Jim Starlin: C/D

Batman: The Cult remains one of the worst comic books I've ever read. But his stuff on the monthly comic (in the late 80s) wasn't so bad for its time. The rest I haven't read.

Oh Chuck you should hunt down his Warlock run ASAP!!! Marvel reprinted it in the 80s (in 6 giant-sized Baxter-papered versions), so you might be able to find them cheap! Or you can, y'know, kill the industry on the DL.

See also: Jim Starlin's "Warlock": Classic or Dud?

You cannot deny the creator of the KGBeast!

"Among Madmen" was a fun, trashy read when I was 13 or something.

S: WARLOCK

It's all you need. I dunno about D for anything else, but it doesn't deliver cosmic-powered-lunacy like WARLOCK did.

Starlin's run on Captain Marvel and his own comic Dreadstar were both pretty good. If you like the Warlock stuff, I'd say check both of those out.

I just bought the Infinity Gauntlet Omnibus, and read the whole thing for the first time in years... And man, I'd totally forgotten that the reason Thanos goes through this whole thing, the reason he kills 50% of all sentient beings in the universe, is overpopulation! As in, Death feels overpopulation has become a problem for the proper balance of life and death, and she orders Thanos to kill half of all living beings because of that! Since Death isn't limited to just Earth but to the whole universe, this would mean that overpopulation has all of sudden become an issue all around the universe at the same time! It's nice for Starlin to try to address real-life issues, but it just doesn't make sense at all.

Also, having read this thing once more, it's even more obvious than I thought before than 99% of the Marvel superheroes appearing in this comic are irrelevant. You could erase them all from the story, and it wouldn't be much different. Only people that matter in the plot are Starlin's own pet characters: Warlock, Thanos, Death, etc. I think Nebula is pretty much the only significant character who didn't already appear in Starlin's original 70s Warlock run. Just like with Starlin's 70s comics, it's pretty obvious that he has a story in his head and just tells it his way regardless of what comic book it appears in or what characters he has to use. Like in this case, the whole Infinity Gauntlet arc starts in Silver Surfer immediately when Starlin replaces Englehart as it's writer, and it's said the Surfer will have a big role in the upcoming conflict, and only he can stop Thanos, but in the actual IG mini his only contribution is that he can fly really fast, and the plot that relies on his speed ends up failing anyway. So all the foreshadowing in his own title amounts to nothing.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to railroad existing comics in this fashion, if it results in entertaining stories (which I think TIG still is, it's sequels less so), but it's kinda funny that The Infinity Gauntlet and it's sequels were the biggest crossovers of the early 90s, and they're basically just Warlock/Thanos stories with the other Marvel characters providing not much more than fodder for the fight scenes.

Yeah, I don't pretend to know the behind-the-scenes machinations of the thing, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that Starlin came to the table with an idea for a sequel to his '70s work, jumped at the opportunity to make it a huge crossover, and then worked backwards to shoehorn all of the other Marvel characters into the story. As I've said elsewhere, the crossover issues are pointless with respect to the core story, and as you say, much of the core story is pointless with respect to the core of the core story. Still love the damn thing, though, as it was the transitional point from occassionally and indiscriminately buying comics as a kid to becoming a legit comics fan/Marvel Zombie.

I'm just reading the long preamble to this in Silver Surfer, like a dozen issues or so, and they're quite fun too.

Starlin's sentences kind of remind me of Stephen King for some reason. Is it just the era or is there something there?

It's that combo of 80 glitz vs fantasy vs pulp, but not in a Miller way. Maybe nothing.

Thanos Quest is the highpoint of the Infinity stories. Tight where everything else is not.

Yeah, Thanos Quest is the best, sometimes it's just fun to read a story where the villain manages to carry out his evil masterplan perfectly. And it helps that most of folks he steals the Gems from have an history of being assholes themselves.

And I agree with Chuck that Silver Surfer issues that lead to IG are not bad in themselves, it's just that Starlin tries to make it look like SS has an important part in the whole story (Death prophesying he's the only one who can stop Thanos, etc), instead of his book just happening to be the place where Starlin decided to start this plot arc. Kinda like Starlin's original Thanos saga starting in Iron Man, because that's the book he was doing at the moment, but then the rest of the story continues and concludes in Captain Marvel.