“Before You Give Me Crap About Including Roy Thomas…” Presenting Jenny Blake’s First Public LIE

As conflicted as the career decisions and public statements of Jenny Blake Isabella (formerly Tony Isabella) have made me, none leave me as bewildered and disappointed as her continued support for Roy “Err Apparent” Thomas, especially with Isabella’s repeated denouncements towards conservatives and those that support conservative causes. Her need for sentimental comfort extends to continued deifying of Stan Lee as well, which is a bit less surprising.

As a quick reminder, Thomas has received immense criticism for his public statements and lack of awareness when making snide and entitled sounding comments regarding his recent co-creator credit on the character of Wolverine, to say nothing of criticism for receiving that credit.

All of this is part of Thomas’s late-in-life career makeover, purposely designed to capitalize on the absence in the lucrative convention circuit that Stan Lee’s death created in 2018. His manager was announcing said plans publicly before Lee even died.

You can read our other articles chronicling and compiling Thomas’s rather icky campaign of retconning his previous statements and importance, but today… today, we’re doing something different. We are treating Jenny Blake like a debutante, for we’re celebrating the public unveiling of Miss Blake’s very first public LIE! (I am, of course, assuming there aren’t similar dishonest statements on her social media, of which I’m not privy.)

Jenny, who even before her reveal had a long and documented history of admirable and downright badass public defiance towards all manners of bigotry and hate, has decided to go all-in with Thomas in his ongoing public campaign to be seen as important, essential, and connected to the character Wolverine (a character he has said in past interviews that he had no interest in).

On Sunday, May 11th, Jenny Blake Isabella wrote a post about creator credit on her blog and, uh, it’s a doozy! Here’s the pertinent excerpt:

• “A somewhat less recent example: Wolverine. There were many hands on that one. Roy Thomas, John Romita Sr., Len Wein, Herb Trimple. I also recognize the later contributions of Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont and John Byrne in shaping the character. Before you give me crap about including Roy Thomas, let me inform you of what informs my take on this.

• I was in the room.

• I wasn’t getting it second or third hand. I was in the room when Roy told me of his plans to create an international team of X-Men to interest our global partners. I was the editor of Marvel’s British weeklies at the time, which is why Roy was talking to me about this.

• Back to Wolverine, Roy told me the character would be Canadian and based on the fierce animal of the same name. He would be short and feisty, character traits I could immediately relate to. His costume colors were the same as the college football team of the same name, a joke almost no one got. Including me. Wolverine was far more than what Roy described to me. But what Roy came up with was vital to the character. I stand by his being considered a co-creator. Not based on second or third hand recollections.

• Based on what I learned when I was in the freaking room.“

A lot to unpack there. I’m also unsure if Isabella is implying or stating that Thomas described the colors of the costume during this supposed conversation, or if Isabella means she figured out the “joke” later on. (As Thomas has referenced possibly crediting the colorist too, which would imply to me the colorist, not Thomas, decided the color scheme of Wolverine’s costume.) But that’s a minor point. There are two main points here.

The first main point is… WHY NOW.

Seriously. Why NOW would you make this claim? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to, you know… make this claim last summer? When the public interest- and public outrage- was at its height?

It’s very curious to me and I have to wonder if John Cimino has possibly reached out to Isabella and offered her the same kind of “representation” deal that Gerry Conway has received; after all, Cimino is making stars out of people like Roy’s ex-wife, and Isabella is, shall we say, a bit ahead of Jean Thomas in terms of achievements in comic book writing.

I sincerely believe it’s possible that Isabella has been emboldened by her transition (as well she should be), but this, combined with years of frustration with her place and treatment within the industry, has made her simply say “fuck it” and decide to cash in and get hers while she can.

And that road leads to compromise, enabling, and abetting.

Otherwise, I’m curious as to the sense of timing with making this statement now– which also was promoted by Roy Thomas’s manager on Roy Thomas’s official social media group- as opposed to nearly one year ago.

To be fair, Isabella did give a variation on the “in the room” statement in August 2024, but it was notably vague and more hypothetical in tone than implying Isabella was literally in the room, or in any room:

So, color me skeptical about this most recent claim of Isabella’s, purely due to the timing of this statement. The entire blog post comes out of nowhere, is a re-written and updated version of a post Isabella sometimes routinely posts every so often and, as far as I know, there’s been no recent controversy over Thomas’s Wolverine credit as that story has mostly subsided. So, what prompted it? Is Isabella sending signals to the Roy Boyz, possibly?

Let’s take another glance at just a few of the public statements Thomas has made regarding the creation of everyone’s favorite merry mutant, and contrast them with Isabella’s claim, a claim that is also notable as it includes a special (and detailed) description of the then-unseen Wolverine.

After being told about Thomas’s pitch to create the international team of X-Men. You mull over those two aspects; I’ll get back to them shortly…

• “Len did his part, which included developing the Wolverine. I consider that I, Len Wein, John Romita, and Herb Trimpe are all the co-creators of the Wolverine, in that chronological order–no one else was involved, unless you want to count the colorist.” – Roy Thomas, 2018

• I wanted some mean, northern animal so we could have a Canadian character. I didn’t go much beyond that. … he wasn’t necessarily a mutant. Then I gave the idea to Len, and he did everything else with him. So, in a sense, I was one of the creators of Wolverine but on the other hand, it was only in a general sort of way… I don’t want to make too much out of it, because someone would’ve come up with something like him anyway.” – Roy Thomas, Comic Book Marketplace May 1996

• “And after that, John Romita was asked to design the character. And I don’t think either Len or I had much input on that.” – Roy Thomas, 2021

• “Next, art director John Romita was asked to design the character- by me or by Len, John gave each of us that honor at different times. In any event, he made it clear that nobody gave him much direction on what to draw. He famously said, later, that he initially thought “wolverine” was a term for a female wolf, not a separate species, and he had to learn the truth from an encyclopedia.

• I presume John showed me the finished art (Roy can’t remember), because that was the way we operated then. Len probably viewed it, too, in advance of the story being drawn. John had made the character look fierce, with his decision to utilize a claw motif- and he had made him short (his notation “only 5 feet 5 inches tall” indicates he hadn’t forgotten my general instructions as to height.) I doubt if I did anything more than indicate that what he’d drawn was fine with me. (It usually was.) I doubt, too, that I did more than glance through Herb Trimpe’s finished artwork for Hulk #180…”    – Roy “Mentallo” Thomas, excerpt from Alter Ego #194, July 2025

I believe it’s also highly possible that Isabella is paltering, that is, using actual factual incidents to create an overall false impression, or is suffering from confabulation which isn’t intentional dishonesty per se, and Isabella believes this shit really happened.

Ah! You remembered I said there were… two main points, yes?

This second main point is especially crucial and will serve as a devastating ax wound to both Isabella and Cimino’s glee over this recent Facebook-share-worthy anecdote.

Let’s examine what Isabella recounts. He says that Thomas told him about his plans to create an international team of X-Men before going into- with some great detail, because of course he would- about Wolverine and his height, and his personality, and possibly even the colors of his costume. Right? Right.

There’s a huge problem with this story.

Roy Thomas’s pitch for the international X-Men- which he gives to then-Marvel president Al Landau- and his idea for a Canadian superhero- occur at two different times in the Seventies. They have never been combined to have been in the same timeframe in any statement whatsoever and Thomas has said more than once that it was Len Wein who made the decision to put Wolverine into the X-Men.

Let that SINK IN. I’ve already quoted one of Thomas’s statements in which he said Wolverine “wasn’t necessarily a mutant“…

…so how would he have been blabbing about all of these details regarding a character that was created to appear in The Incredible Hulk?

• “I just turned it over to Len and I never thought about it again. You know, I kind of vaguely proofed the story when it came in, but otherwise, it was just another character. So now we had a Canadian character, and we made a couple of ads in the book, plugging the fact we had the first Canadian superhero in the United States. Other than that, I left it to Len, who did a good job. And then, of course, it really took off a couple of years later when Len decided to put him in the X-Men right after I had left my role as editor-in-chief.” – Roy Thomas, 2021

As you can see above, this is even something which has been discussed on inferior sites to Four Color Sinners, so there can be no doubt whatsoever that Jenny Blake Isabella has either decided to lie or is genuinely having neurological issues that are affecting her memory– I say that with sincere sympathy, I mean it!

I built up to that point because I am actually surprised that John Cimino, a self-described comics expert and historian didn’t think about this before putting it out as some sort of certification towards his employer’s claims.

Was it possible that Thomas just unleashed a torrent of new ideas and pitches to Isabella, and he understandably conflated them, some fifty years later? Sure, sure. But the intensity and command in Isabella’s tone suggests otherwise. He was in the freakin’ room, after all.

I almost think at this point, you should let these fiends have all the credit, just so they can go to their graves clutching as much as they can, attaining the worth and security they so lacked in life. Because these displays are utterly disgusting, especially coming from people in their seventies and eighties. No ageism intended! I just feel if you’re that old and out bloggin’, you should be, y’know, wiser.

We’ll see if Isabella- or Conway, or anyone else attached to the Roy Boyz empire– continues to make statements which retroactively secure Thomas’s claims of things he likely didn’t do. And when they do, Four Color Sinners will call them out accordingly. Not that it’ll change anything. Some people are too old to learn new behavior. Or leave convention money on the table.

Again, why now? Is Jenny Isabella so devoted to an idealized memory of her time in the 1970s’ Marvel Bullpen that she’ll continue to tarnish her credibility (especially as an activist for tolerance and equality) just to praise Stan and appease Roy? …the fuck?

I believe in the value of public statement. If you talk the talk, walk the walk- by your words you should be held accountable. But we’re dealing with a community and industry of rationalizers and enablers who leeched onto a medium steeped in theft and soaked in the sweat and tears of actual creators who got far less than a borrower like Roy Thomas gets. We’re dealing with people who play “I can separate the art from the artist” just so they don’t have to be inconvenienced with their habits or forced to look at the reality when they support ongoing and generational corruption.

At the top of these enablers? Why, it isn’t even the winners, perched high above and looking down on the rabble, smug and gloating, gluttonous and dismissive, throwing crumbs now and then at the sycophants who also need the illusion of something that never was.

No, it’s the complainers. The bitter and entitled that were once assigned a row of seats in the back because they were marginal, journeyman talent. And when the first row of visionaries passed on, they got to move one aisle ahead, until finally they were in front– and that coincided with mainstream awareness, press interviews, conventions that were like megachurches for the people with no identities of their own.

These bitter old relics aren’t content with inheriting a world that people like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and Trina Robbins and Joe Kubert and countless others created for them. No, they’ve got to have status, too. And they’ll do most anything to get it- including lying, especially lying. They need you to know that they were there and you weren’t. If that means compromising one’s ideals, so be it.

It’s my policy to have absolute zero tolerance for any and all disrespect towards anyone trans, for the record. So let me address Jenny Blake with respect to her gender and identity when I say: Madame, you are a liar.

Oh! And Roy Thomas says stuff like this, which is his right, but I just want Jenny to know it:

“People began making me aware of the fact that some people are complaining — as I think they have over the years — about cultural appropriation and crap like that, which just makes me furious.

But then I really don’t have much sympathy at all to trigger warnings or any of that crap. I think it’s overdone and nobody but a baby needs it, an intellectual baby.” – Roy Thomas, 2017

With special thanks to intellectual babies everywhere.