THANOS

In Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw's 'Thanos Wins' (Thanos Vol. 2, 2017–2018), the younger Thanos is dragged millennia forward to meet the one version of himself who got everything: King Thanos, an ancient, white-bearded Titan who has murdered his way through gods, Celestials, and virtually every hero in existence — all as an offering to Death, who still will not come. Touring the King's palace of bones, the Cosmic Ghost Rider offers the visitor a chore: time to feed the dog.

The dog is the Hulk. Bruce Banner — grey-bearded, half-mad, and effectively unkillable — is kept in a pit beneath the palace, chained like an animal on a diet of the dead: King Thanos feeds him the bodies of the fallen, Steve Rogers among them, as the Ghost Rider cheerfully recounts. When the old Hulk finally speaks to his younger tormentor, it is not a threat. It is a plea, in three broken syllables: 'Kill... Hulk?' — the strongest creature on Earth begging for the one mercy his keeper enjoys withholding.

The arrangement tells you everything about the difference between conquest and cruelty. King Thanos did not keep the Hulk alive because he feared him, needed him, or even used him — the pit is a trophy case with a heartbeat, proof that in the universe Thanos finally won, even hope's biggest monster ends as furniture. When the Fallen One storms the palace in Thanos #16, Banner's brief freedom ends under a blade from behind, and the dog of King Thanos dies as he lived for eons: as somebody else's property.