Roy Thomas - Architect of the Bronze Age
As someone who as a 70s-era kid picked up random issues of Marvel or DC, it’s long saddened me how little most people know about comic book history before Robert Downey Jr.’s snarky movie interpretation of Tony Stark. When it comes to the source material, the only actual creator most MCU fans are familiar with is probably Stan Lee. And that’s cool and all, but this is where the film boom of the last two decades failed: it never connected the people in the seats with key originators like Roy Thomas.
Thomas started out as a fanzine guy from Missouri. Arriving in New York in the mid-1960s, he briefly worked for DC Comics before heading over to Marvel. And it was there that the small-town Midwestern kid essentially took over writing chores on a number of books that Stan Lee had been scripting previously.
And with this handoff, friends, a figure enters into the comics arena who was perhaps it’s first great writer and idea-man outside of Jack “King” Kirby - simply put, American comic books wouldn’t be the same beast were it not for Roy Thomas.
It was Thomas who first lit a fire under ‘X-Men’, which up until his arrival had been a second-rate ‘Fantastic Four’ ripoff; the creator really upped the stakes in terms of characterization (playing up the buddy-angle between Hank McCoy and Bobby Drake, introducing love interests for both, fleshing out Scott Summers’s and Jean Grey’s relationship), villains (Sauron, the Living Monolith), and full-tilt action, especially toward the tail end of his run when management finally got the book a first-rate artist in Neal Adams.
You like those ‘Avengers’ movies Marvel puts out? Fine, but give credit to Roy Thomas for codifying the dynamic of that team during his lengthy tenure on the title. He created the Vision, paired the android up with Wanda, centered Black Panther in a number of key storylines, and in general kept readers guessing from month to month with the Avengers’ constant membership flux facing off against truly menacing threats like Ultron.
But it gets better.
As the decade wound down, replaced by something known in comics circles as the Bronze Age (the 1970s, basically), Thomas took on more of an editorial role at Marvel even as he continued to push the envelope in terms of what kinds of stories and characters could show up in the company’s offerings. Conan the Barbarian got a huge publicity boost thanks to Thomas and artists like Barry Windsor-Smith and John Buscema throwing their all into telling the dread Cimmerian’s story. And Thomas did something that few creators in mainstream American comics ever accomplish - he created his own genre. With a book called ‘The Invaders’, Thomas told World War II-era stories featuring Captain America and other heroes, adding an element of historical/speculative fiction to four-color tales about people in tights.
This is a blog post, so I’ve got to cut the tape somewhere. But, seriously, whether you like comic book movies or the source material or you just want something to read that will invigorate your psyche, pick up a Roy Thomas story. I would especially recommend his 60s-70s Marvel work, but of course a creator as prodigious as this wasn’t done when he hung up his pen at the House of Ideas - among other things, Thomas later returned to DC and made an impact there, as well.
Comic book movies are great, but source material matters. A lot of people have worked on this stuff over the decades, but there are few that deserve universal respect. I would count Roy Thomas towards the top of that hallowed list.
CEH
