4. Marvel Universe: The End
For a while there, one of the best Marvel gimmicks around was their The End series. The premise was that a writer and an artist would explore a popular character during their last days of life. Like most things, the results are fair to middling, but the chance to skip into an alternate future where a dying Tony Stark grooms an inferior replacement or a post-apocalyptic Hulk finally rids himself of the cancerous Banner within is too enticing for a fanatic to pass. Jim Starlin would never relish on the deaths of one character, so when he got his time at bat on the series, he killed the whole shebang. Naturally, Thanos is at the heart of our destruction, consuming the entire cosmos into his being and transcending beyond natural order. Starlin concludes on one hell of a twist revealing that endings are just beginnings for others.
3. Thanos Rising
We jump from the end of Thanos to the beginning. Writer Jason Aaron and illustrator Simone Bianchi journey to those early days on Titan when Thanos was but a newborn baby. When his mother Sui-San saw her purple child immediately after birth, she tried to snuff the wretched thing out. Condemned as a madwoman, the mother of Thanos lives out her days in an asylum while her son grows up an outsider within the Titan school system. He’s a brilliant boy with an artistic flourish, but he has a morbid preoccupation with death. That obsession only grows when he meets a young girl who is most definitely more than she simply appears. Thanos Rising is a grim, ugly story and a fitting origin for the philosophical grotesque that eventually grows into The Avengers’ greatest threat.
2. Infinity
When Thanos learns that The Avengers have abandoned Earth to deal with another cosmic threat known as The Builders (we don’t have the time or the space to get into them here), he launches an attack on our weak planet. His Black Order agents (Ebony Maw, Corvus Glaive, Proxima Midnight, Black Dwarf, and Supergiant) each stake a claim on a nation and proceed to obliterate kingdoms once thought unbeatable. Spearheaded by Jonathan Hickman, this massive series spilled over into both the Avengers and New Avengers monthly titles, and it is one of the few cases in which I would recommend reading everything. Or at least, everything labeled with Hickman as the writer. Infinity is an enormous brawl of a book, and Thanos spends much of it residing like a puppet master in the background, but when he comes out, he comes out swinging. You will also need to set aside some reading time because Infinity is a brick and a half.
1. Thanos Wins
If you read no other Thanos comic on this list before Avengers: Endgame, please read this one. Thanos Wins by Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw is a rip-roaring blitzkrieg through the personality of the Mad Titan that’s as wildly entertaining as it is absurd. A despondent dictator travels to the Chitauri homeworld where he quickly bends the civilization to his will. The challenge leaves him feeling empty. Suddenly, the Cosmic Ghost Rider appears and steals Thanos through time using a fractured piece to the Time Gem. Arriving in the future, Thanos meets an older version of himself. King Thanos has taken claim over every being in the galaxy, but one. The Fallen One is another omnipotent entity that will be familiar to anyone reading this list, but I dare not spoil the reveal for you good reader. Suffice it to say, the threat proves formidable, but just like the best Jim Starlin comics, Donny Cates knows when to flip the script on the reader.
Related Topics: Avengers: Endgame, Comics, Josh Brolin, Marvel Studios
