Darkseid/Thanos & Man-Thing/Swamp Thing 0

[bronze johnny]

The debates over whether one creator's character was based (entirely based in some cases) on another, have and will continue as long as newer collectors discover the history of the comic book medium. Passionate debates over whether Starlin owes a great deal to Kirby for Thanos (Jim does acknowledge Darkseid as an inspiration for Thanos if my memory serves me correctly), and Swampy's sudden appearance after Man-Thing raise questions about the timing. We can even go back to the Silver Age with Doom Patrol and the X-Men. The Golden Age provides the Superman and Captain Marvel debate that ultimately resulted in the demise of Fawcett Comics and the end of one of the most popular superheroes of that era. Notwithstanding the Supes/Captain Marvel battle, most of the questions and debates about whether the creators of one publisher "borrowed" from the works of another under a different publisher never really went anywhere. Some passionate DC and Marvel collectors that are friends of mine have debated these questions going back to when we were kids in the late Bronze Age. The debates continued into the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s. No harm in this but one question that has come up concerns the success some characters have in the transition to film. Thanos is a prime example of where the success and money being generated from the contribution provided by his role as the villian in the Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers films. Swamp Thing had a film in the 80s (Adrienne Barbeau fans will never forget!) but B movies never generated the kind of money A listers do today. Swampy will get eventually his movie.

The money made today on comic book films is unprecedented and has me wondering whether the passionate debates many of us have had through the preceding decades gives rise to new questions as to whether a comic book film (eventually generating a billion dollars in revenue) having Thanos as the major villian in it should provide somewhere in the credits that his creator and Marvel Comics owes Jack Kirby and DC Comics (ironic in this case since Kirby and Marvel are generally coupled together) a special mention since there wouldn't be a Thanos without Darkseid?

Best,

John   

Edited April 29, 2018 by bronze johnny

[nickwire]

wasent there only a month or so difference between savage tales 1 and house of secrets 92?  I honestly have no clue,but is that enough time to take the idea, create the book and get it to publication? 

[jools&jim]

11 hours ago, bronze johnny said:

 Passionate debates over whether Starlin owes a great deal to Kirby for Thanos (Jim does acknowledge Darkseid as an inspiration for Thanos if my memory serves me correctly)...  

 

Quote

Starlin: That was the one exception where there was 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. 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 [Thomas] 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!” (Comic Book Artist #2, TwoMorrows, June, 1998)

 

[jools&jim]

Another similarity: the first appearances of Darkseid and Thanos were both shoe-horned into existing--and thoroughly lackluster--titles (Jimmy Olsen and Iron Man), and neither character is featured on the cover.

[bronze johnny]

On 5/1/2018 at 8:52 PM, jools&jim said:

Another similarity: the first appearances of Darkseid and Thanos were both shoe-horned into existing--and thoroughly lackluster--titles (Jimmy Olsen and Iron Man), and neither character is featured on the cover.

Was Iron Man in the same category as Jimmy Olsen when issue 55 came out? Olsen didn't have a Drax and Blood Brothers to share an issue with. 

[bronze johnny]

On 4/30/2018 at 12:00 AM, jools&jim said:

 

 

Who would have thought that Starlin's borrowing from Kirby's and DC 's Darkseid would later contribute toward Disney making hundreds of millions of dollars?

[divad]

4 hours ago, bronze johnny said:

Was Iron Man in the same category as Jimmy Olsen when issue 55 came out? Olsen didn't have a Drax and Blood Brothers to share an issue with. 

Well, Starlin only did what, 2 or 3 issues of Iron Man, and BWS had just done an ish. Marvel was trying to kickstart a title that was in the doldrums at about that time. Whereas Kirby had just started in the JO title, and even I (a Mighty Marvelite at the core) picked up copies of the JO title to see what Jack had in store for us. I was only buying IM at the time from a completionist perspective. (FWIW)

[divad]

On 4/29/2018 at 9:00 PM, jools&jim said:

On 4/29/2018 at 9:07 AM, bronze johnny said:

 Passionate debates over whether Starlin owes a great deal to Kirby for Thanos (Jim does acknowledge Darkseid as an inspiration for Thanos if my memory serves me correctly)...  

 

Quote

Starlin: That was the one exception where there was 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. 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 [Thomas] 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!” (Comic Book Artist #2, TwoMorrows, June, 1998)

 

Love the quote from Roy! 

[bronze johnny]

5 hours ago, divad said:

Well, Starlin only did what, 2 or 3 issues of Iron Man, and BWS had just done an ish. Marvel was trying to kickstart a title that was in the doldrums at about that time. Whereas Kirby had just started in the JO title, and even I (a Mighty Marvelite at the core) picked up copies of the JO title to see what Jack had in store for us. I was only buying IM at the time from a completionist perspective. (FWIW)

Good point about Marvel using Starlin and BWS to jump start the Iron Man. Shellhead is my favorite Marvel superhero but I didn't find his title too exciting during my first collecting days in the late '70s. I wasn't at all interested in DC back then especially when the great implosion happened. However, Kirby has always been my favorite and I eventually crossed (sacrilege back then!) over to DC to get his Fourth World books. I too would have bought several copies of JO 133 and 134 off the newsstand back in 1970. Must have been cool to be at a newsstand and see Kirby's name on a DC comic. 

Interestingly, Darkseid Is the most significant characters to come out of the Bronze Age Jimmy Olsen - Forever People - Fourth World books. The same can be said for Thanos and the Bronze Age Iron Man comic book. It can also be said that Darkseid is Jack's greatest Bronze Age creation while Starlin will be remembered most for Thanos. 

The questions remain: 

As to how much Starlin borrowed for Thanos from Kirby's Darkseid? 

If Starlin owes a great deal to Kirby then why didn't DC take issue with Thanos? Did the cancellation of the Fourth World have anything to do with this?

Did Infantino care about Kirby's Fourth World work since it wasn't selling prior to his decision to cancel the books? 

John 

[jools&jim]

12 hours ago, bronze johnny said:

Was Iron Man in the same category as Jimmy Olsen when issue 55 came out? Olsen didn't have a Drax and Blood Brothers to share an issue with. 

Those early '70s issues of Iron Man are almost uniformly terrible.  From what I've read, it's pretty clear that Starlin--a newcomer to Marvel at the time who was still establishing himself--was given the green-light to do some interior work on that title precisely because it was such a relatively low-seller...

[RockMyAmadeus]

On 4/29/2018 at 5:31 PM, nickwire said:

wasent there only a month or so difference between savage tales 1 and house of secrets 92?  I honestly have no clue,but is that enough time to take the idea, create the book and get it to publication? 

ST #1 has a 5/71 publication date, while HOS #92 is 7/71.

I'm not sure how sale dates worked with magazines, but at the time, standard comics were 3 months ahead. If magazines were the same, that would put ST on sale in February, and HOS #92 in April.

Since the editorial content (story and art) had to be completed at least a month prior to their presence on newsstands, that would have meant that ST would have been out a month, perhaps, before HOS #92.

Certainly not impossible, but maybe not likely...? Certainly enough time for Len to write it, but enough time for Bernie to draw? Maybe Len and Roy talked about the idea...? 

Mark Engblom argues that even this short window would have been impossible, but I'm not entirely convinced.

http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/comic_coverage/2007/10/which-came-firs.html

And, of course, the Heap beat them both by nearly 30 years.

[Philflound]

I could swear I saw a pre-Marvel horror book with a story that contained a Swamp Thing. I can't recollect which title though.

[divad]

8 hours ago, RockMyAmadeus said:

ST #1 has a 5/71 publication date, while HOS #92 is 7/71.

I'm not sure how sale dates worked with magazines, but at the time, standard comics were 3 months ahead. If magazines were the same, that would put ST on sale in February, and HOS #92 in April.

Since the editorial content (story and art) had to be completed at least a month prior to their presence on newsstands, that would have meant that ST would have been out a month, perhaps, before HOS #92.

Certainly not impossible, but maybe not likely...? Certainly enough time for Len to write it, but enough time for Bernie to draw? Maybe Len and Roy talked about the idea...? 

Mark Engblom argues that even this short window would have been impossible, but I'm not entirely convinced.

http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/comic_coverage/2007/10/which-came-firs.html

And, of course, the Heap beat them both by nearly 30 years.

Yes, but remember that Bernie had already drawn a thing that had risen from the swamp in an earlier HOS (arguably a prototype.) Not sure if Len wrote it, but I had a coverless copy sitting around for the longest time. After having read it 20 or 30 times I put in in someone's order as a freebie.

 

 

 

Edited May 13, 2018 by divad

[boomtown]

8 hours ago, divad said:

Yes, but remember that Bernie had already drawn a thing that had risen from the swamp in an earlier HOS (arguably a prototype.) Not sure if Len wrote it, but I had a coverless copy sitting around for the longest time. After having read it 20 or 30 times I put in in someone's order as a freebie.

 

 

 

It's odd, there are 2 books that people market as Swamp Thing prototypes, but both came out after House of Secrets #92 (6/7 1971). Wrightson did one in House of Mystery #195 (10/11 1971) and Wein did one in Phantom Stranger #14 (7/8 1971). At this point I just view it as a sales ploy, although the Wrightson story is pretty cool.

[herc2000]

The creators of Man-Thing, Swamp-Thing were if I remember correctly were living together at the time, so maybe they both agreed you get yours in DC and I'll get mine in Marvel, lol.

There are lots of prototypes, but I think The Glob came way before all of them ;-)

[___]

Heap was first 

[N e r V]

I covered some of this in another thread in magazine section recently but for anyone interested Savage Tales #1 was released in January 1971 and House of Secrets #92 in April 1971. 

 

 

As described in the text featurette "The Story Behind the Scenes" in Savage Tales #1 (cover-dated May 1971), the black-and-white adventure fantasy magazine in which the character debuted in an 11-page origin story, Man-Thing was conceived in discussions between Marvel Comics editor Stan Lee and writer Roy Thomas, and that together they created five possible origins. Lee provided the name, which had previously been used for unrelated creatures in Marvel's early science-fiction/fantasy anthology Tales of Suspense #7 (Jan. 1960) and #81 (Sept. 1966), as well as the concept of the man losing sentience.

As Thomas recalled in 2002:

Stan Lee called me in; it would've been late '70 or early '71. [...] He had a couple of sentences or so for the concept — I think it was mainly the notion of a guy working on some experimental drug or something for the government, his being accosted by spies, and getting fused with the swamp so that he becomes this creature. The creature itself sounds a lot like the Heap, but neither of us mentioned that character at the time.... I didn't care much for the name 'Man-Thing', because we already had the Thing [of the superhero team the Fantastic Four], and I thought it would be confusing to also have another one called Man-Thing.

 

Thomas worked out a detailed plot and gave it to Gerry Conway to -script. Thomas and Conway are credited as writers, with Gray Morrow as artist. A second story, written by Len Wein and drawn by Neal Adams, was prepared at that time, but, upon Savage Tales' cancellation after that single issue, "took a year or two to see print", according to Thomas. That occurred in Astonishing Tales #12 (June 1972), in which the seven-page story was integrated in its entirety within the 21-page feature "Ka-Zar", starring Marvel's jungle-lord hero. This black-and-white interlude (with yellow highlighting) segued to Man-Thing's introduction to color comics as Ka-Zar's antagonist-turned-ally in this and the following issue (both written by Thomas, with the first penciled by John Buscema and the second by Buscema and Rich Buckler).

The Wein-written Man-Thing story appeared in between Wein's first and second version of his DC Comics character Swamp Thing. Wein was Conway's roommate at the time, and as Thomas recalled in 2008,

 

Gerry and I thought that, unconsciously, the origin in Swamp Thing #1 was a bit too similar to the origin of Man-Thing a year-and-a-half earlier. There was vague talk at the time around Marvel of legal action, but it was never really pursued. I don't know if any letters even changed hands between Marvel and DC. [...] We weren't happy with the situation over the Swamp Thing #1 origin, but we figured it was an accident. Gerry was rooming with Len at the time and tried to talk him into changing the Swamp Thing's origin. Len didn't see the similarities, so he went ahead with what he was going to do. The two characters verged off after that origin, so it didn't make much difference, anyway.

 

 

[N e r V]

And on Thanos:

 

 

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's look was 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!"

 

[N e r V]

FYI, swipes have been happening on purpose and by accident since the beginning of comics. Batman was comics version of the Shadow in many respects along with other pulp swipes. Hulk “borrowed” pretty freely from Frankenstein’s monster and Jekyl and Hyde. All 4 Fantastic Four characters “borrow” from others. Captain America was not there first as a red,white and blue character. Thor, Hercules, etc. all exist prior to comics. It’s more about the characters standing on their own merits vs who they borrowed from.

As its said there is really nothing new under the sun....