Thanos Creator Comments on the Simpsons Getting Dusted by the ‘Avengers’ Villain

Thanos creator Jim Starlin is overjoyed the Marvel Comics villain made a cameo appearance in The Simpsons‘ most recent episode-opening couch gag.

Using the Infinity Gauntlet and five of the Infinity Stones — the sixth being the pacifier plucked out of baby Maggie’s mouth — Thanos then wills the yellow-skinned Springfielders into dust and nothingness, mirroring the same fate met by fifty percent of all living creatures in the universe in Avengers: Infinity War.

“Okay, I can now pass from this veil of tears with a smile on my face,” Starlin wrote on Facebook when reacting to the cameo.

The famed Marvel Comics creator, who in his time with the House of Ideas created Thanos as well as Guardians of the Galaxy members Drax and Gamora, previously revealed even he was not spared by the snap the galaxy’s surviving heroes will seek to reverse in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame.

Starlin has since said he “can’t imagine anybody else playing that character,” remarking at an October convention Brolin’s portrayal of the Mad Titan is so powerful he now imagines the star’s voice when reading his own comic books.

“I always thought it was going to be just a voiceover job, you know, [an] animated character,” Starlin said, remarking the state-of-the-art motion capture used to bring Thanos to life was only just being introduced when the character was first teased in The Avengers, where the alien made a cameo appearance as played by Damion Poitier in full prosthetics.

“I was thinking somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Idris Elba, anybody with a deep voice. That was the only thing I had on the agenda as far as I was thinking who to have.”

Despite many expecting the snap to be undone — the dusted Spider-Man (Tom Holland) returns in this summer’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, while a Black Panther sequel is in the works again with star Chadwick Boseman in the leading role — co-writer Stephen McFeely insists audiences have “no idea what Avengers 4 is.”

“Nobody knows, and that’s what makes me particularly excited. I look all the time on the internet: people have no idea,” McFeely said in August.

“[Avengers] 4 resolves the intrigue of Infinity War; [the movies are] clearly linked, but they almost seem to belong to two different genres. We did not want to cut a film in half and say, ‘Pay now and come back in a year for the rest!’ These are two very different stories, on a tonal and structural level.”

Avengers: Endgame opens April 26.