“Roy Knows This, But He’s Turned Into a Ghoul Late in Life…” – The Comics Biz Gets Wise, Better Late Than Never

I suppose it had to happen tho’ I wish it had happened earlier. A portion of the comics industry has begun to finally speak out against what Four Color Sinners has been covering and compiling for the better part of a year: the ongoing and calculated makeover of Roy Thomas as the co-creator of various characters he only had fleeting, marginal involvement in.

Believe it or don’t, it is not because it would be in this site’s best interest that I implore anybody reading this now to do a deep dive of our previous exposes on the dirty work of Thomas and his “Manager” John Cimino. Each entry provides context and details of this long campaign, which will help fill in the blanks and display a clear objective and premeditated plan to seat Thomas in the position that Stan Lee once held on the lucrative pop culture convention circuit.

I find it mildly amusing that other people are now outraged at this when it’s been one of the clearer, obvious acts of grand theft seen in the comics industry of modern times. I find it mildly amusing that other people are suddenly realizing that Cimino was submitting essays from Thomas to various comic-related websites; I find it not at all surprising that Bleeding Cool’s Rich Johnston is suddenly trying to retroactively change his view on Cimino and Thomas’s efforts when he has endlessly enabled and supported them. But we’ll get to all of that.

This recent uproar- again, long overdue- began with a Facebook post by former Marvel Comics Editor Bobbie Chase. Ms. Chase is friends with Len Wein’s widow, Christine Valada- who has been referenced in passing here before, when John Cimino routinely slandered her on YouTube comments he later deleted after I called him out- as Ms. Valada had been contacted by a Marvel executive to inform her that Roy Thomas will now be credited as a Co-Creator of Wolverine on the upcoming “Deadpool & Wolverine” film.

Chase writes “…that legacy is being changed for the worse, six years after his death.”

As we’ve written before, Thomas benefits from being the last man standing. He also is aided and abetted by Cimino and Alex Grand, the latter being the author of the misleading “Comic Book Historians“. A recent Instagram post by Cimino advertises the upcoming Alter Ego #194, ostensibly devoted to Thomas’s 60th Anniversary in the comics field, but, at first look, serving to reinforce the perception of Thomas as the pivotal figure in the creation of Wolverine.

(You’ll bear with me if I again bring up what I’ve called ‘The Goodman Rule‘, named after Martin Goodman supposedly directing Stan Lee to “create a team of super-heroes”- if Thomas telling Len Wein to create a Canadian character makes him the co-creator, then so too is Martin Goodman the co-creator of the Fantastic Four.)

I will also note the inclusion of both Cimino and Grand on the cover of Alter Ego, as this serves to certify and verify their positions as “somebodies” in the comics industry and names to seek out in future ventures. Certainly, being validated like that wouldn’t motivate them to enable falsehoods, right?

Alex Grand has lost any fleeting and barely deserved credibility he might have had with this behavior; he writes about Thomas being a personal friend for six years and further desecrates what a “historian” actually does- a historian doesn’t enable liars. Such is Grand’s overwhelming urge to belong and be part of fandom history that he will work overtime to help push Thomas and Cimino’s agenda. Grand has been posting various excerpts of a 2014 interview with Herb Trimpe to further dilute any history that dares to contradict Thomas’s recent revisions:

A proper historian doesn’t allow his sentimental feelings or his own best interests and desires to get in the way of actually honoring the actual responsibilities of a historian: Alex Grand is nothing more than a self-serving fan enthusiast who, if he had any conscience, would rename his YouTube channel immediately.

That being said, let’s get to Trimpe’s comments in 2014. And then explore just why his tone changed from a few years earlier in regard to this topic.

• “So, the answer, what I’m going to say now, is going to be completely different than if I live to be a hundred, okay? But no, it was a character that was conceived by Roy, designed by John Romita, animated and introduced by me, and given a voice by Len Wein. That’s the basic structure. I got in touch with John Romita and Roy Thomas and I didn’t tell them (anything), I just said, “How did it happen? How did this character come about?” And both of their memories were exactly like my memory. (chuckles)”

• “Roy came up with the idea of a Canadian super-hero. He wanted to do it, and he coined the name “Wolverine” because he wanted him to be much smaller than the average super-hero, but a very fierce human being like the wolverine is as an animal. And he said, “I discussed it with Len at lunch.” – Herb Trimpe, interviewed in 2014

Now, I don’t claim to be an actual historian, but it occurs to me that you should evaluate all the public claims by a figure and weigh them against each other before you decide to pinpoint and focus on just one of them: therefore, let us look at some prior comments about the creation of Wolverine that Trimpe made, and consider why this one selected by Grand- from an interview commissioned by TwoMorrows Publishing and published in the magazine edited by Thomas– might have differed by that point.

• “There was somewhat of a committee effort on this… the way one of the fans put it, ‘do you have any pride in the character?’ and no, not really…”
• “I have no idea what’s going on in the business.” (When asked about the different versions of Wolverine) – Interview with Joseph Elfassi, 2010

• “The way I see it, Romita and Len Wein sewed the monster together and I shocked it to life! It was just one of those secondary characters, actually, that we were using in that particular book with no particular notion of it going anywhere.” – Trimpe, 2015 “The Incredible Herb Trimpe”

• “No, because I had such a minor part in that process… you know, Len really brought (the character) together and John Romita designed the visual. Len Wein knew what he wanted, my (contribution)… I brought him to life by making him move, sort of.” – Trimpe, 2009 Big Apple Con

• “Wolverine came out of Brother Voodoo, weirdly enough. I was doing Brother Voodoo and the book was set in the Caribbean. The characters had Jamaican and Haitian accents. Roy Thomas called me in one day and said, ‘I hate you because you do great accents and I can’t, and I’d love to hear what you’d do with a Canadian accent. And so, I have a name, Wolverine.‘ And I went and researched wolverines to find out that they are short, hairy ferocious animals with razor-sharp claws and no fear, who would take on creatures ten times their size.
• It’s as easy a character as I’ve ever created. And the funny thing is, I thought I did a terrible Canadian accent. I decided to use him in the Hulk simply because it seemed like a good place to use him. I made him a mutant because I knew there was talk of eventually reviving the X-Men as an international group of mutants, and I figured it would give whoever ended up writing the book a Canadian character if they wanted one.” – Len Wein, ‘The Incredible Herb Trimpe’

• “Len constructed the character, basically and I got the look of the character from Romita, John Romita… I didn’t know it was gonna be yellow spandex, basically!”- Herb Trimpe, 2011 Rocky Mountain Comic Con

• “It came about that the writer Len Wein decided that we should have a Canadian superhero”… Herb Trimpe, Watch Mojo

• “So I met with Len Wein at lunch and told him to create for the Hulk a hero-villain who would be Canadian, short, and very fierce… after that, I left it to Len and artist Herb Trimpe– and (John) Romita, who worked with Len ont he character design. John doesn’t recall being told to make the guy small but did so anyway… but if he hadn’t been small, as editor I would have had it changed, and John may simply have forgotten either Len or myself telling him that. I had no particular input on the costume or look that I can recall… nor was it my idea that he have adamantium claws…” – Roy Thomas, 2008 Clifford Meth’s blog

• “The creation was a kind of group grope with John (Romita) doing the final model sheet. Len’s concept I believe, or Roy, but I think Len. I, being present in the bullpen at the time, was privy to what was going on.”- Herb Trimpe, 2008 Clifford Meth’s blog

• “He was really Len’s baby… it all came out of, basically, Roy saying he wanted a Canadian villain named ‘the Wolverine’ and then Len filled in the blanks and construct of the character. I had John Romita’s design and sort of jolted it to life… Jack Abel inked those issues.” – Herb Trimpe, January 2012

Those statements seem a lot more organic and a lot less “reminded by Roy Thomas what Thomas would prefer I say after I made the mistake of asking him how Wolverine came about“, don’t they? So how did Herb Trimpe- a man of great character who was not political or ambitious in his career- come to change his mind ever so slightly?

• “Most of the ways I generated income is by doing commissions…” – Herb Trimpe, Watch Mojo

Trimpe became a regular presence on the comics convention scene and, movingly, was sincerely surprised to see the fan base he’d been largely unaware and out-of-touch with. Trimpe had been unpretentious about his body of work and revealed to me that he had to “get used to” people telling him how much his work had meant to their childhoods.

• “I don’t (take it for granted), and this is- this is a nice kind of experience in that Patricia (Trimpe’s wife) and I get to travel and interact, and it’s been a source of income that I, honestly, I hadn’t expected to count on. So, it’s been nice. Some of the guys that I’ll talk to, that you asked about, you know, they take it a little more seriously than I do, who did what, whose name should be on the print…” – Trimpe, in conversation with me in 2008

When I spoke with Trimpe about the non-disclosure agreement Marvel had made him sign to acquire retirement benefits in the late Nineties (which included the guarantee that he would never bad mouth Stan Lee in the press), he wearily if bemusedly expressed to me that he didn’t let himself care so long as the benefits were honored, and that a part of his letting go of his understandable anger was literally seeing how seriously his peers and former collaborators were taking themselves now that conventions had become more lucrative for industry veterans. Allow that to sink in.

• “This is a good gig, I have Alex (Trimpe’s son) with me sometimes, you know, it’s sort of made me… not change my mind, but I “go with the flow” a little bit, I’ve got, well, I’ve got fans asking me about characters, you know they think about it a lot more than I ever did… it’s very nice to see the passion, I don’t disregard it, and it’s really put me much more back in touch than I was with some of the old bullpen, we’ll exchange e-mails… the fan thing, it’s different…” – Trimpe, 2008

I believe that it’s Trimpe’s lack of pretension and lack of overall concern for getting credit (which he rarely took) that enabled him to be given- not leading questions per se, but a bit of a directive in what Thomas and Romita told him before the 2014 interview that Grand cites. Otherwise, how do you reconcile his casual and repeated references to Wein as the “creator” of Wolverine in numerous other interviews?

Let’s go back to Bobbie Chase’s initial post that served as a catalyst towards furthering this discussion. While I have a lot of respect for Ms. Chase- I was indeed reading The Incredible Hulk in 1985-1990 in real time as a little boy, and Peter David’s grey Hulk was my Hulk- hey, I was 8- I do feel her take maintains a slight degree of the rationalization that often plagues comic professionals, as if they feel guilty for calling out the veterans that came before them:

• “Even if Roy could have contributed as much to the character as Len – should he get the credit? Does contributing a name and a country of origin mean he deserves a percentage of the creator equity, when he was on staff at the company? Does Marvel now deserve a split, as they would then be co-creators, having hired the editor now taking credit? Marvel is the character’s owner, in this particular case and in most cases, 100%. Character equity in no way implies that creators own any part of a character.”

• “I’m not at all implying Roy didn’t contribute to Wolverine’s creation, although we’ll never know how greatly he deserved it, especially when this article in CBR was published a little over a year after Len’s death. Does Roy, having done all of this as Editor-in-Chief, have any contractual claim to the character, or just bragging rights? Had I been involved in the same way with the creation of any characters back in my days as either editor or EIC, it would most certainly have not netted me any credit, nor would I have wanted any. Working with creators is part of the job of being a Marvel employee. “It’s not like these characters are being co-created by Roy; it’s like they’re being created by Marvel,” Carr said as we were digging incredulously through doctored online entries, across Wikipedia and more.” – Bobbie Chase, 2024

Yes, Cimino has been doctoring Wikipedia entries. Of course he has. Otherwise, Wikipedia users are bizarrely deciding to mention Cimino’s daughter and Cimino’s career as an agent to numerous comic figures (!!) during their edits.

John Hudgens did some research regarding specific Wikipedia entries and reported this on Bobbie Chase’s initial thread:

• “The changes regarding Roy Thomas actually started even earlier- the first edit I see for that happened September 12th, 2017- only TWO DAYS after Len passed- by an editor named “Tenebrae”, who’s since been banned from Wikipedia.”

• “An interesting thing to note is almost all of the edits to Len’s page adding Roy Thomas in as co-creator were done in October 2018 by an un-signed-in Editor- who only edited articles about Len Wein or Roy Thomas- from a series of IPs that came from Cambridge, MA.” – John Hudgens, 2024

Gosh, an IP from the state of Massachusetts you don’t say…? Who lives there (before he moved to the basement of Roy Thomas’s South Carolina estate??)

This is shameful, this is loathsome, this is wicked, and this is corrupt. There is no way around it, no way to rationalize it, no way to confuse it- Cimino and Thomas are in cahoots and they both benefit from Thomas’s grand makeover as the heir of Stan Lee, even though existing evidence and recorded statements- sometimes from Thomas himself- display a clear lack of affection from Lee for Thomas and barely any relationship whatsoever.

Rich Johnston has amusingly tried to downplay and backtrack his previous support of Thomas and Cimino, but also- to his credit, perhaps- admitted he will continue to publish Cimino’s submissions on Bleeding Cool in the future.

But let’s take a look at some of the other responses to Chase’s post, starting with the widow of Len Wein herself:

• “I reached out to Glynis (Wein’s first wife). She’s as surprised by what has been done as I am. She was there and only remembers Len saying what I remember: Canadian accent because Len had been doing accents in Brother Voodoo (most assuredly NOT created by Roy Thomas) and the name Wolverine, which other sources suggest Roy got from a fan submission. Len’s written and oral descriptions of how the character came about differ substantially from Roy’s self-aggrandizement and did not change in all the time I knew him or in the time Glynis knew him.” – Christine Valada

• “I’ve been stunned watching this whole thing happen, thinking that this credit-grabbing by Roy is at best being mishandled. It seems it’s not at best though, it’s at worst. I’ve always admired and respected Roy for what he HAS done in comics and continues to do with Alter Ego as a historian. But this move absolutely tarnishes his legacy and may do so in a way that NOT claiming credit will eventually seem as a far better move.” – Andy Mangels

• “Unconscionable decision. There is no way that editors should be credited as creators. This unjust decision is made worse by the fact that Len is no longer here to counter the argument or make a case for himself.” – Dan Jurgens

• “Roy gets some minor bragging rights and that’s it, full-stop, no argument. He deserves zero financial equity, zero, because he was a paid staffer at the time, and brainstorming and guidance like this is AN EDITOR’S FUCKING JOB. Roy knows this, but he’s turned into a ghoul late in life, snapping up “co-creator” credits as soon as all other involved parties are dead and no longer able to contest his claims. (See also: Gary Friedrich.) It’s pathetic and ironic that, in scrambling for as much credit as he can possibly find, Roy’s guaranteeing that his legacy will be all about stolen valor.” – Mark Waid

Note that Andy Mangels hints that Cimino is the true mastermind, and that Thomas is being “mishandled”. I think that’s being much too generous.

Cimino announced as early as 2014 that he had a plan for Roy Thomas. He told people that “Roy’s time will come” and he foresaw the impending death of Stan Lee leaving a lucrative hole in the ever-growing convention industry; one almost can’t fault his industrious and his proactive outlook.

But to portray Thomas as a creator, to paint him as a figure of real influence is to continue the passive theft that Thomas had always committed; entitled and self-righteous and prone to outbursts when he’d felt slighted, Thomas was always the physical manifestation of both the width of his talent and breadth of his mentality: slight and diminutive.

Do not let this continue. Speak out. Push back. Tell John Morrow. Tell Marvel. Tell Bleeding Cool. Tell Comic Book Historians. Tell everybody. Stop shrugging it off.

THIS BEHAVIOR WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. STOP LYING. STOP STEALING.

I would also like to direct you to our other comprehensive articles covering what Thomas and Cimino have been doing; Four Color Sinners will continue to be a thorn in the side of their endeavors as long as we are able.

Roy Thomas’s Erasure of the Real Creators of Wolverine: https://fourcolorsinners.com/2023/12/29/such-a-shame-that-a-little-fame-and-attention-began-to-get-to-lens-head-on-roy-thomass-erasure-of-the-real-creators-of-wolverine/

De Facto protege: The changing continuity of Roy Thomas: https://fourcolorsinners.com/2023/07/18/de-facto-protege-the-changing-continuity-of-roy-thomas/

The Second Life and Grand Delusion of Roy Thomas: https://fourcolorsinners.com/2023/08/15/he-looked-a-lot-like-the-old-one-the-second-life-grand-delusion-of-roy-thomas/

How the Politics of Roy Thomas Influenced His Dismissive Attitude: https://fourcolorsinners.com/2023/08/17/just-too-damn-sensitive-for-their-own-good-how-the-politics-of-roy-thomas-influenced-his-dismissive-attitude-shit-writing/

The Roy Thomas Rebuttals: https://fourcolorsinners.com/2023/08/21/if-they-didnt-want-to-accept-that-they-were-free-to-work-for-some-other-company-looking-at-the-roy-thomas-hollywood-reporter-rebuttals/

The Moving Story of the Roy Boyzz: https://fourcolorsinners.com/2023/09/24/roy-said-to-me-i-just-showed-up-never-left-and-hes-right-the-moving-story-of-the-roy-boyzz/

You Sort of Believe it Really Happened: https://fourcolorsinners.com/2023/11/23/you-sort-of-believe-it-actually-happened-examining-roy-thomass-comments-on-the-great-stan-lee-jack-kirby-debate/

A Look at How Poorly the “Comics Press” Operates (Roy Thomas Interview examined): https://fourcolorsinners.com/2024/01/17/historians-or-enthusiasts-a-look-at-how-poorly-the-comics-press-operates/

With thanks to Christine Valada, Bobbie Chase, Herb Trimpe, The Trimpe Family, Rich Johnston’s stupid ass, Mark Waid, Andy Mangels and dedicated to the late Bob Beerbohm, whom I argued with but always respected.