“Makes a Big Deal Out of Trumpeting Respect and Admiration For Someone, Then Actually Treats Them With Disrespect…” – On The Complete Lack of Ability Or New Ideas From Roy Thomas

Gosh, that was a long title… and you think you’ve got problems! Truth be told frantic ones, this is not an article I intended or even considered writing. Like with many things, I sort of stumbled onto the idea while researching other topics… and, in my sleepy brain, made a sort of mental chuckle at just how many times Roy “Forever Boy” Thomas cited his wife, Dann Thomas, as the primary instigator or idea-haver of so many titles, concepts, story arcs, characters… you name it!

It got to the point where I imagined someone creating a massive database of Roy Thomas quotes relating to the various titles he’s been associated with, then playing a drinking game every time he credited his wife for working on that title. Then I realized that person would die of alcohol poisoning before long and remembered other sources pointing out that Thomas was using other writers and assistants going back into the 1970s‘… and thought, “well, I guess I’ve got to compile that!” It’s not likely that Back Issue is gonna do it.

While researching entirely separate articles, I was also struck- again- by just how little, if anything, Roy Thomas has ever conceived or created that wasn’t just using existing things. I know, I know- this is well known with Thomas and his career, and he’s often used the excuse that he purposely didn’t create new things since he “knew I wasn’t going to own them” and so forth, but going over several career retrospective type interviews with the rascally one, I was again amazed at how many times he’s just tried to combine existing properties or lazily adapt already written stories.

That’d be fine if he and his manager were not pushing him as some innovative and successful creator and editor– the last and greatest of all of Thomas’s retcons, emphasis on the “con”.

This article serves as a sort of pseudo-oral history, if you will, compiling several quotes of Thomas that only seek to illustrate just how dependent he was on assistance in nearly every facet of his comic book career.

As the saying goes, “behind every great man, there’s a great woman“- we will start with Thomas’s wife and sometime creative partner… Dann Thomas.

“I’ll admit I was happy when they asked me to come back a few months later to write Wonder Woman #300. I worked with Dann on the plotting and even the dialogue; she became the first female ever to have a scripting byline on a “Wonder Woman” story, and together we introduced the Earth-Two Wonder Woman’s daughter- and we gave an origin to the 1970s Simon & Kirby Sandman.”

(All emphasis mine, obviously. Get used to that going forward.)

“And then my wife Dann- she had this notion. She liked the Dark Ages part of my idea… so she came up with this idea about “an American Indian who discovers Europe.” I really sparked to that. We’d start off with this image that Dann had of an American Indian boy adrift in a canoe out in the Atlantic, picked up by Vikings who’d been blown out to sea.”

“Calling it “Young All-Stars” rather than “All-Star Squadron, Vol. 2”, was Dann’s idea. She’s pretty smart, my wife.”

“By the time we’d got back to Manhattan, we’d made up this group- I even knew the title I wanted: the Centurions. But I soon learned that a new TV animated series with that name was about to debut, so Dann came up with Infinity Inc., which I’ll admit I was never wild about. But I couldn’t come up with anything better, and DC liked it…”

“Unlike on Arak, Dann and I co-wrote Infinity from the beginning, co-plotting it, with Dann usually, if not always, doing the first draft on the script, which I then rewrote. Not that she was openly credited as co-writer right away; I had to take it slow in that area.”

“I wanted to sign some of the stories “Roy & Dann Thomas.” Before that, she just got a co-plotting credit, even though she had often contributed to the dialogue, as well.”

“It was Dann who prodded me to make Todd McFarlane the artist of Infinity Inc. when it came down to between him- he had mailed me copies of the little bit of Marvel work he’d done- and another artist that DC was pushing. She convinced me, and that’s certainly a decision I very quickly knew had been the right one.”

“In issue #3, Arak first encountered Valda the Iron Maiden, who was Dann’s and my equivalent of Red Sonja, I suppose. Dann found the name “Valda” somewhere…”

“The time she first started doing actual writing– sitting at the typewriter- was on a plot around that time Mike Barr dialogued that early issue set in Rome. Mike and Gerry did a bit of fill-in dialoguing while we were honeymooning in France…”

(Note that Thomas is also using other friends to assist in writing his books, leading to this next exchange):

Jim Amash: “You also had Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier dialoguing some Arak…”

Roy Thomas: “Yes, but that was much later. So, we eventually had them write the dialogue for a few issues, partly to get a little different flavor, and partly because by then we ourselves were becoming discouraged by less than stellar sales.”

That last part really strikes me. The sales are going down, and what does Roy Thomas, future Living Legend, really DO? He doesn’t roll his sleeves up and use his apparent (and retroactive) editorial genius to look at what problems are facing the book and then correct them himself; he simply passes it off to two other people because he’s “discouraged”. It really is the logic of a child, easily dismayed when his projected expectations don’t come to pass. And John Cimino thinks this guy is the heir of Stan Lee?! Holy shit!

Anyway, back to the prolific Mrs. Thomas…

“It was Dann who came up with the idea of the Batman diary (in America vs. The Justice Society), based on the forged “Hitler diary” that had been in the news.”

“That (The Crimson Avenger) was another project Dann and I did very much together– which made sense, because so much of the plotting and dialogue on the Secret Origins tale (featuring the character) had been hers. I had mostly edited and added the parts dealing with the 1938 Orson Welles “Invasion from Mars” broadcast.”

(I find it notable that Roy’s contribution was mostly interjecting the well documented and already written radio presentation from 1938.)

“Dann was also crucial in that, once Gerry and I started writing movies, him and I were almost never without a film assignment for three or four years running, and I could never have kept up my comics workload without her.”

“Dann had been very much a part of the original 1986 team in terms of plotting (for the First Comics ALTER EGO comic book), maybe even a first draft of some of the dialogue….”

“…so Dann and I came up with this concept I christened Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt. The Captain Thunder name, of course, came from the original name for Captain Marvel– and Blue Bolt had been the name of a hero created by Joe Simon. I’d already appropriated the look of Blue Bolt- and of his nemesis, the Green Sorceress- for the Alter Ego comic. So I swiped that character at two different places- the name in one place, the look of the character in another. Well, you know I’ve always had a great interest in old comic book characters. Dann and I worked on Captain Thunder together. It may even have been her initial suggestion, I don’t recall…”

(This really establishes just how little creative wanderlust or ambition Roy Thomas ever had, appropriating existing and mostly forgotten Golden Age characters about 96% of the time throughout his entire career. And listen, that’s fine- except that, today, Roy Thomas is presented as some grand visionary editor and creator. Which is not true whatsoever.)

“Dan Ostroff, who’s now a producer but then was my agent for movies and TV, said that of all the things he’d read that I’d written, Captain Thunder was his favorite. So, I told him, “Good. Then you should take on Dann as a client, because it’s as much her writing as mine.“

“Anyway, Dann and I met with Tom DeFalco at a San Diego Comic-Con, at his suggestion. Dann was there because she was going to be my informal co-writer. She was tired of writing actual scripts, and she felt I knew Marvel a lot better than she did, so she just intended to work with me verbally on plots.”

“I even got a chance to do stories with The Vision– and two storylines with Ultron, which I was kinda proud of. Dann had a big part in the plotting of those…”

(These comments really reinforce how much of an impact Stan Lee’s “Marvel Method” comics-by-committee approach had on Roy, as you’ll see in further statements- not all referencing his wife- Roy seems completely fine with mentioning his numerous collaborators, all on stories he took the lion’s share of credit for, on projects where his notoriety was considered part of the draw.)

“It (Code Blue) was a cop squad involved with super-villains. I didn’t have any interest in that one except the money, so I called up my friend Jean-Marc L’officier, who read everything, and we worked on it together.”

(Just think that, for a BACK UP, Thomas not only brings in his friend to co-write- but also READ UP on the characters, which Thomas can’t even do. I’m assuming Thomas paid him out of his Marvel salary, but it’d be hilarious and fitting if L’officier did it for free for the “honor” of helping the Rascally One.)

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with partnering with one’s spouse to create stories. Many couples in comic books- whether it be Mike & Laura Allred, Evan Dorkin & Sarah Dyer, even Jack & Roz Kirby– have collaborated to great success. I’m only stating that Roy Thomas, celebrated in recent years as an absolute giant of imagination and character creation, seems to have leaned heavily on assistance since- well, for the bulk of his career, really.

Allow me to segue a bit and still cite a few more quotes which show Thomas’s propensity for co-writers to help carry the load but also display his complete lack of new ideas for stories, characters, or titles. As you’ll see, this is not so much a premeditated mindset as he’ll sometimes claim– Thomas has such enthusiasm for his juxtaposition-of-existing-pieces ideas that he really doesn’t seem aware all of his ideas are, for the most part, extremely juvenile ones.

“I came up with the notion of an ongoing book of re-tellings of Golden and Silver Age origins…”

“I’d made up Amazing-Man for All-Star Squadron, using the name of a Bill Everett character- Bill had given me his blessing to use that name for a character years earlier, but Stan Lee wouldn’t have gone for that name. Too corny. So, I complained volubly when DC launched that humorous ‘Mazing Man comic a bit later. I didn’t have anything against the character, just the name, which I felt undercut my economic interests in Amazing-Man.”

“Eventually, there was a backstage power grab at DC, and I, who had come up with the whole idea of the revival of Secret Origins, was knocked out of it, along with all remaining Earth-Two origin stories. That included two stories already penciled by Gil Kane. Yeah, that’s really clever- that’s doing the right thing for the company. But these office-politics types can be vicious when their little fiefdoms are involved.”

(I have to wonder if Jack Kirby felt the same way during his return to Marvel in the late Seventies when honorable Roy here wrote “lousy dialogue” on returns of Kirby’s artwork, knowing that Kirby would receive them and see the disparaging remark. But! The rules don’t APPLY to the fans-turned-pros branch, remember that!)

“Most of “my” 1990s What Ifs happened because Jean-Marc L’officier, a good friend of mine, would come up with an idea for a story.”

Thomas would reveal something in passing when interviewed by Jim Amash that made me realize his lack of enthusiasm and farming work out to various friends didn’t go unnoticed. Marvel Editor Mike Rockwitz seems to have called him out on it:

“Once, I did something he didn’t like in some (Thor) plot, and whatever it was, for some reason it punched his buttons. I got a fax back saying that I wasn’t really trying and that if I didn’t improve, I’d be kicked off that book. I fixed the synopsis a little and the crisis passed.”

It’s worth noting the entirety of Thomas’s terrible 1990s’ run on THOR is chronicled and summed up much better than I could ever do on the GraphiContent site, which also brought to my attention that one of Thomas’s retroactive continuity plots was created simply so that Thomas could explain why artists drew Don Blake more muscular over the years, I kid you not: https://graphicontent.blogspot.com/2024/01/because-roy-boy-in-9495-thor-472-489.html

I’d also like to discuss both the awareness from other Editors that Thomas was relying on other people to write his stories at an earlier point, as well as the various titles that Roy Thomas pitched to both Marvel and DC in different decades. It is worth recognizing that, in all cases, Thomas is simply coming up with unnecessary situations for existing characters and never coming up with any new and refreshing ideas that might justify creating an entirely new title.

JIM SHOOTER on ROY USING OTHER WRITERS AND THEN “FIXING UP” THEIR SCRIPTS:

“Using other writers. Apparently, Roy thought it was okay to do so. I saw nothing in his agreements that said so, and Marvel was paying for him, not someone who wasn’t nearly as good as him, whether or not he tried to fix up what they wrote. In one letter, Roy admitted that one such writer’s story was “…almost unintelligible as a plotline.”

Making a poor choice once in a blue moon considering the vast number of issues Roy produced is evidence of humanity, not incompetence or lack of discernment.

Farming out work to other writers…? I don’t know…” – Jim Shooter

(Later, a couple readers comment on their surprise at Roy using multiple other writers and asks Shooter to clarify whom he refers to. Shooter responds):

“I think Roy credited the other writers, among them Clair Noto, Christy Marx and, I think, Don Glut. …I forgot about Dann. But, I’m okay with that. All in the family. I meant Clair Noto, Christy Marx, Wendy Pini, Don Glut…maybe others, I forget.”

(Shooter still had (in 2011) a list of proposed new Marvel titles from Roy Thomas. Let’s look at this list to gauge the concept capacity and imagination of the Original Fair-Haired Boy):

“The Saga of the Sub-Mariner (going back through 1939), C.B. (a citizen’s band radio/Smokey and the Bandit type hero), The Impossible Man (a more upbeat Howard the Duck sort of thing), The Liberty Legion, Six Million Dollar Man, Carson of Venus, Super-Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Hammer of Thor (a second Thor book), Titans of Olympus, A Biblical stories book (untitled), An Arthurian/Black knight book (untitled), Thunder Bunny (a rabbit-Thor, predating Walt Simonson’s Frog-Thor by years), Fantastic Furr (similar to the above), The Incredible Hog (ditto)…”

Wow. All of that is so remarkably bland and shitty, even if a couple of them might’ve been decent. It’s so child-like and Fanish, and not in the more positive connotations of those terms. I also appreciate how Shooter felt the need to clarify for us that a title called “The Hammer of Thor” would be a second Thor book as if no one could have figured that out on their own.

Remember how many times Roy Thomas has proactively criticized Jack Kirby’s Fourth World as “a bit clumsy” when you look at the amazing suggestions he was giving Marvel in the late Seventies/early Eighties. Just saying. All are riffs on existing properties, “earlier” tales which means he would have adapted previously written stories and “updated” them, and adaptions of Greek mythology or old Science Fiction characters. And John Cimino called this “the KING of comics?”

“Once I quit being Marvel’s editor-in-chief in ’74, I no longer really cared about the companies I worked for, the way I’d once been emotionally attached to Marvel. I only care about my own work, and about the characters I liked, and about the stories I wanted to write with them.”

(Contrast that with Thomas’s comments on Jack Kirby’s Marvel run in the late 70s’, from Alter Ego #70, 2007: “…it’s a shame he stopped himself from being as integral to the company the second time around as he’d been before, which would’ve been to his advantage as well as theirs.” AGAIN- the rules do NOT APPLY TO ROY THOMAS.)

“In the new Conan mini-series, the villain was Yezud priest from the de Camp novel, but I combined him with- you know I swipe everything from old comics anyway– the title character in a one-shot 1950 Victor Fox comic called The Black Tarantula.”

(Well, at least he admits it.)

“Me, I wanted to do a trilogy of books with DC super-heroes shoehorned into the plots of H.G. Welles’ classic science-fiction novels. In the ’70s, of course, I’d conceived the Marvel “War of the Worlds” series. So, I told DC, “Superman began in comics in 1938- and you know what else happened that year? The Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast!” So, I figured we could combine them to mutual benefit.”

“I sold Marvel a series called Time Busters, a time-travel group that I proposed to star the original Black Knight, Phantom Eagle, Venus Kid Colt, and a couple of others… I was always wild about the name, which had been inspired by the old Ziff-Davis comic Space Busters.”

“Things might’ve worked out differently (at Marvel in the 90s’) if I could’ve sold them on one of the many concepts I pushed during that decade. Besides Avengers South, there was- let’s see, I’ve got a stack of them here- there was The Crusaders, which was basically the “1950s Avengers” grouping that I’d conceived, and Don Glut had written, in What If #9… different permutations of my alternate-war Invaders… a science fiction oriented Sgt. Fury, with more death rays and the like… Untold Stories of the Kree-Skrull War… Marvel: The War Years, a sort of expanded sequel to The Saga of the Sub Mariner and the Human Torch follow-up… the Mighty Marvel Monsters… and a few things that Jean-Marc Lofficier and I proposed together, such as Dr. Weird, who was to Dr. Strange as War Machine was to Iron Man, and Phalanx, an international group that contained characters like Sunfire, Banshee, American Eagle…. but none of these ever materialized.”

…I mean it when I tell you that I can imagine Marvel editors receiving these pitches and just being like, we can rip off our own existing properties, thanks very much. It all reads like fanfiction from hardcore enthusiasts who just consume, consume, consume. I really do feel like Roy Thomas is one of the luckiest people to ever fall into comics, who was in the right place at the right time- honestly, Stan Lee hired him because he was an impressionable “yes man” who was not likely to push back the way Kirby and Ditko did- until Thomas did push back, often, whenever he felt slighted or overruled and didn’t get his way.

(Here’s a great quote which combines Thomas’s relentless habit of just combining existing things and minute continuity elements no one else would care to think about along with his famous bitchiness and sense of entitlement:)

“And there was a proposal for a one-shot special that I called The Night Justice Was Born. It would’ve revealed, and tied together, what DC’s other late-1940s heroes were up to the night the Justice Society of America was enjoying its first big dinner in All-Star Comics #3… guys like Superman, Batman and Robin, Crimson Avenger, Mr. America, Dr. Occult, Hop Harrigan, and Red Tornado… I got a brusque brush-off on that one. I think the concept and the execution were mildly ingenious, and worth doing.

The editor to whom I had to submit it just sent me a short note saying there were currently several Golden Age projects in the works, and he saw no likelihood of any more being scheduled for some time. Period, end of story. I forget the name of the editor who wrote that note, but I like to imagine he’s long since gone from the field, while I’m still working on the Spider-Man newspaper strip and writing books about comics, and even the occasional comic book. Far as I’m concerned, that’d be yet another “night when justice was born.”

(Wow. Not surprising, but still. What a character.)

(over how DC treated John Buscema) “I don’t understand the mindset that makes a big deal out of trumpeting respect and admiration for someone, then actually treats them with disrespect. It just drives me up the wall.”

“One addition- not really a correction– to Dan Jurgen’s tale of working with Gerry Conway on Gerry’s and my concept of SUN DEVILS at DC. Originally, Gerry and I came up with the idea of doing a “future Blackhawks“- using the “Blackhawk” name. DC loved the idea of a “Future Blackhawks in Space” until suddenly they didn’t love it anymore and decides that we couldn’t call it Blackhawk or The Blackhawks. At that point, being fairly busy, I decided I’d rather turn the whole thing over to Gerry, who I presume did a fine job with it.”

(I hadn’t known Thomas was involved with the 80s’ title SUN DEVILS but am not surprised in the slightest that his contribution was simply to rip-off the Blackhawks and invert it and rename it. The creator of WOLVERINE, everybody!)

“For my part, I made it clear that I was only interested in doing adaptions of the (Tarzan) novels…”

(Nothing shocking there. It simply wasn’t possible for Roy Thomas to come up with new stories. At all.)

“The annuals I enjoyed were ones where they let me do my own thing. In one pair of annuals, I riffed on the Hitchcock move Strangers on a Train, where two guys meet and decided to exchange crimes… they figure nobody will suspect them, since the guy who actually commits the murder has no real motive, and the other guy has an alibi. Brilliant device. I called my story “Strangers on an Astral Plane“…”

(Wow. The IDEAS.)

“I had a period two or three years ago, the period in which I only co-wrote Red Sonja and couldn’t even bring myself to do The Invaders on a regular basis, when I just didn’t care as much about comics in general. But I could still tell, even then, that I was doing work which was better than the standard for the field, which isn’t that hard.”

…did Roy Thomas ever have to work hard?

I mean that sincerely. The man has coasted his entire adult life. He quits after one week with Mort Weisinger because Weisinger was too mean, he acts as Stan Lee’s sycophant and conducts such undermined things like telling a teenaged Mark Evanier to tell Lee to remove Dick Ayer’s inking assignment on Captain America, his entire career is simply adapting, and he is almost as prolific in writing angry and offended outbursts every single time he felt slighted or misrepresented in the fan press.

To say nothing of his repeated dismissals on artists like Jack Kirby, his condescending nature, his tangible sense of entitlement, and his contradictory statements into the present year. Roy Thomas is the ultimate fanboy and should be treated as such: he has never been the visionary to lead readers or professionals into new frontiers or new eras, nor did he have any ambition or sense of responsibility to.

He was content to borrow and leave the heavy lifting to the suckers, content to demand and receive his own toys that he craved from childhood, and show a child’s worldview into old age in that he repeatedly announced that he refused to look at any comic book featuring his childhood favorites that he didn’t write, while still admonishing other (superior) creators for having the audacity to break away and build new and slightly unfamiliar worlds.

Roy Thomas is a relic. Unfortunately, he is not part of a dying breed- for other evolutions in the fanboy-turns-pro abound and prosper in the comic book industry. They are more than happy to rationalize the mistreatment of those who paved the way for their careers and keep playing with the same regurgitated nostalgia that has always held the superhero genre back. It isn’t their fault, really- they too lack any new conception for a better world or brighter tomorrow. All that matters is reassurance and repetition.

At least they don’t need a gaggle of other writers the way a hack like Roy Thomas did.

with thanks to Jim Amash, Jim Shooter, Mike Rockwitz, and every editor who turned down Roy’s unimaginative pitches in the 80s’ and 90s’.