Behind a splendid cover pencilled by Jim Starlin and inked by Klaus Janson (and evidently not touched up by Marvel Comics’ art director John Romita, as had sometimes been the case with the covers for this title of late) — the 32nd issue of Captain Marvel picks up right where the 31st had left off:
There have been a couple of changes in the title’s creative lineup since the previous issue that should be noted: one is the presence of Dan Green as solo inker (Green had shared embellishment duties for #31 with Al Milgrom, after having earlier inked #28); another is the return of previous regular scripter Mike Friedrich, who’s credited here for having provided a “writing assist”. After having scripted the last three issues entirely on his own (and co-writing #28 with Friedrich), Starlin seems to have decided he could use some help as his “Thanos War” epic came down the home stretch; the next (and final) chapter would also see a second writer pitching in, as Steve Englehart would script #33 from Starlin’s plot.
Mentor’s comment about not stopping Thanos because he “cannot” bring himself to take such an action against his own offspring is intriguing, suggesting that he actually has the power to do so — or had, at least, prior to Thanos’ recent ascension to godhood. If true, then you could argue that Mentor shares the blame for his son’s atrocities, including the eradication of most of Titan’s population.
Starlin and Friedrich prove themselves highly efficient storytellers here, as they use a quick recap of Captain Marvel #31 not only to bring up to date any readers who might have missed that issue, but also to establish the important idea that despite Thanos’ virtually unlimited power level, he still has a critical vulnerability: his ego.
Captain Marvel tells Iron Man not to hold back in fighting these demons, whom he can tell are merely soulless constructs. But despite the two heroes literally putting their fists right through their foes, they’re barely able to slow them down, and the Golden Avenger is soon overwhelmed…
Eight pages into our story, and we’re down from five heroes standing against doom to just one… or so at least it appears. This is actually something of a recurring pattern in this storyline, as Starlin has given Mar-Vell such allies as the Thing, the Titans, and the Avengers at various points along the way, only to always come back to a scenario where the former captain of the Kree must stand alone.
Meanwhile, what’s that business going on in the narrow panels above? We’ll find out this issue, but not for a few more pages, yet…
Is there any meaning behind the way Thanos’ “face” changes color from panel to panel? I don’t think so — but the variety certainly contributes to the overall visual appeal of the artwork.
There’s a pretty big gaffe in that last triptych of panels that entirely escaped me in 1974; namely, that there’s no way the Douglases could have been planning to see Elvis Presley at the Intercontinental Hotel in Las Vegas in 1953, since, in that year, the 18-year-old Elvis was still a year out from beginning a professional music career. Oops! According the the letters column of Captain Marvel #34, the error had arisen when a late decision was made to change the timeframe of this flashback from 1969 to 1953, and the topical reference (which would have been accurate for ’69) wasn’t altered to fit it. Why was the timeframe changed to begin with? Well, that had to do with a desire to clarify the chronology of little Heather Douglas; for more, read on…
Per the CM #34 lettercol, Starlin had intended at one point for Heather Douglas to have grown to maturity in five years’ time “due to weirdnesses in Titan’s environment”, but ultimately decided that that would be too confusing; hence the change in temporal setting from 1969 to 1953.
From Captain Marvel #28 (Sep., 1973). Text by Jim Starlin; art by Starlin and Dan Green.
As the editorial footnote referencing Iron Man #55 (Feb., 1973) suggests, the initial appearance of Drax the Destroyer in that comic had included an origin story of sorts. But it had begun at the part where Mentor asks Kronos for help against Thanos, and Kronos responds by raising Drax’s body from the ground of some unspecified planetoid and giving it life; and so, until this moment, readers could reasonably have assumed that that was all there was to the matter. And perhaps it was, when Jim Starlin first conceived the character. But it seems a good bet that he’d come up with the idea for “Art Douglas” at least as early as Captain Marvel #28 (Sep., 1973), seeing as how Art’s visage (complete with pipe and turtleneck) shows up as one element in a hallucinatory montage in that issue (see left).
From Daredevil #105 (Nov., 1973). Text by Steve Gerber; art by Jim Starlin and Don Perlin.
Moondragon, on the other hand, is a somewhat different matter. While a woman who looks a lot like Yvette Douglas shows up in CM #28’s montage, there’s no sign of anyone that resembles little Heather; and in the Moondragon origin sequence presented in Daredevil #105 (Nov., 1973) — which was drawn (and possibly scripted) some months before the rest of the issue was produced — the car accident which orphaned Heather (whose parents are never shown on-panel) is implied to have been accidentally caused by a Titan ship not associated with Thanos (see right) — who, indeed, is shown on the very next page to still be a child himself at this time. That, plus the whole “1969 vs.1953” business, suggests that Drax and Moondragon were never originally intended to be related at all, and that Starlin got the idea of linking the two characters fairly late in the game. Naturally, fifty-plus years later, the memories of the people involved are a bit blurry (and some of those folks, like DD #105 scripter Steve Gerber, are sadly no longer with us)… so we’ll probably never know for sure.
Getting back to our story, the Destroyer continues to shout his angry defiance of Thanos into the void of space — but if the one-with-everything entity hears him, he doesn’t respond. At this point, the scene shifts back to Earth, and to Avengers Mansion, where…
“This unit is a threat to no one, warrior Mar-Vell,” the strange figure assures our hero. After taking a couple of panels to explain that he’s not a warrior anymore, per the events of issue #29 (all while continuing to fend off the demons assaulting him), Marv says, OK, fine, but still, who are you, dude?
And that’s where we’ll have to leave things for this post. Be sure and check back in this space just two months from now, when we’ll have the final two chapters of the Thanos War — the first of which will be coming your way via Avengers #125, just like the closing caption above indicates, and the second, of course, in Captain Marvel #33. Just be sure you’re prepared to have your mind thoroughly wrenched, OK?
Along with “Thanos the Insane God!”, Captain Marvel #32 also featured the second appearance of a cutaway diagram of Titan that had originally run in CM #27:
Since my younger self hadn’t climbed aboard the Starlin train until issue #29, this was my first exposure to the diagram; and being a lover of fictional maps of all sorts, I was happy to have it — though I can’t remember what, if anything, I made about the before-and-after-Thanos population data, which seems to have gotten reversed, somehow. Because if you hadn’t been reading the stories, you might think that, instead of being a mass murderer, the big purple guy was in fact a mass procreator. Or at least the overseer of an extremely successful immigration program…
Such high intensity story and art. Starlin expended incredible amounts of (youthful) energy in drawing this, as did those who helped him. This kind of work was way above “the call of duty”—-and the pay Marvel offered him at the time. I hope Jim’s royalties for Thanos in the Avengers movies were a generous if belated compensation.
Despite the many stories are floating around about how the MCU paid comics creators unfairly for the use of their creations in the MCU’s early days, Starlin seems to have done OK by them. According to a story in CBR, even though Starlin would have liked to have gotten “a bigger piece of Thanos” when he originally negotiated with Marvel Studios in 2012, things were renegotiated a bit a few years later and he’s happy with how it all turned out. Ironically, according to a different story in The Hollywood Reporter, Starlin got paid much more by DC/WB for the use of KGBeast in Batman v. Superman than he was for Thanos in the whole of the MCU, proving that Hollywood math can be just as nonsensical as the comics on occasion. However, Starlin was apparently paid nothing for the cameos of Starfox and Pip in The Eternals, being promised by Marvel that the negotiations would happen when the characters appear again, which so far hasn’t happened yet.
Accounting can vary wildly in Hollywood. By the late 1980s Gilligan’s Island cast were apparently getting good residual syndication checks while Mission Impossible was supposedly still in the red so no checks to the actors.
Handling Thanos as making fatal mistakes due to ego could easily have made him look stupid (“Why doesn’t he just kill them?”) but Starlin and Friedrich make me believe it. And I like that it’s Rick who figures it out.
There’s an interesting swipe here: look at the first panel of the last page, and look at the last panel of this page from Swamp Thing #6, cover dated October, 1973, and drawn by Berni Wrightson:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7TJjOTbI3Kk/Vmkp-m5c7uI/AAAAAAAAD9E/8LKZAK86yYA/s0-Ic42/RCO014.jpg
https://50yearoldcomics.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/cm32-demolish.jpg
Very interesting indeed! Thanks for sharing, Chris.
In looking over some of Starlin’s other work I have seen the occasional Neal Adams swipe, or Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, etc., but a far more serious allegation (one whose imagery was removed from the internet – hence this archived file) is that Starlin based his design of Gamora in a 1975 Warlock comic (Strange Tales 180?) on an Esteban Maroto character in Eerie #38 in 1971: https://web.archive.org/web/20210125003441/https://bleedingcool.com/comics/swipe-file/swipe-file-a-stranger-in-hell-and-gamora/
Hmm, looks like maybe Mr. Starlin might want to consider sharing out some of those “Gamora’ royalties. (There’s an irony here, of course, given that Mr. Maroto is known to have swiped an image or three himself, as has been discussed here on occasion in the past.)
The British fantasy writer Michael Morecock showed admirable restraint over some elements in Warlock from what I have read.
I think he knew Starlin was going in another direction.
Bernie did it better!
One of the few titles that kept me from ignoring Marvel completely in the seventies was Captain Marvel. What a great job Starlin did on this book! The story is tight and largely makes sense, even though mistakes like the date change involving Drax’s origin do manage to slip through occasionally, and the artwork is glorious. Starlin’s imagination and the scope of what he believed could be contained within the pages of a four-color comic was unequalled and when the MCU decided to go cosmic, it made perfect sense to use Starlin’s stories to get them there. I haven’t read these stories again in years and it’s nice to go back and recapture that original excitement. Thanks, Alan!
A lot of credit must go to Roy Thomas for enabling the second gen creators to go so far within the constraints of that time.
He had his flaws as an administrator precisely because he was a creative first and a manager second (if that’s the way to phrase it), but the whole glorious Englehart/Gerber/Starlin/McGregor era flourished under his guidance.
Wolfman/Wein and even Goodwin can be seen as an extension of Thomas’ approach.
Shooter would later say that Thomas actually “cracked the whip” harder than he dd and was more feared. Shooter also felt that Marvel’s problems with late books and the need for lots of unscheduled reprints came to the fore under Wein and Wolfman’s editorships.
Thomas did allow his people more creative freedom than Shooter did, but Shooter had been trained by Mort Weisinger at DC, who maintained a strong “House Style” in his books, where Thomas lasted about 3 weeks as Weisinger’s assistant editor before he de-camped to Marvel..
I have always thought a business biography of Shooter would give a lot of insight into both the history of comics and how 1980s and 1990s venture capital in the media/entertainment space operated.
This is similar to how Sean Howe’ book is both a history of Marvel Comics and a very insightful book about how treatment of free lancer work forces has developed. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/some-business-books-people-who-dont-like-john-minehan/?trackingId=bsMQ96BpSC6%2BiU92c0TP8w%3D%3D
Good points, John.
Ah, the ghost of Weisinger! Arguably as much of an auteur as Stan Lee.
It is interesting to note that while much of Shooter’s Marvel lost the spark, both Miller and Simonson blossomed. I must dig up and post the relatively recent long Shooter podcast interview which really gave him a chance to air his point of view.
The culmination of that venture capital was corporate raider Ronald “Mr. Revlon” Perelman filing chapter 11 bankruptcy during his firm’s tenure with Marvel and making their stock practically worthless. He did that with several companies, and sold off Marvel in 1997.
According to the book “Comic Wars” Perelman used Marvel as collateral for junk bonds, then told the buyers they could accept pennies on the dollar or he’d declare bankruptcy and they’d get nothing. He didn’t so much sell off Marvel as Arad and Perlmutter bought it out from under him. Which worked out well — Perelman was against adapting the characters into movies but the new ownership wasted no time greenlighting the X-Men.
Kind of how venture capital is supposed to work: put productive assets to productive use.
You wouldn’t go to Las Vegas in 1953 to see Elvis Presley, as he’d only cut one song at that time (“That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” and “My Happiness”).
The Douglases would have been more likely to see Liberace that year.
Ah, well, it’s why Edith Keeler and James Kirk were off to see “a Clark Gable picture” in “The City on the Edge of Forever” rather than the Richard Dix picture Harlan Ellison’s original script intended. Dix might have been a star in 1930, but who remembered him in 1967?
Your attack has once again captured the comic splendidly. Keep up the wonderful work!
Marvelous overview of this stellar chapter in Starlin’s space opera! Gee, maybe decades from now someone will make an actual opera of this yarn! On that snafu involving the trip to Las Vegas in 1953, Starlin could have changed the performer from Elvis to Sinatra as per the magic of Google it turns out Sinatra made his first performance in that city in October 1953. So we can just imagine he meant Sinatra all along. At least we can be sure they weren’t returning home from a Beatles’ concert on a dark and stormy night and instead running into a motorcycle gang as per Jimmy Cross’ macabre novelty song, “I Want My Baby Back”.
Anyhow, Starlin has been ramping up the tension in this epic, leading to this issue’s cliffhanger in which it looks like Rick Jones is going to be turned into mush and even if he switches out with Marv in time, our Kree hero would have difficulty avoiding the same fate. Loved the introduction of Isaac in humanoid form. He proved very helpful. Also liked that Starlin provided a reasonable explanation as to why the nigh omnipotent Thanos didn’t just blink his opponents out of existence. Seems he wanted to play with them a little while longer and build up their fear of his new status. Far more powerful than ye olde Wizard of Oz but not quite infallible. Starlin must have loved that sort of head in the sky image as he’d use it again, albeit in a different manner, when he introduced the Magus in his later Warlock series, which IMO was even better than this 1st Thanos War.
Correction: one record, not one song.
Fun fact: during his concert career, Presley only once performed outside of the United States, in a few dates in Canada in 1957.
I wonder if Elvis ever performed informally in Germany during his time as a Soldier in 3d Armor Division in Germany? He lived in Bad Nauheim during his time in 1-32 AR on Ray Barracks in Friedbergh and was apparently well liked in that community. I wonder if the thing in GI Blues (1960) of performing in German guest houses was based on a habit he had had.
I was a LT in 2-27 FA on that Kaserne in the 1980s and often ate at the “SGT Elvis A. Presley Memorial Dining Facility” in the 1-32 Area when I was Brigade Staff Duty Officer. (No peanut butter and banana sanwhiches, though,)
Dan Green, the inker on this, passed away last year. He had drawn the Beyond the Farthest Star adaptation in Tarzan for DC. Based on the first work by him I saw, I’m surprised he is mostly thought of as an inker.
He also did some really nice pencils for Doctor Strange in the ’80s, as well as painted art for a DS graphic novel. I think it’s mostly a matter of volume — if you look at his Mike’s Amazing World page, there are just *so* many more inking credits. (Plus, he inked a whole lot of issues of X-Men, which was the most popular book of that era.)
http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/main/features/creator.php?creatorid=1005
The early to mid ’70’s was when I really started to get back into my comics, especially with Mr. Starlin. Marvel, Warlock, just couldn’t wait for the next issue. Dan Green was a very good artist in his own right, but I always preferred Janson’s inks on Jim’s work.
Do you mind if I live through you vicariously for a moment, Alan? What was it like to buy this comic off a spinner rack (assuming it was a spinner rack) in 1974? Did you know it was due to come out that particular week, or was it a pleasant surprise? I know comics sometimes promoted when certain issues would come out—either a specific date, or third week of whatever month, but I don’t know how accurate this proved to be at the time. (And it might have been less accurate in some spots than others, given the distribution then.)
I’m just trying to imagine how it would feel to be buying these comics off the rack at the time, as I was still a few years away from buying comics regularly, myself. This Marv-Thanos storyline is one of my favorite storylines, possibly my very favorite ever. I’m guessing I would have lit up at the sight of it on the racks.
I can’t give you much in the way of specific memories, crustymud, but speaking in general terms, it was great. 😀 I think I was still about a year out from being able to anticipate when a particular issue might go on sale (wasn’t yet plugged into the fan network, in other words), so it was still usually a surprise to see what had made it to the racks in any given week. Essentially, it was a period when I could expect to find something really good, maybe even great, almost every time I made my weekly trip to the Tote-Sum.
Ditto here. I don’t think i ever translated the sales dates in direct currents into “Ah, this will arrive this week!” But there’d always be something.
The ones I remember completely surprising me were the first issue of Marvel’s Doc Savage and the first issue of DC’s Wanted.
As an addendum, I think that the on-sale dates that Marvel and DC posted in ads, checklist columns, etc., were pretty accurate, at least as far as my (and Don’s 😉 ) particular geographic area was concerned. If I’d had a mind to do so, I might actually have been able to cobble together some kind of “coming attractions” calendar for myself (though there would doubtless have been gaps). But, again, there was so much good stuff coming out regularly, that I really didn’t worry about it.
I bought this when it first came out, which was also the day of a huge snow storm, the second in like two weeks (when I bought JLA # 111). On January 29, 1974, it was 74 Degrees F in Upstate NY.
When the next issue of CPT Marvel came out in April we also has a freak snow storm, a couple of days before Easter.
During this period, it seemed liked you could depend on particular books to arrive depending on which week of the month. And every week, there was at least one Marvel book that I so looked forward to reading
As I recall (and take this with a pillar of salt), this was the line-up in 1974:
First week: TOMB OF DRACULA, DAREDEVIL, INCREDIBLE HULK
Second week: CAPTAIN AMERICA, DR. STRANGE, MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, SPIDER-MAN, (and JUNGLE ACTION with Black Panther? I think that was a second week book.)
Third week: AVENGERS, DEFENDERS, CAPTAIN MARVEL
Fourth week: MAN-THING, AMAZING ADVENTURES, FANTASTIC FOUR, MARVEL TEAM-UP
I’m sure I’m forgetting some, and I’m equally sure I messed the order up, but this is what I remember.
I vaguely remember buying this book and others off the spinner rack in the mid-seventies, Crusty, and having no idea how the publication schedule worked, any anticipated title, Capt. Marvel, Daredevil, Batman or whoever, was always a surprise and a thrill. Usually, one of the best parts of my week.
So it was the traditional spinner rack for all of us across the nation, it seems. Same here as far as being surprised every time. I think it was ’82 or ’83 when Marvel Age and the DC newsletter “Direct Currents” listed sales dates that I knew exactly what was coming out when.
I was living in Puerto Rico at the time so I don’t think any on sale dates would have been accurate, though I don’t have any clear memory of paying any attention to that. By ’74 on Wednesdays I would come home from school and a little later in the afternoon walk over to the newsstands in two nearby office buildings and pick up my comics. One newsstand had a spinner rack, the other had a wall mounted rack.
50 years ago, when I was 11, my family was living in West Jordan, a suburb of Salt Lake City. I was in the 6th grade, attending Elementary School a bit less than a mile from our house and I typically got my comics from a drug store across the street from the school. The Junior High School I would start attending in August 1974 was less than a mile away from the Elementary School and actually closer to our house. Over the summer, a Circle K convenience store was built and opened and was just a few minutes walk from the house and was yet another place I could get comics, although the drug store typically had a wider selection. New comics were usually placed on the racks on Tuesdays so unless I was sick or something else unusual was going on, I made a beeline to the drug store every Tuesday after school to see what the latest selections were and what I could afford to get. Whenever I saw a new issue of Captain Marvel, after having gotten issue #27 and instantly smitten with Starlin’s epic, C.M. became one of my must buys whenever I saw a new issue on the racks. I may have had about a dozen “must buys” by this point, but still there were times I missed issues that for whatever reason I couldn’t find at my usual, nearest outlets. With Captain Marvel, I lucked out, not missing any issues for the remainder of its run, even long after it fell off my “must buy” list. I still liked it enough to keep getting it even when the story and art paled considerably to what Starlin had done.
By the fall of 1974 I was in my first year of college, living in a dorm. I almost immediately found a local antique store that specialized in paper collectibles, including comics. The owner allowed his manager to set up a new comics counrt. Some customers were on the Phil Seuling/ Seagate package. They had to buy one of everyting Phil shipped. Package customers would sell what they didn’t collect to fen like me. A week later the same comics came in from the local independent distributor. This shop eventually sold The Comic Reader, so one had an idea when any particular issue would hit.
Here’s a 1974 issue:
https://archive.org/details/comic-reader-104/mode/2up
I still went to newsstands to pick up issues I missed, and sometimes to buy “hot books” that had sold out at the comics shop. I didn’t speculate on a grand level. I’d sell or trade them to fellow fen or to the shop. Before I graduated I was earning part-time $ working for the shop, which all went to my weekly new comics tab or the occasional back issue.
It was the same across the Atlantic. I had no idea what I’d find, but there was always something worth getting. Imagine my delight when I finally found a shop that went by the wondrous name of Yankee Mags in a nearby town. The shop had two parts: to the left was the X-rated section, a no-go area for someone my age, and to the right there was everything else, including roughly a bunch of 50-high piles of Marvel and DC comics in no order whatsoever. The uncertainty of what I might find just added to the excitement of looking through the piles.
The thing that I liked most about this era at Marvel is how relatively compact the Marvel Universe was. Thanos spilled over into other titles, events in one book were often referenced in others. Sure there were glitches: The White House was attacked in CAPTAIN AMERICA and DAREDEVIL in consecutive months.
Starlin’s CAPTAIN MARVEL, like the Englehart-Brunner DR. STRANGE, was about as trippy as mainstream comics could get. Even though I find his scripting a little bit clunky, Starlin’s concepts were pretty darn remarkable and helped set the bar for this era.
I must say that in the splash page of this issue the characters look like they’re dancing. Swap out Thanos’ head for a disco ball and the effect is complete.