Roy Thomas is possibly best known for introducing the pulp magazine hero Conan the Barbarian to American comics, with a series that added to the storyline of Robert E Howard's character and helped launch a sword and sorcery trend in comics.
42 Facts About Roy Thomas
2.
Roy Thomas was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2011 and into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame in 2022.
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Roy Thomas was enrolled at a parochial Lutheran school and attended St Paul Lutheran Church in Jackson.
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Roy Thomas graduated from Southeast Missouri State University in 1961 with a BS in Education, having majored in history and social science.
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In 1965, Roy Thomas moved to New York City to take a job at DC Comics as assistant to Mort Weisinger, then the editor of the Superman titles.
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Roy Thomas soon became the first new Marvel writer to sustain a presence, at a time when comics veterans such as Robert Bernstein, Ernie Hart, Leon Lazarus, and Don Rico, and fellow newcomers Steve Skeates and O'Neil did not.
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Roy Thomas estimates that Lee rewrote approximately half of that fledgling attempt.
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Roy Thomas took on what would be his first long-term Marvel title, the World War II series Sgt.
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Roy Thomas eloped in July 1968 to marry his first wife, Jean Maxey, returning to work a day late from a weekend comic-book convention in St Louis, Missouri.
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Roy Thomas said in 2000 that Brodsky, in the interim, had assigned Doctor Strange to the writer Archie Goodwin, newly ensconced at Marvel and writing Iron Man, but Roy Thomas convinced Brodsky to return it to him.
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Roy Thomas won the 1969 Alley Award that year for Best Writer, while Adams and inker Tom Palmer, netted 1969 Alley Awards for Best Pencil Artist and Best Inking Artist, respectively.
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Roy Thomas, who stepped down from his editorship in August 1974, wrote hundreds of Conan stories in a host of Marvel comics and the black-and-white magazines Savage Tales and The Savage Sword of Conan.
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In 1971, with Stan Lee and Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas created Man-Thing and wrote the first Man-Thing story in color comics, after Conway and Len Wein had introduced the character in the black-and-white comics magazine Savage Tales.
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Later that year, Roy Thomas wrote the "Kree-Skrull War" storyline across multiple issues of The Avengers penciled variously by Sal Buscema, Neal Adams, and John Buscema.
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Roy Thomas was the first person other than Stan Lee to receive a writer's credit for The Amazing Spider-Man, and he and artist Ross Andru launched the Spider-Man spin-off title Marvel Team-Up in March 1972.
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Roy Thomas co-created several characters based on already existing characters, including the Vision, Yellowjacket, the Black Knight, and Adam Warlock.
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In 1972, when Lee became Marvel's publisher, Roy Thomas succeeded him as editor-in-chief.
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Roy Thomas continued to script mainstream titles, including Marvel's flagship, Fantastic Four.
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Roy Thomas launched such new titles as the "non-team" The Defenders, as well as What If, a title that explored fictional alternate histories of Marvel's existing characters and stories.
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Roy Thomas was instrumental in engineering Marvel's comic-book adaptation of the 1977 film Star Wars, without which, 1980s Marvel editor Jim Shooter believed, "[W]e would have gone out of business".
21.
Roy Thomas married his second wife, Danette Couto, in May 1981.
22.
Danette legally changed her first name to Dann and would become Roy Thomas' regular writing partner.
23.
Roy Thomas realized a childhood dream in writing the Justice Society of America.
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Roy Thomas used the series to address the complicated and sometimes contradictory continuity issues surrounding the JSA.
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From 1986 to 1988, Roy Thomas contributed to the Secret Origins series and wrote most of the stories involving the Golden Age characters including Superman and Batman.
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Since then, Roy Thomas has written a trio of Elseworlds one-shots combining DC characters with classic cinema and literature: Superman's Metropolis, Superman: War of the Worlds, and JLA: The Island of Dr Moreau.
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In 1984, Roy Thomas sent Jim Shooter a letter in which he hoped.
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Roy Thomas scripted titles starring Doctor Strange, Thor, the Avengers West Coast, and Conan, often co-scripting with Dann Thomas or Jean-Marc Lofficier.
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Roy Thomas wrote for television, and relaunched Alter Ego as a formal magazine published by TwoMorrows Publishing in 1999.
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Roy Thomas returned to Red Sonja in 2006, writing the one-shot Red Sonja: Monster Isle for Dynamite Entertainment.
31.
In 2007 Roy Thomas wrote a Black Knight story for Marvel's four-issue miniseries Mystic Arcana.
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From 2007 to 2010, Roy Thomas wrote adaptations of classic literature for the Marvel imprint Marvel Illustrated, including The Last of the Mohicans, The Man in the Iron Mask, Treasure Island, The Iliad, Moby-Dick, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Three Musketeers, and Kidnapped.
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In 2011, Roy Thomas wrote the one-shot DC Retroactive: Wonder Woman - The '80s with art by Rich Buckler.
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In 2012, Roy Thomas teamed with artists Mike Hawthorne and Dan Panosian on Dark Horse's Conan: The Road of Kings, which lasted 12 issues.
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Roy Thomas had a cameo appearance as a prison inmate on the third season of Marvel's Daredevil, released in October 2018 on Netflix, and wrote a blog entry about this experience.
36.
On November 10,2018, Roy Thomas visited Stan Lee at Lee's home in Beverly Hills to discuss Roy Thomas' book The Stan Lee Story.
37.
Lee told Thomas' manager, John Cimino, "Take care of my boy Roy" before Lee and Thomas were photographed together.
38.
Roy Thomas had been the ghost writer for Stan Lee on the strip since 2000.
39.
Roy Thomas made a return to Marvel Comics in 2019 with the release of the Captain America and The Invaders: Bahamas Triangle one-shot drawn by Jerry Ordway, wrote a Wolverine origin page for the Marvel 1000 celebration issue and did a two-part Savage Sword of Conan story with artist Alan Davis.
40.
In 2022, Roy Thomas returned to write his most famous co-creation Wolverine, in the first two issues of a new Marvel Comics ongoing series called X-Men: Legends which tells new in-continuity stories of early X-Men adventures.
41.
On February 23,2021, Roy Thomas criticized Abraham Riesman's controversial Stan Lee biography True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.
42.
Roy Thomas serves on the Disbursement Committee of the comic-book industry charity The Hero Initiative.