THANOS

The Mad Titan's first near-death experience happened minutes after he was born. In Thanos Rising #1 (2013), by Jason Aaron and Simone Bianchi, Sui-San — wife of Mentor (A'Lars) — takes one look at her newborn son, sees his purple, Deviant-mutated face and burning eyes, grabs a scalpel and tries to kill him on the spot. The doctors sedate her at Mentor's request, and she spends the rest of her life in an asylum on Titan, convinced she had seen death itself in the baby's eyes.

Young Thanos grew up haunted by nightmares of an attempt he was too young to remember. He visited his silent mother in the asylum, brought her flowers he had bred himself, and told her about his life; she never once spoke to him. Then, as a teenager — his fascination with death curdling into obsession, his dissections already moving from animals to people — he came back one last time. Thanos strapped his own mother to a dissecting table and vivisected her, cutting her open to find whatever was inside her that had made her see a monster — looking, in effect, for what was wrong with him. He found no answers.

It is the darkest corner of Thanos's origin: the universe's greatest mass murderer was nearly its most famous infanticide victim, and his lifelong habit of opening bodies up looking for truth started with the woman who tried to kill him first. The irony cuts both ways — Sui-San may genuinely have foreseen what he would become, and her attempt may be part of what made him become it. Later continuity even denied her an ending: Eternals (2021) revealed she had been resurrected on Earth among the Excluded Eternals.