“I Hope His Widow Gets Rich Off It”- More On Roy the Ghoul and The Power of Recorded Statements

So much to go over and the developments are hardly over. This entry might seem a little haphazard as there’s a few things to cover, but it’s all part of an overall pattern that Four Color Sinners has been documenting for the better part of a year; not because it was the hot topic in the pop culture hub, but because, yes folks, it was *choke* the right thing to do.

Seriously. I may be a little over-the-top at times, sure- but any poor attempts at levity on my part simply pale in comparison to the legitimate villainy and corrupt self-interest of Roy Thomas and his Manager John Cimino.

Since last we wrote, Thomas attempted to get ahead of the increased public awareness/outrage of his late-in-life credit claims and fraudulent public makeover by submitting to an interview with noted pop culture journalist Rob Salkowitz for the Forbes website on April 1st.

The interview is a puff-piece that did more to cement Thomas’s claims than cast doubt on it. Salkowitz doesn’t push back and challenge Thomas, helpfully mentions the one interview that Team Thomas is trying to push as their main point of reference, and, predictably, goes to the condescending and always easy go-to “I wasn’t there and neither were you” deflection. Great journalism.

This concept of “you weren’t there” is brought up ad nauseum by the Marvel Method rationalizers, enough to constitute making it an official term going forward: From now on, the Not There Precedent will join The Goodman Rule in these pages as my easy go-to labels for these repeated justifications from weak, passive minded and compromised fans and corrupt semi-professionals. Please feel free to help me get them into the lexicon.

Back to this shit interview. Thomas could try to display any degree of empathy towards the long-suffering Christine Valada, Wein’s widow, but (per usual) only shows impatience and outrage at the perceived slights of anybody not giving him more credit for other people’s work.

• “I’m not getting a penny, as far as I know, and it in no way takes away from whatever Len [Wein] and John [Romita]’s families may be getting, if anything. I don’t know what their financial arrangement is with Marvel. I’m already getting money from my other contributions to Marvel; I don’t need Wolverine money, thank you very much.” – Roy Thomas, Forbes Interview 2024

• “I’m not trying to take anything away from anyone, I just want credit for what I did. If there’s Wolverine money [from Disney], I hope his widow gets rich off it. I’ve got my own. I don’t need Len’s or hers.”

Roy wants credit for what he did. What we know he did do is give Len Wein the instructions to create a character named Wolverine, who hailed from Canada.

And that is it. Those are the only components that have never varied. (We have also been over this before but, in case this is your first visit to FCS, let us point out that Andy Olsen submitted a character to Marvel called The Wolverine months before the Wolverine you know and tolerate appeared in The Incredible Hulk #181. But more on that soon.)

I was frustrated enough to contact Rob Salkowitz about my impressions. (To Salkowitz’s credit, he responded and answered my questions, albeit without periods on the end of most of his sentences which made me think at all times he was speaking in a fast-paced, nasal monotone. I have no idea why or what Salkowitz’s actual speaking voice sounds like. But that’s irrelevant; if he sounds like Teddy Pendergrass when he talks, he’s still not worth hearing).

Full disclosure, I asked specific questions and assured him that his responses to those would be off the record- but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share the other go-to justification he dropped in our conversation. Anyone who has followed the trials of creator credit in comics will know it well…

Yeah. “Even Kirby said different things in interviews over the years regarding credit“- this is the guy that gets that valuable first interview with a significant figure in comics history about a serious and critically important ongoing discussion- and he’s another one of those guys. Do real journalists rationalize and use debate fodder like “Even Kirby claimed this, blah blah blah” to justify their lack of effort in challenging someone whose claims and actions routinely contradict themselves? Even when their documented actions as a professional show a clear and established motus operandi of “creation”?

Again, full disclosure: Salkowitz told me that he “had a deadline” although I wonder how much longer it would have taken to confront Thomas about Andy Olsen’s Wolverine, John Cimino’s behavior, and so forth. (Well, I know the real reasons- Salkowitz is hesitant to offend or alienate anyone connected with big ol’ Marvel. The same reason most people in comics journalism contribute nothing of journalistic value.)

Salkowitz also repeats a common misunderstanding of my intentions with Four Color Sinners. I don’t want to have to spell this shit out for many of you. I have to spell it out. Because nobody else does, nobody else will. Nobody else has, until Bobbie Chase helpfully brought to the masses Ms. Valada’s plight. I seriously empathize with Christine Valada and believe most people with basic empathy would agree with me that it’s simply just fucked up what Roy Thomas and John Cimino are doing. Plain and simple.

So. Thomas cites the 1982 Peter Sanderson interview in the Forbes piece, after Alex Grand already pushed it excessively on social media as some kind of validation of Thomas’s claims. I believe it’s important to cite previously recorded statements, especially when they evolve over time and especially when they contradict the previous statements- again, if you’re going to use the argument that Kirby’s comments changed- the implication being that Kirby is so deified that if he could change his story, so too could this other guy so you’d better automatically accept it *slobbers*– then, by all means, let’s examine even MORE of Thomas’s past comments, this time from 2006. I recognize that’s a little over a decade after Thomas had lost the prestigious assignment of writing Secret Defenders.

• “I don’t recall many specifics, though perhaps I talked about it with Stan first. Al Landau may have known about it in advance, too- he was certainly instrumental in the return of X-Men not long afterward.”

• “Landau handled the business angle of things, which Stan didn’t feel he had the expertise for, or just didn’t want to handle after a while. We decided between us that we really should have a Canadian character. I don’t remember for sure if anyone besides Stan and I were involved at first.”

• “I wanted to make it an animalistic character. I wanted some sort of animal that lived in the north, that was intrinsically Canadian. It wasn’t going to be a moose, you know? He was either going to be called ‘the Badger‘ or ‘the Wolverine‘.”

• “Six months or more earlier, artist Dave Cockrum had showed me a bunch of characters he’d designed, which I don’t consciously recall, but he and Mike Friedrich remember there being a ‘Wolverine’ in there. Still, if that had been the main reason for the name, I wouldn’t have been mulling over whether to call him ‘Badger’ or ‘Wolverine’ which I definitely did. So, I went with ‘Wolverine’, as it more or less has the word ‘wolf’ in it. I thought that was the better name.”

• “I took Len to lunch sometime in ’74 and told him I wanted a Canadian character called Wolverine, and he should be short, because Wolverines are small. I doubt if I went into detail about whether he had claws or didn’t have claws; any of that stuff. And even though I originated adamantium in Avengers, I had nothing to do with that metal being a part of Wolverine. Len says I told him that I gave him the character to originate partly because I liked the way he wrote accents. I liked the way he did Jamaican accents in Brother Voodoo. I never thought I had much talent, or ever tried to write many characters with accents. I thought Len did it quite well and I wanted to see what he’d do with a Canadian accent. After that, Wolverine was all Len working with John Romita, who designed the character…” (emphasis mine)

• “So, if whoever had the initial idea was the creator, I guess that makes me Wolverine’s creator.”

(Well… Andy Olsen had the initial idea for a government agent named The Wolverine who had a costume with animalistic tones to it. Wein wouldn’t have paid attention to that unless he was an avid reader of FOOM but Thomas was the contributing Editor and certainly saw it. So… by Thomas’s logic, whoever had the initial idea? Was Andy Olsen.)

• “But we all had a hand in his creation. It was another one of those group things. So that’s how Wolverine came about. I wish we all had a little piece of the character. We’d all do well.” – Roy Thomas, ‘Comic Creators on X-Men’ 2006

Thomas’s story has changed, aided and abetted by his- actually successful, if you think about it- manager, John Cimino. Cimino hit the pavement so to speak, posting YouTube comments defaming Wein and slandering his widow as well as altering Wein and Thomas’s Wikipedia entries just 48 hours after Wein’s death.

Many people have speculated that Thomas is doing this for money and that’s a very logical and understandable motivation to assume. But I actually believe Thomas when he says he isn’t privy to how much, if any at all, royalties that he might receive on the upcoming ‘Deadpool & Wolverine‘ film- I believe Marvel did this for a much less benign reason than people are thinking. Unfortunately, I lack the vocabulary in legalese to properly articulate what I think is happening, so I’ll thank you for tolerating my layman’s attempts to explain this now:

Marvel is giving Thomas the co-creator credit because it means nothing to them and will placate and please Thomas. The reason for doing this is because, secretly, Marvel is delighted with Thomas’s actions in the modern court: Thomas pushes back against Kirby’s heirs, Thomas reiterates Stan Lee’s narrative- the Marvel narrative- which helpfully protects the corporate myth that is undeniably necessary for Disney/Marvel to maintain their hold on the profitable intellectual property that fuels their empire. Roy was there, they’ll say. And adding him to the list of creators further muddies the waters and dilutes the idea that any singular creator could be the catalyst for a viable, marketable character. Thomas is a tool that serves a helpful corporate purpose. Like Lee was, he’s just happy to get a minimum of financial reward and the recognition of creatorship from the already and newly converted: keep the train rolling, keep the zombies coming.

That’s it. It’s as simple as that. If there’s indeed an actual legal term for… when a corporation decides to give an employee creator credit, simply to reinforce their ownership of various creations- that’s what Thomas is now. A corporate patsy.

Thomas can’t even say Christine Valada’s name. He refers to her as “Len’s widow” and dismissively adds “I hope she gets rich off it”- these are the words and tones of an entitled and bitter man who blatantly displays his utter lack of regard for the potential feelings of anybody else who did more creating and heavy lifting than he ever could.

There’s no sense of shame, no hint of embarrassment, not one iota of any urgency to praise anyone else except in the form of using them as a rationalization device to further his own claims. This is who Roy Thomas always was. His final stage promises to continue its disgusting, nauseating trajectory towards what Mark Waid called “stolen valor” and certifying that John Cimino has a guaranteed position to carry on the campaign of dishonesty years after Thomas shuffles off this mortal coil. Only now, more people see his deeds for what they are.

This was more of a rant than an article, but there is much going on, my friends and much more to come. Much more. We’ll be back with more information, more facts and more zero compromise in the days ahead. Thanks for reading.

post-script: Just because this message delighted me, I want to share what a wise young woman wrote to me after she’d read this when it initially went up:

“I think it’s fucked up how this guy just invents entire narratives… like, is a wolverine “inherently Canadian?” Who thinks that? I think of a Moose, I think of Geese, I’d never think of wolverines being canadian!” Who is this guy to say wolverines were thought of as “inherently Canadian?” – J.L. to me, 8:55 PM

Dedicated the memory of Len Wein. Dedicated to Christine Valada who is already more rich in ways Roy Thomas could never be. Shout out to Bobbie Chase for calling out bullshit when she saw it and every comics professional who didn’t justify Thomas’s misdeeds in response. And actually, sincere thanks to Rob Salkowitz for at least engaging with me when I contacted him even if I’m sure to never be invited to his dinner parties now.