Stryker2011 wrote:Yeah, sorry. Got the names mixed. But, yeah — DC was around a long time before Marvel came on the scene, so I always thought it was weird thatMarvel had pretty much all the same characters that DC had — though I always thought the Marvel characters “looked” cooler, and less “silly” than their DC forebears. Whether the creators at Marvel directly copied the “ideas” is debatable, but the comparisons can be made, or one could say — if you can think of it, someone else probably already thought of it as well.
Jack Kirby left DC for Marvel in 1971 because they gave him more creative control, presumably better money, and his own set of connected books, the New Gods, for which he created Darkseid. In those days it was a foregone conclusion that artists did not work for both Marvel and DC. When Jim Starlin created Thanos in 1973 arguably, he wasn’t borrowing a specific character so much as he was shooting for a certain “Kirby-ness” quality that Marvel was now missing after Kirby left. Mostly, Starlin borrowed from a New Gods character called Metron (Spock-like), but then a Marvel editor said to him “If you are going to copy, copy the good one,” i.e Darkseid (who was Dr-Doom-like).
Though Darkseid and Thanos are within the same comic book type, their essences quickly diverged. Darkseid stories stayed in the same mindset that Kirby carried from WWII, “Freedom is good, Nazi Tyrant bad,” which is powerful but not subtle. (Most of the DC guys were older than the Marvel guys). While Thanos got the Marvel treatment, which was more coloured by Vietnam and then Watergate, so he was more philosophically complicated and nihilistic. Thanos was strengthened by Marvel letting him be used almost exclusively by one very talented writer/artist, his creator Jim Starlin. Darkseid got a boost as a surprise villain for the Legion of Super Heroes, and more so when DC realized they didn’t have anyone else who could stand up in an actual fistfight with Superman. (Later they created Doomsday for that purpose, but Doomsday killed Superman first time out, so he was kind of used up -- how do you top that in a second appearance?)
Both Darkseid and Thanos consistently make it into a Top Ten list of comic book villains (before and after their movie versions), so it’s all good.