Joss Whedon Chimes In On Marvel & Jim Starlin Breakup

While Thanos is set to dominate the MCU, his original creator is at odds with Marvel Comics, and he's getting support from a variety of other creators.

That includes Avengers director Joss Whedon. Whedon, who also penned the beloved Astonishing X-Men run for Marvel, chimed in on the falling out after Bill Sienkiewicz commented on the dispute. "This is unfortunate. Jim deserves to be treated fairly, respectfully, across the creative board.⚡️," Sienkiewicz wrote. Whedon then added, "His work is as important to the MCU as anyone's."

Starlin recently decided to stop working with Marvel Comics, despite having a trilogy of projects in the works. Some thought it was Marvel that broke ties, but it turns out it was a clashing between Starlin and editor Tom Breevort.

"What I objected to and what will keep me from doing any further work for Marvel Editorial was Tom Brevoort approving a plot for the current on-going series, which was pretty much the same as the Thanos story arc in the graphic novel trilogy Alan Davis and I have been working on for Tom for close to the past year," Starlin explained. "He had 200 pages of script and 100 pages of pencils on this project when he gave the green light to a strikingly similar plot. The on-going will be in print before the graphic novel trilogy. TO avoid spoiling anyone's enjoyment of these two stories I will not be summarizing the striking similarities."

Starlin blames much of that not on the current Thanos creative team but on Breevort.

"At first Tom denied giving his approval to the plot," Starlin wrote. "When that turned out to be false, he switched to claiming there was nothing similar about the two plots. When that didn't fly he changed his story to it was all an accident. These changes of excuse and other bits of procrastination ate up a month, by which time the current Thanos on-going art team was too far along for anything to be done about the situation. Too bad for me. So, I am moving on."

Starlin also revealed that he "lobbied heavily" to write the ongoing Thanos series, but Marvel decided to go with other writers two different times.

Thanos has never been more popular, so it is quite odd that relations between his creator and Marvel are this bad. Hopefully, this relationship improves sooner rather than later.