“I’M NOT SHY ANYMORE”- The Awareness-Lacking Admissions Of The Rascally One

Roy Thomas has gotten bolder.

Or maybe… just maybe? I’ve been wrong all along. I’m serious. Perhaps Roy hasn’t been scheming in the traditional sense, and isn’t purposely trying to be an abhorrent lying thief and scoundrel- I mean, I know his Manager/Hanger On/Leech John Cimino is all of those things, as well as the assorted crew like Stan Lee’s old flunky ‘Hairspray‘, etc.- but maybe Roy just genuinely believes all of this shit and what we’ve had all this time is a simple matter of different interpretations.

I say this simply because I didn’t think Roy Thomas could dig any deeper, I didn’t think Roy Thomas could surprise me, I didn’t think Roy Thomas could literally validate and back up everything I’ve written about him… but he does, and he did it quite perfectly.

I expected Thomas’s interview with the YouTube show “Bronze Age Monsters” to be your typical modern day fanboy fare; surely Thomas wouldn’t really deviate from his usual greatest interview hits, would reiterate his usual talking points, would righteously and defiantly defend his case as the co-creator of this and that. He does, in a way, but in one that’s much more… literal. And damning.

But as I’ve learned- damning is subjective.

This interview was posted on April 28th, 2024, but the interview itself was conducted in February of the same year. The hosts are Jacob Balcom, Matt Howell, and Marvel Studios employee Michael Giacchino. The hosts will reference “this Season” numerous times, which leads me to think the concept of having seasons is important to their branding identity.

In all fairness, this show is genial enough and not obnoxious like the majority of comics-focused YouTube content. However, they suffer from the same affliction most guys doing this sort of thing have, which is allowing their personal nostalgia to hinder any and all potential progress they might make in interviewing veteran comic professionals.

A prelude by the hosts references the recent Wolverine co-creator controversy. Howell states this change has “caused a bit of a dust up in the comics community” and also says that they will “give our two cents” before abruptly segueing into “or set up that kind of scene…” which led me to think they are reluctant to speak against Roy publicly.

Balcom, who is an affable guy on camera but visibly conflicted- perhaps he’s always like this, I’m not sure- says, “we think that, without jumping into the fray ourselves… we thought it would be interesting to put this interview out there… where, uh, yeah! We think Roy’s pretty candid about his involvement with these creations…“

He seems like he’s been coerced by a Mob enforcer while serving on jury duty. Again, it isn’t my intent to project but he does seem tangibly uncomfortable over this. Sorry Jake!

The non-committal attitude comes through again with, “we’re just putting it out there“- I don’t mean to attack these guys, I can appreciate their lack of taking a stance over not wanting to risk offending someone- but that’s just it, they’re not taking a stance. In transparency and fairness, I said as much to them on their comment section, and they confirmed that yes, it was a “deflection” and, “for various reasons“, they “opted not to pile on.”

This is the problem. Adults cannot psychologically confront anything that disrupts their affection or nostalgic embrace of happier times. And so, the distortion of holding people accountable becomes “bashing”- calling out literal theft and dishonesty is “piling on”- it’s ridiculous.

Some people have seen Four Color Sinners as a “let’s you and him fight” site. It’s actually a “let’s you and him TALK” site- but it’s easier for people to either ignore what makes them awkward and conflicted, or to cast anybody asking questions as a hater, a basher, or otherwise. But I digress!

Again, seriously… if you’ve made it THIS far, let me tell you: Thomas is really letting it all hang out in terms of what he’s stating for the record. I mean, come on. This is some hardcore shit he’s spewing.

The two hosts are joined by the director and composer of the recent Werewolf by Night short film, Michael Giacchino. Giacchino previously joined this show when Gerry Conway, Thomas, and Thomas’s ex-wife Jean were guests and Jean was credited as being a “co-creator” of Werewolf by Night.

• 6:27: “I love just hearing all the stories about the Marvel offices back in the day… I eat up whenever there’s an interview with anybody that you worked with, talking about what it was like…”

-host Matt Howell affirms that he’s romanticized the collective notion of the fabled Marvel Bullpen, as well as illustrating something else I keep complaining about: for someone who takes the time to develop and record and host a show about comics history, I am again struck by the interviewers’ lack of knowledge regarding references the interview subject brings up. Shouldn’t you know this if you’re going to start a Patreon? Shouldn’t you have read everything humanly possible about the person you’re interviewing before the show? Sigh. Anyway, let’s get to the co-creator himself…

• 6:45: “It changed quite a bit once that time got in, what, I don’t know, Spring or Spring to early summer of 1972 when I suddenly got sort of elevated, I guess, because Stan got elevated, you know, rising tide raises all boats and I was one of the boats, I guess…”

• 7:39: “By this stage, it was a little different because, until this time in 1972, for the past several years, neither Stan nor I had been coming in every day… we came in about three times a week and, uh, worked at home the other couple days… I’d have thought Stan would’ve wanted me to be there he wasn’t, but he preferred the days he was, you know… by this time we both had to be there five days a week and I discovered what I didn’t like about working five days a week in an office you know… so that put the editor right off to a slow start…”

This thing about coming into the office two to three days a week has always amazed me and I’m still surprised it’s not a bigger deal amongst so-called comic historians. If Stan initially adopted this schedule because he was “too busy” to write- then what was he busy with? We already knew Sol Brodsky was running the administrative duties.

• 8:29: “We’d work on seven, eight, ten cover ideas you know, by looking at the photocopies of, uh, an issue… we didn’t usually have the plot, we could check on that if we needed to, usually we just had the pictures and the notes, and the margins and we’d try to figure out what was going on…”

• 8:53: “I didn’t have a lot of long conferences because I trusted these writers… they’d sort of drop by and tell me in about one sentence something they would think about doing… and y’know, if I didn’t like it, I’d have a reason or something but otherwise, they’d just sort of keep me in the loop…”

Something truly glorious happens when Thomas suddenly takes exception to Cimino, who is being loud in another room.

• 9:55: “…just a hang on a second, just a second… guys?? Can you go somewhere else to talk? You’re really bothering me… it’s really bothering me, hearing you talk… they thought I couldn’t, we couldn’t hear them, it was just bothering me, I was having trouble concentrating…”

• 11:07: “I was there to get what Stan wanted.”

• 11:33: (Jacob Balcom to Roy): “It sounds like you kind of had like, your management style, at least with artists, were to respect them enough and want them to do different stuff… you’re kind of hands off at first, then maybe when they come to you with stuff, that you’re like, ‘ooh, maybe we can go in another direction’, then you would guide them that way- does that sound accurate?”

Eh, isn’t that a bit leading the witness, Jacob?? Also, Thomas was “hands off” because, like his mentor, he RELIED UPON THE ARTISTS TO PLOT THE STORIES. You’ve got to love these guys giving Thomas a rope and saying how he “respected” the artists- was it respect to write ‘lousy dialogue‘ on Kirby’s original artwork, when Thomas was writing it as a response to make sure Kirby got it back (therefore verifying that Kirby would definitely SEE it)? Does Barry Windsor Smith feel respected? Did Dave Cockrum? Did Neal Adams?

• 11:55: “Mostly what I’d often do is I would sort of get another artist because… y’know, it takes a lot of time if a person doesn’t walk in with somethat that’s fairly close to what you want… are you you going to be able to turn that into your kind of artist…”

Wow. What respect.

• 16:37: “Once he suddenly emerged in the early Sixties as a talented writer, who- who’d have guessed that he had any specific talent before that?”

This. This is the kind of statement that these guys say in passing that they don’t even realize cements the case that we’ve been trying to make.

• 20:35: “None of us like- most of us don’t like to be disagreed with, Stan really did not like to be disagreed with.”

• 22:21: “I mean, he was a smart guy, y’know- he was not the cariacture clown and hype character that some people try to make him into, he was a very bright guy…”

• 22:53: “Just that ‘Rosemary’s Baby‘ in a costume kind of thing, I guess… and it was only later I realized that a friend of mine, ten years earlier had done ONE story called ‘Son of Satan‘ that was a little like that… but of course again, once I heard the name Satan, it’s got the ‘S’ in it, ‘Son of Satan’ is so natural…”

• 27:27: “Y’know, let’s get this into print right away, not ’cause we’re trying to beat anybody, but I had this idea and I wanted to see Len do it right away and so, he did it right away. If he had balked I would have found somebody else to do- somebody ELSE would have been the first writer of Wolverine, and it would have been a totally different character with some of the same characteristics! But somebody else would have done, if- if Len had said, ‘No, I don’t want to do a character called that!’ I would’ve called in somebody else, uh, Marv Wolfman or Gerry or somebody and say, y’know… can you- put this guy, Wolverine- he might’ve appeared with Spider-Man as a villain first, I mean of course, Gerry’s Wolverine- even based on the few things I had told Len about him being Canadian, short and fierce, and- even with John drawing the costume, would have been quite a different character…”

• 30:06: “My first wife, Jeannie always said, she didn’t think that uh, she could always tell that I wasn’t really committed because I never put up a picture or anything to personalize the office, I never bothered… there were no pictures on the wall, not artwork or anything, just my desk and me, that was all…”

The truth is that Thomas was a totally ineffectual and incompetent Editor in Chief, poorly suited to any job or position that required actual adult work duties that rose above fan fiction writing. He admits to never going over sales figures or any other administrative work and lasts a pitifully short time in the role, yet in the present day, will routinely declare that he had “only been” the Editor in Chief of the biggest comic company in the world. More selective history and retconning from the master.

• 32:33: “I called him Stunt-Master… I had kind of taken the name from the Simon & Kirby ‘StuntMan’ and thought of ‘Stunt-Master’….”

Worth mentioning that, while telling this story, Thomas then refers to the character as “Sports-Master”, a Golden Age DC villain.

• 32:46: “It was just my concept wasn’t very good, it was just a nothing character…”

• 33:59: “I certainly consider Gary the main creator uh, along with, visually, Mike Ploog… of the Ghost Rider, but- the funny thing is, if I had just Gary do it, it would have been a quite different character… he might or might not have worn a white costume, I don’t know… but the funny thing is, that he would’ve been in Daredevil, did you ever see Daredevil back in those days fight supernatural characters, really supernatural characters? No! He would’ve been a trick motorcyclist like Stunt-Master was, only better… but once we got in there talking to Stan, Stan looked at it, Stan immediately started thinking of it as a supernatural character. So by the time it came out, it was Gerry’s character and yet it was a new character… While you know, Gary and I and Ploog sort of get treated as the creator, in a certain way STAN was…”

I think going out of his way to include Stan Lee as a co-creator for multiple Seventies characters, as Thomas does in this interview a number of times, and in ways I’ve not seen him ever do in previous interviews or editorials, is less about his affection for Lee and more to double down on the recent logic in declaring anybody who gave an opinion or a suggestion retroactive creatorship credit. There’s a lot of money to go around now, what a racket!

• 35:11: “It’s so hard to tell… there’s so many characters that have one creator, right? Well, not many, but a few… you say ‘Batman’ but we can’t do that anymore… usually there are often committees and Stan gets left off a lot of them, like off Luke Cage or Ghost Rider, certainly because he was the guy really kind of guiding it or making a key decision…”

• 36:27: “But at the same time, the guy who really created Cage more than any of the people whose name you associate it with on the thing is actually Stan Lee… because he GUIDED the whole thing and said yes, no, and everything… ‘this is okay‘, ‘this is not good‘, and when it comes out, it says Archie and me and John Romita but it was Stan GUIDING the whole thing… it’s even true with the Vision, one of my major creations.. okay, it’s partly based on and old Simon/Kirby character and the look… but, why did I do it? Because Stan came to me and said it’s time for a new Avenger and I want him to be an android. And since he left the rest to me, I made the Vision an android because he didn’t like the Vision name or the look that much… but again, you know, the Vision as the character he is with the android background, which is his main thing, right? And that’s all Stan Lee but nobody KNOWS it… and whenever they talk about the creators of the Vision, it should really be Stan Lee at the top as much as anybody.”

…wow.

• 40:14: “I think what they mostly do is they come along and they write a Spider-Man book, right? They write a Black Panther book, they take things that are ALREADY THERE… and they suddenly make their own Rorscharch test out of them, and they maybe do a fine, interesting job and it’s a quality thing, but that’s not the same thing as creating characters that last fifty years.”

Roy Thomas unintentionally and unironically describes his entire output and outlook, perfectly, in this one statement. Roy then makes a statement and then pauses with a smug smirk on his face, knowingly aware of its dramatic effect.

• 40:39: “I’m not as shy as I used to be.”

The hosts ask what changed that. Thomas responds that it was getting older, but to be honest, it’s THE OTHER PEOPLE DIED AND CAN’T SPEAK UP.

• 42:56: “Stan one day decided he wanted to revive that title, ‘Strange Tales‘… so, Stan said ‘come up with a character we could use’, which means, don’t make it like another werewolf or another vampire, you know- something a little different. This name came back to me, so I thought of ‘voodoo’ and the name ‘Doctor Voodoo’ came to me… Stan, it couldn’t have been over two or three seconds, he says, “Nah- BROTHER Voodoo”. That was sort of the rapport we had! In a second, he automatically- first of all, he immediately became, inevitable then, that he was Black- I hadn’t even probably thought about the race of the character- he might’ve been Black, he might’ve been white, I don’t know what he would have been…”

Imagine that Thomas makes a voodoo character a white guy. I mean, Dr. John aside, it would have been, uh… rare, to say the least.

• 44:23: “I said, if Stan approved the name, the character would follow… we’d find somebody to, to come up with the character… but, once we had ‘Brother’ Voodoo, that shaped the character a little more… it made it more likely he was gonna be Black…”

Emphasis mine.

• 44:38: “So, at that point, having no more ideas about voodoo…”

• 45:02: “So I brought in Len Wein, and we talked over a little bit, I sent him off to do reference… I think he came up with the idea of the twins, and we talked that over a little… I said, “just go off and write it”… the funny thing is, one reason- it wasn’t the main reason, but a little extra thing I’d mentioned to Len when I asked him to do Wolverine was, I said, I liked the way you do the accent in Brother Voodoo a year or two earlier… but, the funny thing is, Brother Voodoo was what, Haitian, right? If you read the dialogue Len wrote, it’s really Jamaican!”

• 46:35: “What Len did was just take Jamaican and (makes swoosh noise) split into Haitian, but I loved that accent, it was the WRONG accent, but I liked it! (laughter)”

I also believe that Thomas either has decided to proactively dilute and limit Wein and other writer’s contributions with anecdotes like this, or has been advised to, due to the recent outpouring of criticism due to Thomas’s recent co-creator status on Wolverine.

• 49:01: “It was my idea to DO ‘The Golem’, I think Len did that too, I had Len and Gerry Conway always doing these crazy things that I came up with, or that we came up with together…”

It was my idea, but I had these other guys develop and name it and write it and- are longtime readers of Four Color Sinners tired of hearing me invoke The Goodman Rule yet??

• 50:46: “But I knew that Don (McGregor)- who hates me now, but we were okay then-“

What?! Why would Don McGregor, a progressive, liberal writer whose work the Black Panther film with Chadwick Boseman was largely based upon, possibly hate Roy Thomas, a known conservative for over five decades, who enables Newsmax scum like James Rosen in the pages of Alter Ego?

• 51:03: “The only thing I ever suggested to Don was, could you put a couple of WHITE people in, once in a while, y’know?”

…Ah. Now I get it.

I might also add that McGregor’s legendary Black Panther run was especially notable because it, you know… was mostly set in… Africa.

• “Having all the major characters be Wakandian meant all the characters had to be Black. That was the only thing that made sense to me. That became somewhat of a problem for Editorial as the series progressed. I suspect they hadn’t thought that through…” – Don McGregor

• 51:17: “The only person who I think made a bigger mistake on Black Panther was Jack Kirby. …the only person who made a bad decision there was Jack, because when Jack came back, he was so determined not to have anything to do with the rest of the Marvel Universe, you know- he wouldn’t use any of the Marvel characters, you want him to use the Hulk, he’d use a robot Hulk… he didn’t want to intermingle HIS books with the rest of the universe… so when he brought in Black Panther, whom he knew slightly… instead of paying any attention to- whatever Don’s writing with these other artists had been- it had had its audience!”

• “…And Jack should have continued that, taken those characters, done his little, you know, or at least write them out over an issue or two- instead, he just, like in the middle of whatever is happening, he just happened like that never happened and starts a whole new storyline about, what was it- King Solomon’s frog. You know, maybe if that had been a really brilliant thing, maybe it would’ve brought enough people in, but what it really did was just piss off the people that already liked Black Panther, they probably dropped off, so Black Panther while it may have sold better under Jack than it did before, but it still probably could have done better if Jack had done this, and this- at least this is something they can’t blame on me, I wasn’t the Editor in Chief anymore, and I think Gerry had left the job a couple days later, so probably nobody was paying attention to what Jack was doing… but I mean, it is a sloppy way to run a company, I’ll grant you…”

Note that these guys giggle and nod and say “yeah!” in affirmation when Thomas says Kirby “pissed off” Black Panther readers. But I really found this anecdote interesting- and Thomas has used this before, criticizing Kirby for not including his books in the “regular” Marvel Universe- and I find it another case of “the same rules don’t apply to ME” since Thomas is a serious practitioner of the same logic- and far more outspoken and bitchier about it than Jack Kirby ever was!

• “I could go along with that if they really left me alone to have my own fiefdom, but they interfered with me…” – Roy Thomas, ‘Comic Book Historians’ Interview

• “I simply ignored what others had done with the characters, as well as they might have done them and as much as I certainly respected the talents of those involved in those stories… but for me, they just didn’t matter, as much as the stories featuring the JSA after I’d left and wasn’t writing them anymore didn’t count, for better or worse…” – Roy Thomas, 2002

• “What happened before the All-Star Squadron didn’t concern me insomuch as I just felt those stories (the All-Star Comics of the late Seventies drawn by Wally Wood) didn’t affect what I was going to do… a hill that I was prepared to die on, if I’d encountered any resistance from Len, Dick, or Jeanette…” – Roy Thomas, 2005

So yeah. Criticizing Jack Kirby of all people for what you expected… clueless.

• 104:07: “You know, everything I ever dug up was always an old concept… I tried hard not to make up things too much for Marvel, because I knew I wouldn’t own them, so I was always happy to take something that’d already been used and repurpose it, be it be Him into Warlock or a new Black Knight or even the Vision into the Vision, because I knew I wasn’t going to own those characters but, somehow or other, this was not farsighted of me because now I probably make more money from Marvel even than I do…”

Emphasis mine. And wow. Credit (?) to Roy for his outspoken honesty here. I guess it really is just a case of different ideals- or him lacking any ideals? Because what he is doing is not “creating” at all.

Giancchino asks if Roy had a drawer filled with creations he had kept off to the side (!!!); Roy says “No”- does Giancchino, a grown man (who apparently hasn’t been listening), REALLY BELIEVE this is how Roy Thomas of all people has ever worked?

• 104:57: “No, I just reached in my mind and what was in there was a lot of old movies and comic books… almost any comic book I did, in my case as nakedly as anybody else, you can sometimes find where I was deliberately trying to use an old comic book or movie idea… like, when I did this character Mr. Bones and so forth- he had a skull head like the Ghost Rider but it was basically a swipe of the Black Terror’s costume, because I liked that costume, nobody was using it anymore…”

• 105:40: “The Vision, I hadn’t known about the Vision until I was in my twenties, but I thought that was kind of an interesting character and I had wanted to bring him into the Avengers and Stan wouldn’t let me… so he said, ‘I want an Android! Anything you do, as long as it’s an Android…” It was not really what he wanted, I think he wanted an Android that was a little less like a superhero but I wanted a superhero and I like the Vision so I figured, well, I’ll just combine the two of them…”

Stan demanded an android, apparently. It’s worth mentioning that Wally Wood- one of the few artists to really stand up to Stan Lee over his blatant story theft- created an android called NoMan in 1965. The modern-day Vision appears in 1968. Perhaps this was where Lee got the idea for an android.

• 106:26: “I wouldn’t be resenting it quite as much, because I’d say well it isn’t all mine, you know Jack Kirby made up HIM… Stan Lee and Maneely made up a Black Knight, if I do a Black Knight or a Vision, that was Kirby, maybe Simon… obviously, you know you can’t help make, because you, anyway you make up villains, you can’t keep swiping them entirely…”

-wait, what

• 106:56: “It’s strange, when I was gonna make up a hero, I’d, I’d try to think of what I could SWIPE…”

Wow. Just wow. A stunning admission that reiterates what Thomas has always said in print; that every single “creation” he has ever had a part in has simply been borrowing elements and even the same exact names for his “new” characters. And these hosts grin and nod, they never challenge, they never press, they never question. Shameful.

When I put forth my belief that Thomas got the name for Wolverine from Andy Olsen’s submission to Marvel, people spoke against it. “I’m not convinced“, one wrote. How can you not be convinced when this guy has blatantly stated for the record- numerous times, but never so shamelessly than here– that all he has ever done is taken a name from someplace else, whether it was outright or whether he just inverted it?

• 109:16: “The thing is, that first generation- Stan and Kirby, I mean- and some of them liked comics better, like Jack I think, really liked comics, Stan was just in it because he needed a job when he was 17 or 18, next thing ya know, a few months later, he’s the head of a comic company… so he stayed in it all his life… but, you know he didn’t really care if he was in comics… in fact, he often talked about wanting to get out of it, not with me so much…”

Just asking for a friend. Is it “vilifying” Stan Lee if you point out he really didn’t give a fuck about comics? Especially when you really only do it in response to the endless propaganda that says that he did?

Anyway, this interview told us much and shed light on the pathology of Roy Thomas where other interviews only hinted at. Will anything change? It’s up to the public and the public, at least as represented by the hosts of Bronze Age Monsters, doesn’t want to be bothered. It could cause awkwardness, you know.

And potentially alienate future guests for the show you’re trying to grow. Hey, if I worried about that– I’d never write anything.

Call out Roy Thomas. Call out every person who enables, rationalizes, deflects and excuses the dishonesty. These grifts have gone on for decades. Let’s stop them in Thomas’s lifetime. Credit really should be where credit is due. Thomas’s excuse for editorial oversight is ridiculous; he is not the catalyst for any creative renaissance. He was a toady to a far cannier and, ironically, more talented and charismatic personality than he could ever be.

And from that individual, he inherited a grift system designed to benefit those who could coast on the backs of artists, artists tasked with generating concepts, creators, entire worlds and biosystems, writers tasked with building an entire universe around a throwaway name, a one sentence possibility. Whose involvement was assured by a corrupt system perfected over the years by dishonest publishers and hypnotized fanboys. Didn’t these artists suffer enough in their lifetimes with creative theft? You’re going to enable it to continue after they’ve gone, too?

Roy Thomas is a horrible hack. His overbearing devotion and unquestionable enablement of Stan Lee’s whims was likely what cemented his being hired to begin with; his mission to copy that ex-boss’s modus operandi into his twilight years at the risk of everyone else’s contributions while cultivating his own stooge in John Cimino is his real legacy. Don’t let your fuzzy memories of old comic books cloud your morals. Editors should contribute. Editors should not be thieves.

Dedicated to the misguided if affable hosts of Bronze Age Monsters, Len Wein, Christine Valada, Andy Olsen, Jack Kirby, Don McGregor, Daniel Greenberg, Michael Hill, and Stan Lee for creating Luke Cage, Ghost Rider and The Vision.