Iron Man #55: The First Thanos
Iron Man #55, cover dated February 1973, introduced Thanos along with Drax the Destroyer. Jim Starlin created both characters and drew the issue, with Mike Friedrich writing, and VeVe's comic store and Marvel lineup include officially licensed material connected to the character's later prominence.
A purple-skinned giant obsessed with death appears in an Iron Man issue, of all places, alongside a living weapon created specifically to destroy him. Jim Starlin was twenty-three years old and relatively new to the industry when he introduced two of Marvel’s most consequential cosmic characters in a single story that had nothing structurally to do with either of them beforehand.
What happens in the issue
Iron Man #55 pits Tony Stark against forces connected to the alien Blood Brothers, but the story’s real purpose is introducing Thanos, a Titan obsessed with death and destruction, and Drax the Destroyer, a being created for the sole purpose of killing him. Starlin plotted and drew the issue, with Mike Friedrich scripting, working within an Iron Man title that had not previously ventured into cosmic territory in any serious way. The choice to launch a character this ambitious inside someone else’s book, rather than build him a dedicated launchpad, was unusual even by the standards of 1970s Marvel.
Thanos is given almost none of his eventual mythology here. The obsession with the literal figure of Death as a romantic interest, the philosophy of cosmic balance that would eventually justify the character’s most famous scheme decades later, none of it is present yet. What exists in Iron Man #55 is the shape: immense power, cosmic ambition, and an adversary built specifically to oppose him.
Starlin’s Titan grows far beyond this cameo
Starlin returned to Thanos repeatedly across the 1970s, most significantly in Captain Marvel and the character’s own subsequent stories, steadily building the cosmology, the Eternals of Titan as Thanos’s own people, Death as an actual entity Thanos seeks to court, that turned a one-off villain into one of the most fully developed antagonists Marvel has ever published. The Infinity Gauntlet storyline in 1991, also written by Starlin, brought decades of that groundwork to its most famous conclusion and became the basis for the character’s enormous later film prominence.
Very little of that arc was planned in 1973. Starlin has said in interviews that Thanos began as a variation on Jack Kirby’s Darkseid, filtered through his own interests in cosmic philosophy and mortality, rather than as the mastermind that decades of later stories carefully built him into.
Why an Iron Man issue, of all places
Marvel in the early 1970s gave younger creators unusual latitude on secondary titles, and Iron Man in 1973 was exactly that kind of book: popular enough to matter, not so tightly controlled editorially that a young artist could not steer it somewhere unexpected. Starlin used that latitude to build toward the cosmic Marvel stories he actually wanted to tell, and Thanos’s unlikely origin point is a direct result of where Marvel happened to let him work.
Collecting the debut
Iron Man #55 is a significant Bronze Age key, and its value has grown substantially since the character’s introduction into Marvel’s films made him one of the most recognizable villains in popular culture rather than a niche cosmic figure known mainly to longtime readers. High-grade copies are less scarce in absolute terms than 1960s Silver Age comics, since print runs and preservation rates were both improving by the early 1970s, but demand has outpaced supply at the top of the grading scale.
High-grade copies bring serious prices at major auction houses.
Thanos and Iron Man on VeVe today
VeVe’s Marvel lineup includes officially licensed Iron Man material, and the comic store carries officially licensed Marvel digital comics more broadly. Checking there directly is the way to confirm what is currently available rather than assuming any specific issue is included.
To look around the app before deciding anything, start a free VeVe account. New collectors get US$10 in credit toward a first piece, no card required, and the free credit page has the details.
A villain who outgrew his own launchpad
Iron Man #55 is barely remembered today for anything involving Tony Stark. It survives as a footnote in one hero’s history and a cornerstone in a villain’s, which is a strange kind of legacy for a comic to carry, and precisely the kind of accident that makes Silver and Bronze Age Marvel worth studying issue by issue rather than character by character.