James P. Starlin (born October 9, 1949) is an American comics artist and writer. Beginning his career in the early 1970s, he is best known for space opera stories, for revamping the Marvel Comics characters Captain Marvel and Adam Warlock, and for creating or co-creating the Marvel characters Thanos, Drax the Destroyer, Gamora, and Shang-Chi. Later, for DC Comics, he drew many of their iconic characters, including Darkseid and other characters from Jack Kirby's Fourth World, and scripted the death of Jason Todd, the second Robin, during his run on Batman. For Epic Illustrated, he created his own character, Dreadstar.
Notable works written by Starlin:
- Warlock (1967)
- Captain Marvel
- Thanos
- The Thanos Quest
- Gamora
- Drax the Destroyer
- Dreadstar
- Shang-Chi
- A Death in the Family
- The Infinity Gauntlet
- The Infinity War
- The Infinity Crusade
- Infinity Abyss
- Marvel: The End
- Batman: The Cult
His work includes examples of:
- Acid-Trip Dimension: Jim Starlin loves this trope. Trippy, reality-warping dreamscapes tend to pop up frequently in his Thanos and Adam Warlock stories.
- Creator's Favorite:
- While he did not create Adam Warlock, he is certainly a favorite character of the author who took him from an obscure Fantastic Four side character to one of the foremost tacticians of Marvel Comics in the 90's.
- He has also expressed fondness of Spider-Man and inserts him into most of his cosmic-based stories, even though Spidey is generally considered a "street-level" hero.
- Also on a regular basis, he seems to like The Incredible Hulk. And preferably in his big, strong, Savage Hulk persona.
- It also seems he has a soft spot for Doctor Strange, trying to include him in his stories whenever he can.
- Beyond all of these, however, is Thanos, who is somewhat like Adam Warlock in being a cosmic-tier character of the type that Starlin preferred, with one very important difference — Starlin did create Thanos, and so favored him above all others. How much did he favor Thanos? Enough to demote the aforementioned Warlock into Thanos's emo sidekick during the '90s, as well as to come up with the The Infinity Gauntlet storyline which basically boils down to "Thanos lords it over the ENTIRE REST OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE, and is not even defeated by any hero or combination of heroes but instead by his own hubris". Indeed, Starlin's love of Thanos ran so deep that when he eventually crossed over to write for DC, he reinvented the obscure Hawkman/Captain Comet villain Onimarr Synn into a very thin Expy of Thanos.
- Creepy Shadowed Undereyes: Jim Starlin always draws Adam Warlock this way.
- Old Shame: According to this Comic-Con interview
, Jim Starlin regrets working on Shang-Chi's first three issues. He worked on the first issue completely ignorant of the source material of Fu Manchu, who was portrayed as Shang-Chi's father. Afterward, Starlin's friend Larry Hama gave him a Fu Manchu book to read, and he is horrified by the stereotypical Yellow Peril portrayal of the character, leading to him dropping out of the book after the third issue.
