Jim Starlin, a comic book artist and writer responsible for several Marvel Universe story lines, condemned President Trump’s campaign for using his character Thanos in a recent ad.
On Tuesday evening, Trump’s campaign war room tweeted out a video from the climax of the Avengers film when the villain snapped his fingers and vaporized half of the population, including several heroes. The clip featured Trump as Thanos and claimed his reelection was “inevitable.” It also showed top Democrats vaporized while delivering their announcement of the articles of impeachment on Tuesday morning.
House Democrats can push their sham impeachment all they want.
President Trump’s re-election is ??????????. pic.twitter.com/O7o02S26nS
— Trump War Room (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TrumpWarRoom) December 10, 2019
In response to the clip, Starlin, 70, expressed his outrage in a post on Instagram. He said he felt “violated” by the use of the famous clip and claimed it was “sick” for Trump to compare himself to the “mass murderer.”
“After my initial feeling of being violated, seeing that pompous dang fool using my creation to stroke his infantile ego, it finally struck me that the leader of my country and the free world actually enjoys comparing himself to a mass murderer,” Starlin wrote. “How sick is that?”
He added, “These are sad and strange times we are going through. Fortunately all things, even national nightmares, eventually come to an end.”
[Related: ‘Are we in junior high school?’: Don Lemon incredulous over viral Trump Thanos meme]
The Trump campaign has a record with Hollywood types “being violated” by the use of their works. The family of the late musician Prince has demanded he stop using the song Purple Rain at campaign rallies, and the band Nickelback used a copyright complaint to force Twitter to take down similarly edited footage of their music video for the song Photograph.
