Previous Post Quote: While this is definitely a case of "nobody asked Starlin about his plot", it's easily explained by what we know about Mentor, which is that he makes his son Eros look like a piker with the ladies. Well the questions I have 1. Is Kazantra Thanos's mother or step-mother? 2. Is Sui-San Eros's mother or step-mother? 3. Are Sui-San and Kazantra the same person? 4. Could Thanos be Sui-San's son but Eros be Kazantra's son? 5. Kazantra is shown with 3 children. Thanos must be her step-child if she isn't Sui-San. Eros might be one of the other two...but who is Mentor's third kid? Presumably Mentor has had numerous children over the ages but Thanos and Eros are supposed to be the last two if memory serves. It appears they have a younger brother or maybe even a brother younger than Thanos but older than Stafox. 6. If Moondragon came to Titan as a child after her parents were killed and played with Thanos who was also a child...then how did an adult Thanos kill Heather's parents?

The early Thanos stories are pretty inconsistent; essentially, Starlin was an artist who wanted work as a writer, and Friedrich let him co-plot all sorts of stuff in whatever books were available. Additionally, Steve Engelhart and Steve Gerber wrote tie-ins to the Friedrich/Starlin Captain Marvel stories, with Engelhart taking a particular interest in developing Moondragon.

As a result, you get all sorts of weird inconsistencies. One early flashback to Moondragon's childhood shows child-Thanos there, which contradicts everything since. Thanos's first appearance shows that all the "Titans" are purple-skinned.

There're also a few things that were changed or quietly ignored later on. The big one is that the Titans, under Starlin, were clearly meant to be *the* Titans of Greek myth, not Eternals in exile. But a few others are striking as well. In the 1970s stories, Thanos's power seems concentrated in his eyebeams, probably a legacy of his beginnings as a mashup of Darkseid and Metron of Kirby's New Gods series. The Blood Brothers' symbiotic link is nowhere in evidence in Starlin's stories; it seems to have been invented by Jim Shooter and Archie Goodwin in a story in Iron Man. (Starlin's idea was that they were blood-drinkers.)

One of the odder elements is that Starlin starts the whole shebang with the idea that the Destroyer, later Drax the Destroyer, is Thanos's archfoe and a huge threat to him. However, as the original Thanos series goes on, Drax becomes kind of a minor annoyance at best, a guy who accomplishes essentially nothing at all and is routinely outwitted or just plain beaten up by Thanos. This may explain why Starlin resurrected Drax as comic relief in the 1990s. Clearly, his plans for his space epic changed as soon as he could use characters like Mar-Vell and Adam Warlock.

All of this leaves lots of room for wacky speculation, but some of it will still point to plain inconsistencies in the planning and execution of the stories.