[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello and welcome to "Comic Culture."

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is one of the most influential figures in the history of American comics, writer, editor, archivist Roy Thomas.

Roy, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Nice to be here.

After that introduction, I'm glad to be anywhere.

- Roy, you have just a career that's gone over the course, I guess, since the 1960s to the present day.

I was wondering when you started as an editor working at DC and Marvel and then going back to Marvel a little bit later on, how did the job of editor sort of evolve from being maybe one where you're just kind of putting out fires in the production house to making sure that the artist is hitting the deadlines and that the publisher's happy?

- Well, the nice thing about the Marvel system, which is where I did most of my editing-type work, was that system had been set up so that the editor didn't do a number of things that they had to do at DC.

At DC, people like Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz kept all sorts of books and schedules and so forth because they didn't have assistants, most of 'em.

Weisinger finally did, but most of 'em didn't have an assistant editor back in the '60s or through the early '70s.

So they just had to keep all the books themselves and keep on top of the artists and do this and that.

Marvel had evolved a system under Stan just a couple of years before I came whereby the production manager, originally Sol Brodsky through 1970 and then John Verpoorten for the next six or seven years, which covered my time really working there, they took care of all the scheduling and things of that sort.

And that left me free to, as you say, put out the fires, which is what I felt I was doing about 90% of the time during my editor-in-chiefship, which is why I eventually got kind of tired of it.

So I didn't get a chance to do a lot of the things that editors do.

I didn't do a lot of real editing.

You know, I'm perfectly capable of rewriting somebody's script to make it better or maybe worse, depending upon their point of view.

But I didn't have time to do it.

You know, we had 30, 40, 50 books a month coming out.

I was barely able to skim them, let alone actually read them at that time, which was a little unsatisfactory to me.

But it meant that I had to find writers that were already good enough they were almost their own editors and just needed a little guidance or reigning in occasionally.

And luckily, DC did most of that work for me.

DC had sort of groomed a number of good writers who liked DC Comics, but also liked Marvel Comics and understood what they were kind of about.

They knew what Stan Lee wanted as opposed to what, say, Julius Schwartz or somebody wanted at DC.

And all they needed was a little guidance and the chance to show what they could do.

And you had people like Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, and a couple of others, Steve Skeates, who had been at Marvel before me but then went to DC, one or two others.

They would just come sort of wandering in, and all I had to do was open the door and step aside, and then, you know, hand out assignments and give 'em a little bit of help.

And it really made the job as easy as it could be so that I could do the thing that I guess I had to do most of the time, which, as you say, is putting out fires and working on covers and whatever little things came up or handling whatever things Stan threw at me any particular day.

- So you mentioned going back to DC, and I know at DC, you had the title of writer-editor on titles like "All-Star Squadron."

So I'm wondering, as somebody who is a creative, the writer coming up with the script ideas and collaborating with the artistic partner, if it's a Rich Buckler or a Jerry Ordway, how do you sort of put on the other hat as the editor and give the critical, I guess, eye to your own work but also kind of be that leader that the artist might need to make sure that they're staying on deadline?

- Well, it's just something you kind of... You know, there's the line in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" about this character named Topsy that says she just "growed."

You know, she just... You know, you come in, and you start doing things.

The next thing you do, you're doing more and more and more.

And the whole writer and editor thing at Marvel, they kind of grew up together because I was hired first as a staff writer.

Within a few weeks, that seemed to be not working 'cause I couldn't work under those situations in the office.

So I became like an editorial assistant instead and wrote only, you know, at home.

And so since I was working with Stan, who was also a writer and editor, I was sort of imbibing both at the same time.

And granted, there is the viewpoint, I mean, and there certainly is the reality, that an editor can't necessarily edit his own work.

And I understand that.

But I had Stan Lee over me, who, even when he was publisher, still functioned as an editor to a certain extent and certainly had up through 1972, the first seven years I was there.

And I felt like by that stage, he had kind of taught me enough that, you know, yeah, I was gonna make some mistakes.

And I was always very happy to have an assistant editor or somebody there point out a mistake I made, and they did from time to time, and I would encourage that.

If somebody told me that something didn't seem clear, or there was some kind of mistake, I mean, whether it was some little subtle thing where Steve Englehart noticing one day in the early '70s that in an issue of "Avengers" that Neal Adams had drawn a giant figure of Rick Jones with six fingers on one hand, you know, and noticed this right before the book went out.

It was just easy to miss.

Neal drew so well, all six of the fingers looked so good.

You know, I just hadn't counted them.

And so you just need different people to find those things.

I had worked with what I considered was the best of the editors of the period, Stan Lee.

I mean, Julius Schwartz and others had other great editorial abilities in various ways, but Stan was the guy who really knew what should be done in comics.

He had it all.

He could edit basically.

He could write, you know, and so forth.

He was very good with art even though he was not an artist himself.

So therefore, the idea somehow of working under some lesser editor, as long as I could avoid it, I didn't want to.

And I've never liked working under...

I've had good relationship with a number of editors, but I've never liked working under any of them except Stan.

And I got annoyed enough at him, [laughs] after a while.

When you get your own feeling a little bit, then all of a sudden, even the mentor you had, all of a sudden you find, "Well, I really don't agree with this guy who's taught me everything I know," you know.

And sometimes that would lead to problems.

But you know, I feel I learned a lot from several different people directly and indirectly, including Julius Schwartz and a couple of other editors.

But, you know, mostly I was a Stan Lee guy.

If you don't like Stan Lee, or you don't like that approach, you're probably not gonna like me, and I'm not probably gonna like you much either.

- Now you mentioned problems, and I'm thinking of one storyline in particular.

And the problem was it seemed that you started a storyline, the "Kree-Skrull War" with Neal Adams, and then somewhere in the middle of the arc, you had to switch to another artist.

I know John Buscema actually did the art on the final chapter, and his brother Sal did some of the art before and some spots in the middle.

So when you're working on a story with a particular collaborator, and that collaborator for whatever reason needs to step back for a month or two or maybe step back entirely, how do you sort of keep that arc on track and make sure that the new artists are able to follow through with that vision?

- Well, when I think of the, what was it, eight or nine issues, I should really know this, of the "Kree-Skrull War," it first just evolved with Sal Buscema as the penciller.

And Sal was a really good story man, good storyteller, et cetera.

But he wasn't the kind of guy that added a lot to it or was interested in coming up with stories himself.

You gave him a plot, and he gave it back to you.

He added if he needed a little choreography in a fight, you know, or a few little touches here and there.

He's perfectly capable of adding 'em and doing a good job.

But he mostly gave you back what you gave him in my two or three or four-page plot.

And that was working fine, but those first three or four issues, they're kind of building, but they really haven't got to anything substantial, you know, yet.

And so I was just about to kind of go into high gear, and it would've probably have been a slightly different high gear when suddenly, I have this new artist tossed at me, you know, Neal Adams.

I told Neal we could abandon this if he didn't like the idea of this war thing.

I could abandon it for a few issues 'cause I knew Neal wouldn't stick around forever.

You know, he was gonna come in and out.

But Neal liked the idea of the war, so I told him the things that I had thought of, which was kind of a general direction.

I had the ending in mind a few issues down the line.

He just liked to continue that way of working where we would talk over lunch or sometimes after one or two, we might just talk over the phone about what was going on.

And we knew where it was kind of heading, and it was going into space.

It would carry the thing to the Kree-Skrull planets and that kind of thing.

And I had the ending in mind of certain things that I had set up with Sal.

You know, there was the 1940s characters coming out of Rick's head.

That's set up in a panel, you know, a character named Senator Craddock, who would turn out to be the fourth Skrull from "Fantastic Four," number two that had been lying around dormant for a decade and two or three other things I had in mind.

And then now Neal was a wonderful godsend to the "Kree-Skrull War" because he not only brought my ideas before, but he added so many new ones of his own.

And I didn't really care because I knew where we were going at the end.

There was 5,000 ways to get there, and I didn't have such a strong storyline that it had to be exactly this, this, and this.

It wasn't one of those things where it had to go a certain way.

It just had to get to the end, finally the showdown on the planet, and Rick Jones actually by being human, being better than...

It was like humanity, as represented by Rick Jones, was superior to the Kree and superior to the Skrulls because they were at what I called an evolutionary dead end, and they weren't gonna evolve much more.

I don't know how scientific that is, but that was my theory.

And human beings were still had a lot of potential, and eventually they would pass up both the Kree and the Skrull.

So that was the only thing I really cared about.

So anything Neal wanted to do in between, if he wanted to bring in the Inhumans we had worked on together before, well, that just enlarged the scope of the characters.

If he wanted to bring in Nick Fury and suddenly give him a space station that we had not prepared for anywhere else in Marvel Comics, well, I figured, okay.

If Stan doesn't mind that we're gonna have this space station we'd never heard of before, what the hell, you know, let's just have it up there.

It's in there.

They land there, and they go on it.

And the space station makes absolutely no difference in the plot at all, but there it is.

Or the most memorable scene from the whole "Kree-Skrull War," which had nothing to do with it, which is the journey inside the Vision by the Ant-Man, which is merely to help the vision after he is been felled by the Skrulls.

It has nothing to do with the story other than like a doctor coming in and helping you out a little bit.

But because we had a lot of pages to fill, and Neal said he'd like to do that, I said, "Go for it.

Just throw in a bunch of pages of Ant-Man exploring the Vision and so forth," obviously like the old "Fantastic Voyage" movie, which was the obvious source of it.

And you know, so we had this, so the most remarkable, memorable scene in the entire "Kree-Skrull War" has almost no bearing on the plot at all, but nobody notices that.

It's just because it's so exciting, and Neal drew it so well.

The problem we came to at the end was that Neal was getting later and later because he was also doing work for DC.

He had his commercial work.

To say he had a cavalier attitude toward deadlines would be a gross understatement.

He had no view toward deadlines except they should be ignored.

And I had tried to convince him we just didn't have the time for him to take his usual five weeks because every issue was getting later.

So that when finally he didn't come in within about a week with any artwork at all after promising me I'd see him in a day or two with pages, I could no longer resist the production manager my good friend John Verpoorten's blandishments, to be polite, that we had to have somebody else do it.

So we got John Buscema, who was both as good and as fast as anybody, to come in, and within a few days, draw the plot.

And the plot I gave him was basically the plot Neal and I had kind of talked over and where we were going, just omitting something that Neal had wanted me to do in that last issue, which I hadn't wanted to do.

He wanted to set the entire last issue as a flashback set several hundred years in the future with some Kree guard in a museum, in essence, leading a group of other Kree around explaining about these relics from the Kree-Skrull War.

Well, I didn't care much for that.

It might have been a nice arty thing to do, but we only had like 22, 23 pages, and we were gonna finish up the war.

This would take two or three pages of it, and I didn't care much for it anyway.

But I went along with it because I thought, Neal, if it'll enthuse Neal with the idea of making a deadline for a change, maybe it'll be worth it.

When Neal didn't show up, I just ditched that 'cause I didn't like it, and I gave the plot to John Buscema.

I don't know if they messengered it to... And in three or four days, he's drawn it all very roughly, and I have to write it like basically overnight.

Tom Palmer, who's grousing about having to stay up all night because Neal can't make a deadline, said he's not doing it anymore after this, but he did it on this one.

So we had to get it done.

And then Neal, of course, was kind of outraged that we didn't have any faith in him.

But he never delivered a single finished page to me even a week or two later.

If he had, I'd have ditched what John did, you know, and I'd have found a way to write the other page 'cause of course I would've rather had Neal's thing.

But I always felt I was... First of all, the "Kree-Skrull War," whatever else it was, was my idea and my project.

It wasn't Sal's or John's or Neal's or Stan's.

And so therefore anything that I needed to do to get my story done, I felt, well, was kind of justified.

I wanted Neal to do it.

If Neal couldn't do it, then somebody else was going to do it.

And I'm sorry it wasn't Neal 'cause then it would've been even a little bit better.

But I'm very, you know, satisfied with what happened.

I always said that comic books are the art of the possible, you know, like politics, and whatever you can do, you know, especially in the economics of the day where deadlines are always looming.

You can't, you know, skip issues.

I didn't wanna have to put a reprint issue in the middle of this and slow things down.

So we just did the best we could.

And then you argue about it later on, you know, and Neal and I, of course, never came to terms.

We never spoke about the Avengers again in all the years we knew each other.

Indirectly, we had a few contretemps through the media, you know, including in the last couple of years before he passed away and so forth when arguing about credit.

But before that time, I hadn't worried about it.

I simply found at one stage I had to defend myself because he was acting like somehow this had all been him.

And I knew that was crap, so, you know.

And at the same time, I had such a respect for him as one of the most important comic book artists, of the entire, you know, that whole period, if not the whole 20th century.

So I was kind of doing this balancing act.

I loved Neal, and I hated Neal.

And Neal I think kind of felt the same way about me most of the time.

- And it's interesting you mentioned an event that happened in "Fantastic Four," number two and how that became part of something that you were working on 10 years later.

And it's interesting because I know that you were a fan of comics, and you were sort of at the forefront of the fans turned pro.

We start to see Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, like you mentioned all comic readers becoming comic professionals.

So as this transition kind of takes place in the late '60s and early 1970s, how do you sort of bridge that gap between the old-school guys like a Jack Kirby or a Don Heck and the new-school guys, like, Jerry, Marvin, Len?

- Well, I think they worked pretty seamlessly together.

You know, I never had any trouble working with the old guard.

I didn't work with Jack that terribly much.

I didn't get a chance to, but I worked with the Don Hecks and Dick Ayers and Gil Kane and people who had been around since the '40s and '50s.

And you know, the basic thing was Marvel at that stage was really a sort of a writer-led company.

And to the extent that you count people like Ditko and Kirby as being very, very important, which of course they were, it was there whether you wanna call it writer or just creator, but it wasn't just their drawing that was important, obviously.

It was that side that also added to the story so that they and Stan would each contribute to the story.

It wasn't like just Stan's story or, you know, and it certainly wasn't just Steve's or Jack's story.

It was a sort of a combination of all the things.

So I never had any trouble working with those people.

I think some of the younger people probably were a little more simpatico to what we were doing because they had come along and become fans of Marvel comics in the early '60s, the middle-'60s, and so forth.

So when they got into the field, they had already, like Jerry and the other writers, had already kind of imbibed that.

It was part of their DNA, which it never would've been with a Jack Kirby or a Gil Kane or people like that from the old days.

They had their own style, but you could still kind of make it work if the writer kind of guided things, and you got jobs out of Jack and Steve and Gill and all these other people that just worked very seamlessly as part of the Marvel age of comics and worked, you know, equally well at DC.

- When we start to see the evolution of a lot of these artists, an artist like Gil Kane, obviously known for his work at DC as one of the creators of the silver-age "Green Lantern," but also takes on a whole new artistic style while at Marvel.

I mean, those "Spider-Man" issues that he works on are just uncanny.

And as somebody who's both an editor and a writer, how do you encourage those artists to maybe take that chance, like, you can do something that's gonna be fresh and new?

- Well, with a guy like Gil, it wasn't hard because as soon as he came there and started doing his first work for Marvel, which was what, a couple of Hulk issues, wasn't it, as Scott Edwards or something?

And you know, the thing is, you know, the problem really wasn't, for example, with Gil as a perfect example of the old guard merging with the new, it wasn't a case of his suddenly evolving from this really basically bland sort of second-string Carmine Infantino work that we thought of him as like, you know, the guy who'd do not quite as well as Carmine Infantino did on the Flash at the time, to all of a sudden doing this Kirby-style action.

Because after all, Gil's first job, or one of his first jobs was as an assistant to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

He was drawing covers and stories for like the "Sandman" and characters as "Newsboy Legion" with the Guardian back in the middle '40s.

So it was more a case that DC had put the brakes on him and forced him into this bland style of "Green Lantern."

And he kept trying to put more and more in, and it was Julius Schwartz as the editor who didn't want him to.

When Gil wanted to throw punches, Julius' thing was, "Oh, no, have the ring do everything," you know, and so forth.

And you know, Gil developed the style of the flying that looked like somebody parachuting, really, in a way.

But when he really was left to his own devices, it's more like a Kirby kind of thing.

It wasn't...

It's funny, it was influenced by Kirby, and yet you would never mistake it for Kirby.

It was his own version of that kind of thing.

And he started doing it right away with the Hulk and then when he did Spider-Man.

So in a way it wasn't really very hard for Gil to get into that because he was simply getting into the Kirby-esque kind of thing that had been his second nature.

Some artists found it harder because they had been in a quieter school.

It's like George Tuska, who had came over after doing "Buck Rogers" in the newspaper strips for years and doing a rather realistic quiet, visually quiet, "Crime Does Not Pay" back in the '40s and '50s.

George told Stan once soon after Stan would talk to him about what he wanted, in "Iron Man," and he would talk about the action and throwing a punch and this and that, and Stan would jump around on the furniture to show this.

And George says, "You know, Stan, what you're telling me to do is everything that the newspaper syndicates drilled out of me for a decade or two."

And that was the thing, the DC editors, in general, in the early days, the newspaper syndicates that some people came from and other people, they all wanted something quieter.

The only madman was Stan and with him, you know, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, who meshed perfectly with that kind of style.

And the three of them together, by rubbing against each other with Stan as kind of guiding, but at the same time using the genius of these other two guys, and out of that emerged the thing that became Marvel Comics, which at least without either both Stan and Jack could never have existed.

- When we think of those times, they are exciting comics, and you can see those steps in evolution.

And I'm thinking about that next wave of talent that comes in the group of artists that are influenced by Kirby and Ditko and Gil Kane.

- The Jim Starlins and Rich Bucklers and people like that, yeah.

- I was going to say, I mean, I was going to mention Jim Starlin credits you with helping develop the visuals of Thanos.

So as somebody who is a writer, somebody who's an editor, how do you sort of encourage a younger artist to maybe push something, a boundary, the same way you would encourage a Gil Kane to do that?

- Well, the thing with Jim is that when he walked in the door, he already had all the tools.

He had that Kirby, a little bit of Ditko and Gil Kane influence.

You could see Gil in him.

You could see Kirby in him in particular, those two guys.

And he had all the tools when he walked in the door because of being immersed in comics in general and the work of Gil Kane and Jack Kirby and maybe to some extent, Ditko.

And he had all the tools.

He was all ready.

All he needed was an occasional bit of guidance or something.

And in the case of Thanos, it was simplest, dumb kind of thing.

He showed me several different characters he wanted to bring into the comics as obviously his sort of answer to the "New Gods" in a certain way.

I saw this one, and it had this interesting name, "Thanos," which I love because I knew it meant death.

And the idea, Thanos, I thought, now there's a great name for a comic-book villain, you know.

You can't get any better.

It's like Dr. Doom, Thanos, you know, they both mean the same thing, practically.

But he had given him to this kind of skinny character who was more like the guy that rode around in the chair, Metron in "New Gods."

And he had given him that kind of character.

And I thought, well, that'd be okay 'cause actually death doesn't have to be muscular.

But for some reason, thinking of Darkseid and so forth, I thought, well, if this is gonna be the character, make him the leader and make him the big guy.

Make him big and bulky.

It's not because muscles are evil, or you have to have, but it just somehow seemed to fit.

You have a muscular death instead of a kind of a wiry one.

So I made that one suggestion.

I don't know, maybe it would've worked without that.

So once you got Jim started in the right direction, that was the end of it.

He could pretty much take it from there.

- And I wanted to talk about another artist that you worked with, Jerry Ordway on "All-Star Squadron," who went on to be a very successful writer-artist.

And I'm just wondering, you know, when you get an artist like that who you're sort of bringing in and showing the ropes, how do you kind of help them get into that confidence to do more to help be part of that storytelling process and then do their own work independently?

- I wish I could claim, you know, much of Jerry Ordway's success, talent, or whatever, but I can't.

I mean, he was thrust on me all over the place.

First he was thrust on me as an inker by Len Wein, who was the editor, original editor of "All-Star Squadron."

It turned out to work out just fine once I saw the work, but, you know, I didn't have much choice in it, and it turned out to be fine.

After a little while when Len Wein decided various things that Jerry Ordway should become the penciller because otherwise he was gonna lose him, I wasn't that wild about that either 'cause I had never seen any real pencils by Jerry.

You know, I'd seen him.

He did a wonderful job inking and actually fixing up and embellishing.

He was actually just as important as the penciller.

But was he gonna be able to pencil and do the layouts and the storytelling?

Well, okay, so Len, pushed him down my throat.

Okay, I saw two or three pages.

I became even more of a Jerry Ordway fan.

Jerry was kind of a different kind of character because he isn't an action artist in the sense of these other guys, you know, like a Starlin or a Rich Buckler.

He can do action, but he's a little more realistic and so forth.

And I kind of like that.

It somehow had a nice feeling for what I was trying to get into, this feeling of a World War II that had heroic characters.

But they weren't quite, They weren't all Kirby.

You know, they weren't all smash, pow.

They were all different kinds of characters, 'cause after all, I had 40 or 50 characters coming in and out of that thing.

And Jerry just turned out to be a wonderful artist.

But the only thing I ever guided him on, which I don't think he appreciated all the time, maybe in retrospect, but not at the time, was that I was absolutely relentless about the costumes.

I wanted them to look right.

I don't want 'em to have the details wrong.

I'm not gonna mention, but there were two or three guys who had drawn the "Justice Society" in the past that were good artists, but I hated their version of the costume.

They'd be sloppy about what the boots were like or what this was like or what that was like, you know, or be inconsistent.

And I said, "I want the guys to look right."

There wasn't necessarily one version, but I would find one version of those characters that I liked, and then I would insist that Jerry do it.

And knew I drove him crazy because he had a lot of characters to do that to.

But of course, he rose the challenge beautifully.

He's retrogressed just a little bit.

Now when he draws Doctor Fate, he doesn't draw him right as far as I'm concerned.

He takes that wonderful helmet, which is two pieces as far as I'm concerned.

And he, like everybody else, he puts an extra crest on top, you know, that extra crest.

That crest is supposed to be, as far as the best of the 1940s versions of Dr.

Fate, is part of the same half.

It's just like two halves of a helmet put together.

There's no third piece that's the crest.

And I was surprised to see Jerry drawing it that way again.

I thought I'd taught him better than that, but that's okay.

That's his option now.

I'm not his editor anymore.

He can do what he wants to.

If you were working me with an "All-Star Squadron" again, he'd go back to the two-part, you know, helmet.

But Jerry's a wonderful artist.

I had no idea he could write at all, but he did a fine job with the various things he wrote later on, too.

And I'm just sorry that... We had a chance to do a sort of JSA Infinity, Incorporated book for DC a few years ago but they didn't seem to wanna quite accept what I did when I was rewriting.

The next thing you know, they kind of cut me out of it.

So I can just wait for... All I can do is wait until particular DC people are gone and everything, you know, as far as I'm concerned because to me, some of those, all they were was enemies of what I was trying to accomplish.

- Well, Roy, they're telling us we're just about out of time.

I was wondering if you have any projects that are upcoming that you'd like to talk about.

- I'm working on a few projects with comics that are creator-owned that I had.

I had the "Alter-Ego" comic book character, and there's Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt, and we're doing some kind of crowdfunded or whatever it is, things with that because I wanna keep those copyrights and trademarks going and so forth.

But otherwise, the main thing I work on is "Alter-Ego," which a comics history magazine, and working on my autobiography and so forth and this book here that'll come out soon, which I have no, you know, I've gotten paid for it.

I don't get any royalties.

If it sells a million copies, I won't get a penny more.

But it's based on a project I absolutely hated back in the early '70s that Stan Lee came up with, "Marvel Value Stamps."

Anybody who remembers those or has run into a comic book with a picture cut out of it because of a Marvel value stamp being on a page can guess why I opposed this idea.

But they asked me to write an introduction to it and go over the drawings and so forth, and I was very... And this this turned out to be a 10 times better book than it had any right to be given the subject matter.

And I'm real proud to be associated with Abrams art books that'll be coming out.

It'll be out by this spring.

So that's basically it.

- Well, Roy, I wanna thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule today.

It's been a great conversation.

- Thank you, sorry we kind of had to rush through it, but we did the best we could.

- It was fantastic.

I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture."

We will see you again soon.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ - [Announcer] "Comic Culture" is a production of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.