20 best superhero comics to read after Infinity War

11. Thanos

So far in the MCU, Thanos hasn’t received much in the way of a backstory. He’s mostly seen sitting around on his space throne, grumping at people and looking an awful lot like Josh Brolin. While you’ve surely seen some of his backstories in Avengers: Infinity War, it’s likely that nothing in the movie history of Thanos can add up to the deviously, deliciously complicated one for his comics counterpart.

It goes something like this: Thanos is born to two Eternals, members of a race of hyper-intelligent, super strong beings (seems like the galaxy is lousy with them these days). Young Thanos looks different and draws the ire of everyone around him, including his own parents. He starts off as a pacifist but eventually feels drawn to nihilism and death worship.

That death worship gets even more intense when he encounters the physical embodiment of death, creatively named Mistress Death. As an adult, Thanos sort of putters around as a scientist, pirate  and galactic baby daddy with many different children. When Mistress Death shows up again, he tries to impress her by killing almost everyone in his family. He also commits genocide against his own people. While he’s at it, Thanos also starts planning to gain power over the entire universe, eventually looking for the Infinity Stones and Infinity Gauntlet.

Like many a comic book protagonist or villain, Thanos has died at least a couple of times. He seemed really dead for a while, but a recent series, Thanos (2016), has brought him back as more of an old-fashioned bad guy. Writer Jeff Lemire and artist Mike Deodato work together on the series, which is as good a place as any to get started on the Thanos drama.