Having read more of Warlock and Thanos' interactions before having read Marvel and Thanos', but having read Death of Captain Marvel, I too found it strange the "attachment" Thanos had in that he gave Marvel basically a dying wish. In later stories (I was just reading Marvel The End again) Warlock is always the one to show up as Thanos' conscience. When I read Marvel The End again, the epilogue, so to speak, between the two of them reminded me of Batman and Joker in Killing Joke. I think it's relative obscurity might shield it from the criticisms that the end of the Killing Joke gets. But it's very similar in how, instead of the hero acting "out of character" it is the villain.

I too read it for the first time around the same age. But I also might as well have been a child, as I was deprived of comics in my younger years so seeing the fantastical way that Starlin writes stories and illustrates them, is almost exclusive to him.

As far as analysis, this is probably one of my faults at review threads. I feel like if I look at it too closely, unless there are just blinding inconsistencies or failures in basic logic, it looses it's magic and I may not like it. Thankfully with most of the usual suspects, TKJ, DKR, and Watchmen, reading them at face value never impressed me enough to look deeper.

I think what impresses me most about the Thanos Saga isn't the work itself, but rather how Starlin got it made, beginning as a fill-in artist, building his career on this ongoing storyline, and (most importantly) doing it with the characters nobody else wanted, leaving him a lot of leeway with how to handle them. Had he been an established talent in the bullpen, he would have been put to work on more established characters, and that surely would have restricted what he could have done with them.

Starlin's is a classic comicdom version of the Cinderella story, and while it would have been nice to see him stick solely with one character/title, the Thanos Saga really couldn't have achieved what it did any other way.