Thanos Rising #4

Thanos Rising was a 2013 Marvel NOW! five-issue title that acted as a prequel for both the original Thanos appearance in Jim Starlin's super-historic recreation of Captain Marvel from the Watergate-era 1970s as well as the recent Infinity blockbuster crossover event.

In a nutshell, Jason Aaron, Thanos Rising's writer, crafts a tale of a young, bloodthirsty sociopath, Thanos, who, after vivisecting his mother, leaves his home world of Titan and roams the cosmos as a space pirate, fucking, propagating offspring, accumulating power. At a certain point along the way, Thanos returns to Titan and the young woman who was instrumental in unleashing the murderer in him when they were both school children. She promises Thanos her love if he will seek out each child he has sired across the galaxy and slaughter it (hence, the tie-in with Infinity, which has Thanos returning to Earth to slay his last remaining son, Thane).

The six scans below are from Thanos Rising #4. The pencils are by rising star Simone Bianchi; the inks and inkwash, by Simone Bianchi and Riccardo Pieruccini; the colors, Ive Svorcina. The art is beautiful. The beguiling young lady Thanos is obsessed with reveals herself to be Death itself. This reprises the original "reveal" from the first substantial Thanos narrative, Captain Marvel #26-#33. Also, Aaron taps themes he explores in the Gorr arc of Thor: God of Thunder, namely, death, like religion and all the appurtenances of deity creation, is a projection of the self. Aaron has a lot in common with the German idealists.