fighting some of the strongest beings in the cosmos using nothing but his intellect to defeat opponents. But before Thanos could begin gathering the powerful stones in the comics he first had to pull off another, much harder deception - faking his own death.
Thanos' quest for the Infinity Stones in the comics is chronicled in the appropriately named Thanos Quest by Jim Starlin and Ron Lim. This short two-issue comic shows Thanos gathering the six Infinity Stones but it only tells part of the story of how he did it. Thanos' plan to get the Infinity Gauntlet actually begins when he is brought back to life In Silver Surfer #34 after being dead for over a decade in real-time. After being resurrected Thanos realizes that in order to obtain ultimate power he will have to find some way to deal with the Silver Surfer, so in Silver Surfer #38 he decides to fake his own death by luring the Surfer into a fight and letting him "kill" Thanos.
His scheme is successful and all of Thanos' enemies with the exception of Drax are convinced that the Mad Titan is finally gone for good, leaving him free reign to search for the stones in secret. But it only step one of his plans. Since Silver Surfer is one of the few beings that can actually threaten Thanos in a fight, he comes up with another plot to get rid of the Galactus' herald by trapping him on an alien world. In Silver Surfer #40 the Surfer is visited by a robot emissary from Dynamo City, an alien planet controlled by excessive bureaucracy. The Robot is there to arrest the Surfer for killing Thanos because as it turns out he was actually a citizen of Dynamo City and the laws state that anyone who harms one of their citizens must be punished no matter what.
Once he is taken to Dynamo City the Surfer using his custom space chair. This continues until Silver Surfer #43 when the Surfer is put on trial again, this time for conspiring against Dynamo City's robot oligarchy.
The trial of the Surfer is humorously filled with jokes about the biased and contradictory legal system of Dynamo City, and the Surfer is eventually sentenced to death. Fortunately for him, Dynamo City executes prisoners by shooting them into space, so the Surfer is able to immediately regain the Power Cosmic and escape with his life. But while the Surfer may have escaped Dynamo City, it no longer mattered, since by this point Thanos had already completed the Infinity Gauntlet. The Silver Surfer may be one of cosmic Marvel's strongest heroes but not even he can overcome the genius intellect of Thanos - or the power of bureaucracy!
