Not my favorite iteration of Thanos at all, tbh. The grandeuse that Jim Starlin wrote him into ill fits to a cosmic-ky re-do of
Metropolis 900 mi. where the 80's megacorp CEO Lex Luthor ruined the life of a cafeteria waitress just because he could. There's been better:
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Damn if I don't wish that I would have gotten to read chronologically the build-up to the Infinity Gauntlet saga in the turn of the 90's in the Silver Surfer comicbook. It's magnificent how Thanos does a very eco-conscious bleeding heart presentation to the Silver Surfer, true real-world stuff on overpopulation, pollution and whatnot, before letting the Surfer on his master plan to wipe away half the life in universe.
See, I was never really a big comic book reader growing up, and honestly only have a passing interest in them now, simply because I enjoy the ridiculous stories and characters that come along. The Thanos ones tickled my fancy because the idea of a supervillain being petty to one specific random person is hilarious to me.
My two favorite villains in comics are Sixpack and Dog Welder. They’re D-class villains in the DC universe (though Sixpack has a consistent appearance in the HBO Harley Quinn series, so maybe C-class now?). And their powers and backstories are WILD.
Sixpack is simply a short, fat, balding drunk. He is consistently drunk, and outside of forming a supervillain group called Section 8 (also consisting of D-class villains), he’s completely unremarkable. No major powers, not super strength, nothing. But, in one comic, Superman finds him in a cold alley and Sixpack basically spills his guts to him. Talks about how unhappy he is, how he doesn’t want to be drunk all the time, etc. He also mentions that when he gets blackout drunk and passes out, he dreams of a world without superheroes. No power rings, no alien time travelers, nothing. No heroes at all, because it’s too hard to BE one in that world.
And Superman tells him that in ancient cultures, there’s a story about a god that basically dreamed up their universe. Everything mortals knew and everything that existed existed only in the god’s dream, and if the god awoke, everything would disappear. He then leads Sixpack out to a park, where there’s a statue of Sixpack with a plaque describing him as “The world’s greatest superhero”. And Superman says people don’t make statues of people unless they did something to be remembered for, and he hands Sixpack a bottle of whiskey.
Dog Welder is also exactly what he sounds like. He’s a guy with a mental disorder that causes him to weld dogs to people’s faces. He did attempt to save the world from an alien invasion by welding a dog to an alien’s face, but was promptly killed. His son, Dog Welder II, had a much more flushed out backstory, basically finding out that the bloodline was cursed by Osiris in ancient Egypt to want to weld dogs to people’s faces. And he fought back against the curse and I believe saved the world by welding two Dog stars together that would have destroyed the Earth had they continued to expand.