Jim Starlin recently appeared at the New York Comic-Con for the Infinity Gauntlet 25th Anniversary panel with CM Punk.
Marvel posted 8-minutes of highlights as well as an interview with Jim Starlin at the NYCC, which includes Starlin announcing a new Thanos comic as well as talking the inspiration for killing Robin and an abandoned Jimmy Olsen AIDS story.
If you haven’t read Infinity Gauntlet, you can pick up the trade on Amazon. I just reread it a week or so ago, and it definitely withstands the test of time. It’s a great read and one of my all-time favorite Marvel Cosmic stories. The Infinity Gauntlet is also the comic book story that influenced the Marvel movies with the Infinity Stones, Thanos and the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War movies.
“It all comes down from a quote by Norman Mailer, ‘All true stories end in death,'” Starlin explained when CM Punk asked about the death themes throughout his writings. “These guys are playing massively high stake games, and if people don’t die occasionally there’s no reality. I mean it’s not reality to begin with, but we have to at least give it a semblance of reality every so often. ”
Regarding inspirations for creating Thanos and Adam Warlock: “Everything from Will Helmreich to Jung to James Bond movies to comic books, walking around in the woods. Inspiration just comes everywhere,” Starlin said. “If I was to go through page by page – probably newer stuff would be easier to do – I could say I got this idea here, this idea there. They just come everywhere. A lot in the woods [smiles].”
Jim Starlin also agrees with CM Punk in that they hate that Marvel won’t let artists draw Pip the Troll as smoking (or any Marvel characters) and offered where the inspiration came from for the character.
“He’s everything that I that, well I wouldn’t want to do, but I have probably done in some of the more embarrassing moments,” Starlin said with a laugh. “He used to be royalty. His hobby was painting starfields, which was basically doing a black field and sitting their all day putting dots on. So of course he went insane and turned into a degenerate. No so different from my story back in the ’70s. But he is supposed to be based on Jack Kirby [laughs]. The cigar is Jack Kirby. Everything else was… Jack never did any of that stuff. He was a gentleman [laughs].”
Jim Starlin goes on to tell the story of how he and Steve Gerber were fired from Iron Man by Stan Lee as a result of following up their first appearance of Thanos issue with a funny story, which Stan Lee didn’t think too highly of.
“[Stan Lee] thought, ‘This is the worst Iron Man story ever done.’ It had Rasputin and stuff, so he fired us,” Starlin recalled. “Stan and I were always at logger heads. Howard Chaykin and I did a Nick Fury story where he is embezzling money from SHIELD to pay for an Infinity Formula. Stan saw that one and sent out a memo saying, ‘This is never to be referenced anywhere in the universe of Marvel ever again.’ I was always getting into trouble with Stan.”
Starlin also offered a story he always wanted to do involved Namor, but it was scrapped following the 911 attacks. Watch the video for more.
