirby's Darkseid:
“
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!"
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!"
I don't think thanos was. And the guy just said beef him up like darkseid. Basically just giving him a general idea of what he should look like. But apocalypse is a carbon copy. When I was younger I couldn't tell the difference.
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