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Roy Thomas, Team Driver

Roy Thomas enjoys the first of my Talent Pool columns to describe a writer rather than an artist. Though perhaps others contributed more to the bedrock of the Silver Age - for instance, Lee redefined the medium and Kirby populated Marvel's universe within the parameters Lee established - Thomas nonetheless infused much of the vitality into the comics that followed the Lee-Kirby collaborative days. His work helped define the standard for team books in the years that followed his tenure on The Avengers. Furthermore, he would interpret the characters of the Golden Age in a way that reached new generations of readers and would also provide a model for creating shared universes from originally separate materials.

Thomas' contributions still shape the medium even where subsequent creative teams would unwisely abandon the carefully-worked edifices he built, a story at a time, from materials to which he added flavor even while remaining true to their original conceptions.

Earth's Mightiest Heroes

During his 50-issue run on Avengers, Thomas brought this flagging title out of the doldrums that followed the departure of the Lee-Kirby team with vigorous stories with strong use of characters demonstrating an imaginative understanding of the distinctness of a modest-sized stable of characters.

He would find his strength in working with the insecurities of characters upon whom Thomas could place a plausible tendency of self-doubt, such as Hawkeye (who compared himself unfavorably to the superpowered big guns of the team) or the Vision (who chronically dwells upon his borderline status straddling the human and inhuman).

In this, he would continue the Stan Lee legacy and model, though perhaps with somewhat less shouting and hoakum; Thomas has a fine ability to depict a feel without needing to rely upon regrettable cliches.

Furthermore, Thomas, with the aid of the excellent work of Silver Age talent like Gene Colan and especially John Buscema, showed a knack for portraying superheroes actually struggling against the beings and superbeings that beset them, making their efforts seem plausible in spite of the logical conclusion a long-term reader must acquire that Good Generally Prevails.

His best characterizations would ultimately rely on his sense of the weak link in the characters' self-images; therefore, one recalls best his version of Hawkeye / Goliath, Quicksilver, and the Vision more than the more self-assured Avengers. Arguably, he achieved considerably less with those figures with good reason to confide in their own ability, such as Thor, but could evoke drama from the big guns in the middle of the storms of activity which contained the more central characters on a scale closer to humanity.

In this and later work Thomas would speak through the voice of self-doubt, and he became, with time, eloquent in its expression, first in whines, then in whispers, and ultimately (with the collusion of the right art teams) through faces and subtler signals. From the beginning, however, Thomas would enjoy the good fortune of creative positions that allowed him both the premium characters of Marvel's superhero universe and luminaries of comic art, including the underrated John Buscema during the height of his enthusiasm for superhero comics.

Golden Age Revisionism

If some tragedy had removed Roy Thomas from comics altogether after he left The Avengers and Steve Englehart took over, comics history would still recall the vigor with which he could tell a story and graft the humane onto the superhuman.

However, his earlier passion would later become the center of many years of his work and one of the things for which we now recognize his name: Thomas would become the authority on new stories about Golden Age characters. This work would cover both major comics publishers and eventually include meta-Golden Age work that dealt with prototypical figures that never saw print in the Golden Age.

The Invaders

Thomas came to professional comics work from a history of the interest of a comics fan, particularly his passion for the characters of the Golden Age of comics. He had worked on an amateur comics fanzine which would contain the seeds of his later Alter Ego project. Before that work, however, Thomas managed, when circumstance allowed, to infuse Golden Age elements here and there into Avengers stories.

For instance, the character the Vision, who has appeared in more Avengers stories than other long-term members (at least as of the reboot of the series in v. 3), represented the reworking of a Golden Age prototype, who also wore a cape with a large collar, possessed an inhuman appearance, and could vanish.

Later, during the much-lauded Kree-Skrull War sequence, Thomas resolved a cliff-hanger situation by having superhero sidekick Rick Jones summon up avatars of the old Timely heroes, including versions of Captain America, Namor, and the original Human Torch, all characters already somewhere in Marvel continuity.

Thomas' interest would have sufficed to experiment with creating a Golden Age superhero title; but Marvel could also eye the various successes DC had enjoyed with its sometimes-awkward use of its Golden Age stable in the annual Justice Society / Justice League team-up stories.

Therefore, Marvel released The Invaders, a work that built on Timely characters and concepts in a manner consistent with their design but not entirely subject to the dictates of previous publications. For instance, Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch had never appeared as a superhero team during the Second World War; but Invaders stories would show these superheroes fighting Nazis as a team.

Thomas would use whatever Golden Age material he knew (and his expertise makes him an authority on much of this matter) and a variety of subsequent additions in this title, even semi-anachronistic figures like Baron Blood (a vampire in a costume whose style relied on design innovations that did not predate Dave Cockrum's Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes work). In these anachronisms, we may fairly say, Marvel erred less than their DC brethren, even if subsequent revisions would render much of the restructured Golden Age history moot.

This concept would offer a take on superheroes that the Marvel model had done much to render obsolete, in that the scenario of World War II stripped away the recurrent moral ambiguity that defined many of the better comics after the Lee-Kirby innovations sank into the medium. Such an interpretation would allow some storytelling freedom in a writer's ability to ignore some of the moodiness or sensitivity of characters and return to what some readers longed for: powerful heroes knocking the heads of villains who deserve whatever the Good Guys can dish out.

The All-Star Squadron

Thinking back about the scope of the All-Star Squadron title, with its inclusion of the Golden Age stables of DC Comics and every superhero from every company it had absorbed through legitimate acquisition and combative litigation, one can imagine Roy Thomas' stomach growling. With the Avengers, he could handle a dozen or so major characters, whose cast he might rotate with a handful of others, plus the occasional new creation Thomas or his editors might care to introduce. With the Invaders, he enjoyed a similar limitation of numbers. But the All-Star Squadron represented such a diverse and numerous nation of superhero creations that it might defy the ability of the likes of George Perez to force them all into a two- page spread (perhaps I exaggerate here).

Furthermore, Thomas' style had matured from an already-robust one of ten years before, during his Avengers days, when he assumed the scripting chores for All-Star Squadron. He could place a human face on all manner of bizarre beings; he could find motivations where an electron microscope might miss them; and he could understand and humanize enormously powerful beings like the Golden Age Green Lantern (who, as originally conceived, possessed demonstrably greater power than Superman, as originally conceived).

If his treatment of the Avengers tended to revolve around Hawkeye and his difficulties in recognizing his own worth, his All-Star Squadron similarly tended to revolve around the desire of Johnny Quick to prove himself to the likes of the Flash, whom Thomas made Quick see as a model he felt a need to impress. Similarly, the Guardian and the Tarantula would sometimes find themselves in need of proof, sometimes in the desire for the attention of the rich body of heroines.

Even though some of his scripting involved the inevitable anachronism - including post-sixties viewpoints and figures of speech - these works nonetheless allowed a subtle interaction of characters, the nuances of which came out under the expert handling of post-Silver Age penciler emeritus Jerry Ordway.

Alter Ego

DC would ultimately (and, so I will argue, in error) abandon Thomas' work on refining its Golden Age history. This error demonstrates itself in the clearly sounder structure of his Golden Age edifice compared to the dubious revisionist patches hastily cobbled together after each universe-shaking event to which DC resorts to offer a pretext to correct previously established continuity.

However, DC had problems to resolve. It wanted to rid itself of the baggage of the cumbersome "parallel universe" explanation it had unwisely used to explain both the disappearance of its Golden Age creations and their continued youth in the case of characters like Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman, and Green Arrow, who all dated from no later than the 1940s. The principle of the recency of characters who sold books became increasingly important: these characters must not, so the argument went, age past about 29 years if any pretext or argument might explain away such aging.

The Crisis on Infinite Earths explained away a unification of DC's myriad comic universes and timelines, attempting to blend parallel universes and time-displaced characters into a single all-encompassing whole with some degree of consistency. Thereby DC hoped to rescue its continuity by fixing it (begging the question of the desireability of so much continuity).

Thomas, however, enjoyed considerable success in two titles that related heavily to the Golden Age homeland, the "Earth-2" DC created to explain the heroes of the 1940s. In both All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc., Thomas scripted stories in the past and present about the Justice Society and its contemporaries. Yet, for reasons of newly-revised continuity rather than commercial forces like sales, DC would eventually cancel both.

In a time where years of work had just entered the editorial trashcan on grounds other than quality, Thomas returned to a Golden Age tribute project from his teen years, the Alter Ego book ultimately published by First Comics.

While Alter Ego would not enjoy the success of Thomas' work for mainstream publishers, nor enjoy the artistic resources available through such publishers, it would provide a tribute of the sort unfairly taken from Thomas. It would depict forties-style superheroes vying against Nazis and Nazilike powers across multiple realities in a contest that risked the future survival of at least one world, and Thomas evidently enjoyed the result enough that, as rumor has it, Alter Ego from 1985 may enjoy a follow-up around 2000.

Other Work

Thomas would ultimately work on Marvel's Conan title longer than he had on Avengers, particularly in tandem with John Buscema, his creative teammate from the latter title. Readers of this work, however, often concluded that the Conan titles exhausted the concept fairly early yet continued the book interminably; parodies such as The Same Old Sword of Conan would appear in subsequent years.

Nonetheless, Thomas' work, especially in the earliest days of the title during Barry (Windsor-)Smith's short tenure, helped stimulate interest in material that had mainly interested hardcore pulp fans and thereby expose it to a wider audience. One may credit Thomas' work with making Conan eventually come to the screen in two movies and a cartoon show, regardless of the poor reception some of this material enjoyed.

Thomas would also return to superhero comics, including an eighties incarnation of The Invaders; and he worked, with his wife Dann, on titles like West Coast Avengers.

These days, however, Thomas enjoys some work for other media, including movies and television; and he hopes soon to publish novels, after the precedent of other comics writers like Elliott Maggin, John Byrne, and occasional others allowed the broad exposure of such media tie-in works.

While we can regret that others now handle such titles at which we would expect Thomas to excel, we can also look with some optimism to a future in which he may appear in comics, on television, in movies, or in novels. Nor should we miss him when his work pervades the medium over three decades. All we need do is keep our eyes open and wait for him to appear, perhaps somewhere we wouldn't expect.