We’re going to start this post off a little differently than any other among the 405 (!) that have preceded it, as before we can proceed to our discussion of Captain Marvel #31, your humble blogger has an apology — and a correction — to make regarding our Captain Marvel #30 post from October.
You see, I left the whole last page of that issue’s story out of the post. Arrgh.
As you may recall, the very last panel of the last page I showed y’all back then was the one reproduced here at left, depicting the arrival of Drax the Destroyer at the door of Avengers Mansion. Evidently, I was so focused on the “next issue” tease contained within the final caption that the “other grim events happening at this moment!” part didn’t really sink in. Or maybe I just incorrectly remembered the story ending this way from when I’d first read it, fifty years ago. But, in any event, at the time I was writing the post, I neglected to turn to the next page of my digital edition of Marvel Masterworks — Captain Marvel, Vol. 3 … and so, I missed the following:
I suppose I could claim that writer-artist Jim Starlin’s affectation of labeling the last page of his story a “Prologue” (a tip of the hat to the finale of fellow writer-artist Jack Kirby’s New Gods #1, perhaps?) confused me into thinking this was the first page of the following issue, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case — and it still would have been careless reading on my part, regardless. So, sorry everyone. My one consolation is that I discovered the error myself before anyone else dinged me on it; but that’s a small comfort, frankly.
Anyway, I think my original wrapping-up statement about the end of Captain Marvel #30, in which I described it as closing one chapter of the “Thanos War” saga, while heralding the beginning of the storyline’s final phase, still holds up pretty well. It’s just that Starlin did a bit more setting up of that final phase at the conclusion of #30 than I’d realized.
But now let’s move on from the scene of my mortification, to take up the more pleasant (for me, at least) topic of Captain Marvel #31 — which, behind a character-packed cover pencilled by Starlin, inked by Al Milgrom, and touched up by John Romita (presumably to make Mar-Vell more standard-issue-hero handsome, a la his cover for Captain Marvel #29), opens with the following splash page:
“The Beginning of the End!” brings with it a slight change in the series’ creative line-up, as auteur Starlin (who colored the story in addition to plotting, pencilling, and scripting it) is joined here not only by Al Milgrom on inks, but by Dan Green as well. It also brings a major addition to the cast, in the person of Moondragon.
As we’ve discussed in some detail in a prior post, Moondragon’s provenance and early history at Marvel are unusually murky. She’d first turned up in Iron Man #54 (written by Mike Friedrich and drawn by George Tuska), where she was given no backstory, but where her aggressive behavior suggested she intended to live up to her initial moniker of “Madame McEvil”. But then, in her second appearance (in the Steve 
Gerber-scripted Daredevil #105), the character was seriously retooled, as an origin sequence illustrated (and likely plotted) by Jim Starlin gave her both a new name and a new raison d’etre — she was now Monndragon, a woman born of Earth who’d been raised on Titan (gaining telepathic powers along the way), who of late had been temporarily deceived by a crooked San Francisco lawyer named Kerwin J. Broderick into believing that Daredevil, as well as most of the other residents of the Bay Area, were thralls of Thanos. (Hey, it could have happened to anyone.) Realizing her error, she’d eventually joined up with DD, the Black Widow, and even a guest-starring Captain Marvel to defeat the Broderick-initiated, Titan-spawned menace of Terrex.
Following that storyline’s conclusion in Daredevil #107, Moondragon had moved in with DD and the Widow — which was kind of awkward, seeing as how the latter two adventurers were “involved”, to say the least, and DD and “MD” clearly had some chemistry going on between them. Per Daredevil #108, Moondragon had remained 
the Widow’s house guest (it was Natasha Romanoff who’d paid for the lease, after all, not Matt Murdock) for a full two months — which was the real-world time span between issues of the bi-monthly series, sure, but which nevertheless felt a lot longer in “Marvel time” — before deciding that her and DD’s “respective orientations toward life and the cosmos” were just too dissimilar for things to ever work out between them. As indicated in the panel from DD #108 shown at right (art by Bob Brown and Paul Gulacy), after bidding Daredevil farewell Moondragon headed to outer space to spend some time in solo meditation — a sojourn from which she’s just returned, per the editorial footnote on page 1 of our present story.
Did Steve Gerber have long-range plans for Moondragon in Daredevil that he gave up when Jim Starlin decided he wanted to use her in Captain Marvel? Did the two creators flip a coin to see who “got” the character? We’ll probably never know. But the notion that Moondragon’s been hanging around San Francisco for a couple of months following the adventure in which she first met Mar-Vell poses an obvious continuity problem, seeing as how the events of DD #107 clearly follow those of CM #30… and there’s just no way that sixty or so days have passed since Captain Marvel’s defeat of the Controller in the latter comic. It’s an issue that Marvel would eventually acknowledge, and address, in a later Avengers letters column that attempted to deal with the chronological challenges presented by the Assemblers’ ongoing role in this storyline… though further discussion of that “fix” should probably be postponed until a later post.
Anyway, speaking of the Avengers…
Drax the Destroyer — whose given name, you may have noticed, doesn’t get used a lot in these early stories — was the first of Starlin’s Titan-related characters to see publication, being featured on the cover and the opening splash page of Iron Man #55 (Thanos, for his part, didn’t show up until page 4 of that milestone issue). But although he’s made appearances in the previous four issues of Captain Marvel, the comic’s titular star hasn’t actually encountered him until this moment.
Even at this point, Starlin hasn’t explicitly specified Thanos’ “dark and deadly beauty” as the literal personification of Death — although I suspect that few people who’d been following the storyline since Captain Marvel #26 (where the silent robed figure first appeared) harbored much doubt as to her true identity at this point. Intriguingly, considering how very important Thanos’ fixation on Death would prove to be to the development of the former character, when Starlin first drew this robed individual his thought was that they were simply one of Thanos’ Skrull allies. (Or, at least, that’s what the writer-artist told the attendees of a panel at the 2022 San Diego Comic-Con.)
I’m sure I don’t have to tell anyone just which masterpiece of world art Starlin is “homaging” in the panel above. But I figure it still might be fun to throw up a scan of said work for easy comparison, so…
As to whether there was any actual religious symbolism intended on Starlin’s part here, I have my doubts; rather, I’m inclined to think he was just having a bit of fun. (Although I can see where he might have sneakily meant to encourage speculation about the Destroyer’s ultimate role by giving him the Judas Iscariot spot in the composition.)
This was a very handy recap for my younger self back in December, 1973, given that I’d only started picking up Starlin’s Captain Marvel with issue #29, and still had a lot of catching up to do.
One of the plot elements of Starlin’s epic I was finding a little confusing as a late-comer was the presence of the Cosmic Cube. As the editorial note above notes, it had last been seen — and, seemingly, destroyed, the result of an uncontrolled build-up of power that led to its violent explosion — at the end of Sub-Mariner #49 (May, 1972), a book that I had in fact read. While it was hardly surprising to me that the Cube would have eventually been revealed to have survived (these are comics, after all), I was curious as to just how that had gone down — and even more curious as to how Thanos had pried the Cube’s location from the subconscious mind of Mar-Vell’s sort-of alter ego, Rick Jones (as Marv’s recap for the Avengers a few pages back had indicated was the case). As I’d eventually learn (though probably not until I’d picked up Starlin’s first few Captain Marvels as back issues), that knowledge had been implanted in Rick’s mind by the Supreme Intelligence back at the end of the Kree-Skrull War storyline in Avengers (though, naturally, this hadn’t been shown on panel at the time). As for how the Cube came to be reconstituted after that cataclysmic explosion in Sub-Mariner #49 — well, that dialogue of Thanos above about how he “had to use all my power to overcome the destructive force the Cube had developed due to mineral mutation” is the closest thing to an explanation that we ever got, as best as I’ve been able to determine.
I spy, with my little eye… a Sagittarian, an Aakon, a Wanderer, a Skrull, a Badoon, and a Rigellian. Any of y’all got any more?
At this point, Starlin shift scenes back to Earth, and Avengers Mansion, just long enough for Rick Jones’ girlfriend LouAnn (whom you’ll recall was rescued from the Controller in issue #30) to wake up and ask what’s going on. Upon hearing from the Scarlet Witch that Thanos has abducted “Iron Man, Captain Marvel, and his two friends”, LouAnn is distressed — since if Captain Marvel is currently a captive, then so is…
For my sixteen-year-old self, this was a welcome opportunity to see what Mentor and Eros could do when they weren’t being held prisoner in stasis by Thanos (which is the only way I’d seen them, outside of the “origin of Moondragon” flashback in Daredevil #105).
As he had with the previous issue’s fight scene between Captain Marvel and the Controller, Starlin enhances this multi-page action sequence with a variety of different camera angles and page layout techniques; we might also note his bold use of “unrealistic” colors for dramatic effect, as in the second panel of the page shown above.
Just about every issue of Starlin’s Captain Marvel includes at least a microdose of psychedelia, and #31 is no exception, as demonstrated by the following page…
I suppose you could see the past seven or so pages of this story — everything that’s happened since Mar-Vell freed himself and his companions from Thanos’ bio-electric field — as just a lot of sound and fury that in the end signified nothing, or next to it; after all, we’ve pretty much come right back around to where we started. On the other hand, those pages have served the purpose of allowing the suspense over Thanos’ pending “grand transformation” to build… not to mention that they were, simply, a lot of fun to read. So, I, at least, am inclined to say that the ride has been worth it.
I can see how a reader in 1973 might have raised an objection at this point, based on the Olympian origin story of the Titans that Starlin had chronicled in Captain Marvel #29: isn’t Thanos already a god? Or at least half of one, on his dad’s side? But I don’t recall being one of them at the time; rather, it seemed clear to me that we were dealing with a different sort of godhood here than that represented by Mentor, or by his brother Zeus… or, for that matter, by our old familiar friend, the mighty Thor. This was godhood with a capital “G”, if you will.
Actually, the quest for Godhood was kind of a thing for Marvel Comics villains (and their writers) during this period. Take, for another example, the time-traveling sorcerer Sise-Neg, whose own pursuit of the ultimate cosmic transfiguration was going on concurrently with Thanos’, over in the “Doctor Strange” strip running in Marvel Premiere. As a matter of fact, we’ll be covering the conclusion of that latter quest here on the blog, just ten days from now… so be sure and stop by for that one, then check back in two months to see if Thanos will have to settle for Sise-Neg’s leftover scraps.
Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books 
In the panel of varied aliens, the fellow on the far right is a Xeronian, as first seen in the Hulk’s 103rd issue (might very well be Randau the Space Parasite himself)…I always liked the way Starlin recalled previously used characters like that; it gave a nice sense of continuity.
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The green faced one about 6th along from the right looks very Ditkoesque but I can’t pin it down to any particular story.
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Isn´t that green alien the “fake alien identity” used by the Tinkerer?
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Good pot, Sure looks like one, right down to the “gills” under the eyes:
https://ibb.co/7SW23Pn
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The guy in blue, closest to us looks like one of the Overlords minions from Silver Surfer #6, behind him, on our right, Ramrod from Iron Man #36, behind him a Toad man from Hulk #2, and all the way on our left, a stalker from Sub-Mariner #17. The green alien with the yellow halo rings a bell, but I can’t place him.
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The green alien with a yellow halo is one of the would-be invaders from Daredevil 28 May, 1967.
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Also, to the left of the Toad man, with the golden skin color,that looks like one of the Metal Master’s race, from Hulk #6.
Thanks to Christian Green for ID’ing the green alien.
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Minor kvetch: Thanos jumps around between talk of controlling the Solar System and controlling the galaxy as if they were the same thing. Doesn’t make this any less entertaining.
Having read the Captain America story where the Red Skull reclaims the Cube and switches bodies with Cap, I realized it’s a perfect example of what Thanos is ranting about: all that power and the Skull can’t think of anything but “Nyahaha, I will toy with Captain America! Now I’ll toy with him for another issue!” Starlin was the first writer to fully tackle the power of the cube and use it effectively in a story.
For me, Starlin’s mojo was entirely gone by the time he started churning out the god-awful Infinity Big Events, but nothing can take away how awesome he was in the Bronze Age.
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It was obvious after the first Infinity Event that Starlin had given in to the lure of crafting more such Events for Marvel and affect the whole MU. Can anyone blame him? The OGNs of more recent years have shown much more of his distinctive vision. The others that came between those and the OGNs were pretty damn good too in my opinion. I’m still disappointed that instead of stopping them, he didn’t just spin his continuity into an alt timeline so we could still be enjoying them.
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The original stories were born out of love; the later ones were done for the money. And it shows. https://crustymud.paradoxcomics.com/to-infinity-and-back/
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I agree that “Infinity War” and “Infinity Crusade” were both pretty underwhelming (though not *utterly* without merit, IMHO 🙂 ). But I’m with Steve McB. in thinking that Starlin’s later “Thanos” material, including the three “Thanos” graphic novels, were a lot better. You might want to give them a look, crustymud, if you haven’t already.
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I got the one with Eros a couple years ago. I seem to recall it being okay. Part of the problem is that all the later stuff pales in comparison to the original Thanos stories from the 70s.
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Hi , as well as the last supper homage there’s at least another possible Biblical reference, where Thanos says;
“I am the light, the way, the power” seems a darker turn on the Biblical Jesus quotation John 8.12
“When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
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No real comment about this one other to say that I found it very enjoyable fifty years ago and still find it a hoot today, though in hindsight, it’s fairly obvious that Starlin was making up a lot of this stuff as he went along. Did he ever tell us WHY Thanos had a bone to pick with the Earth in the first place? Was it just because it was the only other inhabited planet in the neighborhood, or was their something more specific?
Starlin’s fascination with religious ideas and iconography becomes even more pronounced the deeper he gets into the Captain Marvel/Warlock of it all, so it’s no surprise he’s dropping biblical easter eggs here. I would imagine if Marvel editorial would have allowed it, Thanos would have tried to conquer God Himself (and by this I mean the all-powerful Judeo-Christian incarnation). And my what a story that would have been. Thanks, Alan.
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Perhaps Earth inventing the cosmic cube made it of more interest to Thanos.
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Is that what happened? Did the Cube originate on Earth? I don’t think I ever knew. So, I assume it’s not an Infinity Stone like it was in the MCU? I’m getting my mythology confused. Who created it and why? Short answers, please. I’m mildly curious; I don’t need the whole history. Thanks.
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AIM created the Cosmic Cube. Unfortunately they made the mistake of simultaneously thawing the Red Skull out of suspended animation to serve them — three guesses how that worked out. Okay, you only need one guess.
A later retcon by Englehart revealed the Cube worked because it caught a Beyonder-type entity inside but I don’t know if that stayed canon.
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Thanks for the 4-1-1.
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As my Silver Age rereading over at Atomic Junk Shop is almost up to Mar-Vell’s debut, I began wondering about what younger readers make of him. With Carol having the lock on the name, is he the equivalent of Jay Garrick or maybe one of the really obscure Golden Agers — The Death of Captain Marvel, after all, is now further behind us than the Golden Age was when the Kree with a heart of gold debuted.
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To my mind of 50 years ago, Starlin’s ongoing Thanos epic was the first big cosmic comics event I’d latched onto thus far. I’ll admit I missed the now obvious homage to Michaelangelo’s Last Supper in that table scene. Was Starlin already planning to kill off Marv back then? Of course, Warlock had already been used as Christ figure in his first go-round as a solo star and just a few months hence he’d be executed and resurrected in the Hulk’s series before Starlin took him into a far more interesting religious-themed epic. Meanwhile, in C.M. we see Thanos overly eager to have an audience watch him achieve a greater level of god-hood than he already had. This was the first time we’d seen anyone other than Drax take him on, and even without the Cosmic Cube, he was a pretty tough brawler, as well as strong on the mindgames too.
Reading these comics was the first time I’d even heard of the Cosmic Cube so I had no idea as to its background, although in just a few months Marvel Double Feature would reprint those Captain America stories in which it first appeared and feel into the hands of the Red Skull. That old Nazi Schmidt couldn’t think of anything much better to do with the cube than to give himself a suit of golden armor and matching crown and to sic a creature made of dirt on Cap. Thanos brought a greater sense of cosmic grandeur in his use, although ultimately, as with the Skull, his vanity did him in. But that was still a few months done the line. With the last page of this issue, it looked like everyone was going to stuck in a new Thanosverse.
In other interesting bits, I like how in those first few pages Capt.M. is shown using his head to think things through rather than barging into things, and seeing the frenzy of the Avengers trying to take down Drax, just shouts, “Stop” to get everyone’s attention and restore some order to the situation. A rather amusing contrast to the all-too typical standard Marvel misunderstandings and resulting mayhem. Starlin’s method of showcasing aspects of Captain Marvel’s more cosmically aware self over his previous self. Not that that did him much good in his one-on-one battles with Thanos as also shown in this issue. But, helpfully, Thanos wasn’t prone to immediately eliminating his key adversaries, a trait shared by most fictional baddies.
Anyhow, this was a fun read and certainly left me eager to see just how Marv, Iron Man and the gang would survive and deal with this latest turn of events.
Oh, and I’d nearly forgotten about that last page of issue 30 also, Alan! Been a few years since I last read that issue, but in the back of my mind I thought I remembered there being something else after that false stop at the end of the next to the last page. Sort of like the false stop near the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, before the band starts up again and Lennon intones, “cranberry sauce”, commonly mistranslated as “I buried Paul”.
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Those “seven or so pages of this story” showed us Thanos beating up all the heroes. AGAIN. There’s that one brief moment where Marv kicks the cube away where you’re thinking maybe the heroes have a shot, but then no—Thanos prevails again. This all played into the larger drama of how are the heroes ever going to win. The audience was conditioned to expect Thanos to win at this point, which makes the heroes’ ultimate victory (spoiler alert) all the more exhilarating when we finally get it. This storyline was a freakin’ masterpiece and Jim Starlin was a comics genius, an absolute pillar of the Bronze Age.
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That scene wherein Thanos graps Marv by the leg and slams him on the floor looked like it must have been a pretty painful knockdown for Marv. Having Thanos relatively easily take out so many powerful characters here clearly established him as one of the heavyweights among Marvel’s more muscular characters.
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I wonder if Starlin wasn’t trying the same thing in the first Infinity crossover where Thanos repeatedly goes up against the omega-level heavy hitters and crushes them. Only there it’s so clearly established the Infinity Gauntlet makes him omnipotent that it felt pointless.
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Marv’s very loud “NO!” juxtaposed with Thanos’s modest “Yes’ is just chef’s kiss. And yes, the way Thanos flings him into the floor is like a child taking out his anger on a stuffed toy. That’s all any of the heroes are to Thanos at that point, just harmless toys.
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As I shared the last time you showed some of Starlin’s work of this era, the intensity of effort in his art is overwhelmingly evident. I almost get tired looking at it. 😉 He really went all-out on these stories. Inkers did well, too.
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Last time I read this storyline was well before the MCU films. Never realized until now just how much the Titan sequence in Infinity War borrowed from this particular issue. Both include:
– a subset of heroes (including Iron Man and Drax) engaging Thanos in a preliminary bout on Titan
– the heroes dog-piling on Thanos
– a celestial body ripped out of its orbit
– the sole female hero attacking Thanos telepathically
– a cloaked, mystical hero taking a brains-over-brawn approach
– a brief moment when it looks as if the heroes might prevail
It’s not apples to apples, but I prefer the chaotic free-for-all depicted here. Aside from Marv knocking the cosmic cube loose, Thanos is barely tested, reinforcing that the good guys are out of their weight class. He ultimately wins the skirmish decisively in Infinity War, but only after Starlord screws up. I felt the narrow escape diminished his threat level somewhat.
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After a disappointing splash page the art really takes off. Do I spot Adams’ inks on the Vision’s face on the 4th panel of the third page you show of the comic? Totally agree with frasersherman and crusymud about Starlin’s later work. The Infinity series is one of the reason’s I stopped reading Marvels in the 90s ( that together with the art). And on how the use of the cosmic cube was more epic here than in previous uses…well I think ultimately you have to thank Kirby for that; the creation of Darkseid was the real game changer.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Wrightson inked the Mar-Vell in that panel, and the entirety of the prior one. Does look like an Adams Vision head. Berni did partial inks in #41 and inked Milgrom’s cover for #43.
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Remembering the impact this had when it first came out, I wonder if fans in the 1940s were similarly inspired by Al Toth or Carmine Infantino’s early work?
I think the earlier commenter is correct , Adams probably inked the Vision in that panel Starlin was,had been a “Crusty Bunker” back then. Further, Adams is known to have inked two pages of Cockrum’s Giant Sized Avengers #2, It’s not unlikely.
Speaking of former Murphy Anderson assistants, Al Milgrom did a nice job on these issues of CM (and the framing sequence for Giant-Sized Defenders #1). The interesting thing was that when Starlin inked his own pencils on Strange Tales # 178, we saw how Anderson-influenced Starlin himself was.
The Red Skull used the Cube as a sort of Magic Wand, sort of something out of hia poor, abusive Middle European Childhood. Thanos as a “god” has slightly higher aspirations . . . . However, Thanos did not seem to have the ides of fundamentally re-ordering the cosmos that Darkseid seemed to be seeking with the Anti-Life Equation.
Both Thanos and Darkseid have been developed by other writers and have become “institutionalized big bads,” Possibly my favorite take on Darkseid, who found life absurd and wanted to bring his point to it; where Scott Free wanted to inspire everyone to find their own point in Steve Gerber’s 3 issues of Mr. Miricle before the DC Implosion,.
Klaus Jenson would do the next two issues of CM and Jack Abel would do the last Jim Starlin issue. Although I admired Dave Cockrum’s and Pablo Marcus’s inks and would admire Klaus Jensen’s work, i thought Milgrom caotured what Starlin was trying to put on paper better than most (although they were less joined at the him than people remember).
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Keith Giffen’s “DC editors pass around Darkseid like a bong” expresses my feelings well.
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Does your one panel of DD #108 mean we will not be getting a review? I loved Paul Gulacy’s inking on this.
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I’m afraid not, John. Just too many other comics out there!
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Starlin pulls out the stops with this one! But part of me wishes that Englehart had started scripting the book here (or even earlier). Starlin’s plotting was stop-notch, but his dialogue and captions….
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Odd thought, this moight have been a plot point but it has been 50 years: you’d think CM’s “comic awaness” would have given him more insight into Thanos once Thanos became one with the cosmos.
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