Consider the Wolverine. The Marvel Comics character who bears that name made his debut in the July 1974 issue of The Incredible Hulk, an issue scripted by Len Wein and drawn by Herb Trimpe, in a one-panel teaser that preceded his star turn one month later.
His deportment and appearance in those issues was, to put it politely, inauspicious. His costume is largely the same as today in its broad strokes, but with differences in all the most embarrassing places: the bat-ear hood is absent, replaced by dainty cat whiskers painted on his cheeks; his bright blue shoulder pads are just big enough to be unmissable, and just small enough to be entirely baffling. He is short, squat, and saddled with metal knuckle claws that do not appear to retract. He is something of a villain here, fighting with the Hulk as a government-sponsored foil throughout the story. He is also something of a whiner: recalled by his military commanders after 20 pages of fruitless combat, he impotently protests, “No – you can’t do this to me! My failure was only a temporary setback! I can still defeat that big brute! I can!”
Just shy of one year later, the character appeared again, this time in the interior pages and prominently on the cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 (interior art by Dave Cockrum, script again by Wein, cover by Gil Kane, Cockrum, and Danny Crespi). Perhaps it was the subtle but effective modifications to his costume design, or perhaps it was the ineffable chemistry of his antiheroic personality alongside those of his newfound co-stars. Whatever the case, Wolverine steadily grew in popularity among fans over the next half-decade. His emergence as the biggest fan-favorite in what was, by the early 1980s, the best-selling book in American comics was canonized by a four-issue, Frank Miller-drawn solo series in 1984, which in turn became an ongoing series four years later.
By 1995, fueled by his appearance in a highly-rated Saturday morning cartoon series, Wolverine was neck-and-neck with Spider-Man for the title of Marvel’s most-licensed character, in a year when toys and licensing collectively accounted for 28% of the company’s income.1 Throughout that period, and despite a regular presence in animated TV, any possible Wolverine movie appearances were tied up in contractual limbo. This, however, came to an end in 2000 with the box office success of the first X-Men live-action movie, starring a then-unknown Hugh Jackman as its breakout star. That film's success would eventually result in Wolverine’s very first solo film in 2009. Altogether, the 13 films in the X-Men franchise have earned $6.038 billion.2 The wild Canadian carnivore had become an American cash cow.
Throughout most of this history, the question of who actually created the character was a matter confined to fan curiosity or arcane academic interest. And why not? For all the money in play around the character, only an infinitesimal sliver was destined for the creative personnel at Marvel Comics. In 1974, as for decades before and after, all creative work performed by Marvel writers, artists, and editors was designated as work made for hire, the sole intellectual property of Marvel Comics and its corporate parents (then Cadence Industries; since 2009, the Walt Disney Company).
In the absence of formal contracts, the system in place in the mid-70s was something of a slipshod affair. Language was inserted on the back of checks issued to freelancers at Marvel to the effect that all work was the property of the contracting company. Signing the check implicitly meant agreeing to the terms. Consequently, any subsequent payments given to freelancers in the form of sales bonuses, reprint fees, or money from movie and TV adaptations was treated exclusively as a voluntary courtesy, and until relatively recently, the extent of that courtesy was limited indeed. So, to take one example, the '90s X-Men animated series – which at its 1994 height was viewed by 23 million households weekly and was the highest-rated show on the Fox Kids network3 – generated a grand total of $0 for the writers and artists who had created the X-Men.
But 2024 is not 1974 or 1994, and in the wake of more high-profile attention on the neglected past generations of comics creators, it has become increasingly de rigueur for writers and artists associated with comics-based movies and tv shows to see at least a nominal reward for their contributions. There is money at stake, to say nothing of glory, such as it is.
Which is why it managed to generate a fair amount of attention – and a fair number of raised eyebrows – when it came to light at the beginning of April that former Marvel editor Roy Thomas would be receiving credit as a co-creator of Wolverine in the credits for the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine film, coinciding with the character’s 50th anniversary.
The news first came to light on March 26 when Christine Valada, the widow of the late Len Wein, posted the following message on her facebook page:
We are living in an era of big lies, and the bigger the lie, the more people believe it. About a month ago, I received a phone call that sent me off to searching the Internet, where I learned that the EIC of Marvel Comics when Len Wein wrote Hulk #180 claims he co-created Wolverine. Not only that, this former EIC also claims he is a co-creator of Len Wein’s Brother Voodoo, a character of which I am particularly fond.
This former EIC must have carried seething resentment all of the years Len thought of him as a friend, because these claims started popping up soon after Len died. They now extend to someone recently changing information on Wikipedia and, I suspect, other places like IMDB.
This was in fact the case: roughly three weeks earlier, on March 4, the Wikipedia page for Len Wein had been modified, so that the portion of his page mentioning Wolverine’s creation now read, “Wein co-created Wolverine with Roy Thomas and artist John Romita Sr. during his run on The Incredible Hulk." Roy Thomas’s own page followed suit on March 16, and on March 19, the change was finally reflected on the page for Wolverine himself: "He was created by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, writer Len Wein, and Marvel art director John Romita Sr."
Within the insular but attentive world comics social media, the reaction to Valada’a post was swift, vocal, and largely defined by astonished bemusement. Mark Waid, rarely one to shy away from vocal controversy, weighed in early:
“A rule in comics: Staff editors don't get to claim a co-creator credit on characters their writers and artists create for them. Throwing out suggestions and brainstorming is part of the editor's job. Change my mind.
I'm kidding. You'll never change my mind on this.”
Tom Brevoort, who, as a currently-sitting Executive Editor and Vice President at Marvel Comics, carries a more weighty authority in his opinion than most, responded to Waid's post, saying, “Creators get the credit, editors get the blame. That is the compact of the job, and those who cannot abide by it do dishonor to our profession. Don Draper had the right [sic] of it: ‘That's what the money is for!’”
Likewise, Paul Levitz, who was an editor and later publisher at DC Comics for the better part of four decades, a portion of which overlapped with Thomas’s own time at that company, wrote, “That’s always been a rule I believe in, Mark. Editors make small or very large contributions to the work, but the work, the credit, and the compensation for writers and artists shouldn’t be diminished by it.”
More names followed suit: Kurt Busiek, Gregory Wright, Bobbie Chase (who undertook some additional investigations on her own initiative into the timeline on which the wikipedia pages mentioned above had been modified). By March 30, it had reached enough of a fever pitch to receive the stamp of certification for comic industry scandals, in the form of a write-up at bleedingcool.com.
All of which would seem to raise two key questions worth asking: Who really did create Wolverine? And just as importantly, why should any of the rest of us care?
***
We begin with the earliest accounts as we have them, one player at a time. In 1982, Fantagraphics published The X-Men Companion, which featured interviews with both Thomas and Wein, among others. In his interview with Peter Sanderson, Thomas had this to say about Wolverine’s creation:
The only other thing I suggested to [Wein], over lunch, was that I thought it was time we had a Canadian hero. There was talk about names like Captain Canuck, Captain Canada, things of that sort, and I suggested that since we had a Canadian market and I felt guilty about not having more Canadian characters in the comics, the X-Men should have a character that I suggested be called the Wolverine because that animal inhabits Canada as well as the Northern United States and would be familiar to both. He could be a Canadian and be very fierce. I was thinking of someone much like what evolved, a very fierce character worth his weight in wildcats, that kind of thing, a little like Wildcat or Atom, only with more power.
Note that there are three points here to Thomas’s recollection about his role in Wolverine’s genesis. In his account, he proposed that there be: a) a Canadian character; b) named Wolverine; who was c) “a little like Wildcat or the Atom.” (Precisely what this third point meant is a bit fuzzier than the first two, but we’ll get to that.) In any case, in that same publication, Wein related the following:
Actually, the name Wolverine was Roy’s suggestion: he suggested “do a character called Wolverine,” gave him to me to create for the Hulk, and most of the rest of the details of who and what he was were my own. So I decided to make him a teen-age mutant to be one of the new X-Men if it came to pass.
So, agreement on Thomas’s first point, but not necessarily the second two. And at the same time, Wein takes the opportunity to stress that the absence of what was included in his own contributions were as significant as what was there. Wein again:
He had no adamantine skeleton, he had nothing. He was a mutant only in terms of his ferocity and his animal senses. He was a hunter and a tracker and incredibly resilient. He was able to get the stuff kicked out of him by the Hulk and still be able to get back on his feet.
Wein makes no mention here of Wolverine’s Canadian nationality, but this would later make it into his recollections as well. In Back Issue #4 in 2004, he told interviewer Michael Eury: “Whatever his strengths as a writer were, which were considerable, Roy had no strength for accents and loved the fact that I was doing Jamaican and Haitian accents in ‘Brother Voodoo.’ So he came to me one day and said, ‘I want you to do a Canadian accent. I want you to do a Canadian character. I’ve got a name: Wolverine. Go!”
So a broad agreement on Thomas’s first and second claims (the name, the nation), even if not on his third (anything to do with the specific personality). But it would seem to be beyond dispute both that Wein was a creator of the character, and that Thomas’s instruction instigated that creation. Why is all that worth a fight? For Christine Valada, the answer is simple.
“Because it’s a fucking lie,” she told me on the phone. She paused after she said this. “I probably shouldn't say ‘fucking.’ That's not really ladylike for a 72-year-old woman.”
Valada was speaking to me the week after the controversy broke out because, she said, “It is a lie that is being given credence. And to me, it's trade defamation. … You know that trade defamation and regular defamation have different standards. They are attacking him as a creator, as a writer. And you know they're also attacking him as an individual.”
Valada said that she first heard the news when David Bogart, Marvel’s SVP of Operations and Procurement, Publishing, called her shortly before her Facebook post.
“David sent me a message on a Friday which said, ‘We need to talk',” she said. “And I spent the weekend with a knot in my stomach, because it's sort of like the, ‘Honey, we need to talk’ conversation, which just made me feel that something was coming that I was not going to be happy about. So David called me and basically said that Roy was going to be given co-creator status on Wolverine on the movie that was upcoming, and that it was ‘a done deal.’ Needless to say, I reacted as one might expect I reacted. I was incredibly upset.”
For Valada, the crux of the issue is twofold. First, that Thomas's addition as editor diminishes, in consequence if not in name, Wein’s role as the character’s co-creator. And second, that this should be happening at all, after five decades during which Thomas had not made any overt claim on co-creator credit.
“Not knowing where it came from, and specifically why this was happening at this late date, clearly put me in a position of being incredibly upset,” Valada said. “Because the Logan movie did have a credit for Len and John [Romita], which made me very happy. I mean, I thought that perhaps Herb Trimpe probably should also have been included, but he was not, since the position had been that Len sat down with John to design the character. But generally, in comics, it's the writer and the artist who first bring [the character] out on the page who get creator credit.”
Let’s talk for a moment about John Romita. Incredible Hulk #180 was, as noted, penciled and inked by Herb Trimpe. But prior to that issue, a set of design sketches were prepared by Romita, then Marvel’s art director. Romita, like Thomas, was a full-time Marvel staffer, but if Valada objects to his inclusion as a co-creator on that basis, she’s not inclined to make an issue of it now. This is partly because Romita’s association with the character has been relatively longstanding (both Wein and Trimpe repeatedly acknowledged that Romita’s designs provided a close template for Trimpe’s work on those initial issues), and partly because, according to Valada, Romita’s work was performed in close collaboration with Wein himself.
In her words: “He went to John Romita and gave the description, and then sat with John to design the character. And the reason why Len sat with John was that Len was trained as an artist. He actually wanted to be a comic book artist from the time he was a little kid. So Len was very comfortable with giving visual instructions, you know, doing sketches himself of various things. And John did the basics of that character, and then Herb took that and turned it into Incredible Hulk #180-181.”
Valada objects to what she considers a newfound association Thomas has made between himself and Wolverine. Other longtime associates of Thomas disagree, noting that he has long mentioned his own role in the character’s creation both in and outside of public interviews. Indeed, one comic professional who has been a personal acquaintance of both Thomas and Wein told me that Thomas’s desire to be associated with Wolverine actually preceded Wein’s, the latter having only taken much notice of his co-creation after the character belatedly became a star.
But while Thomas’s basic narrative has indeed been in place since at least the early '80s, the tenor and frequency of his Wolverine-related PR campaign seems to have markedly escalated in the years since Wein’s death in 2017. As late as 2021, Thomas was still describing his association with the character in self-effacing terms: “I just kind of turned it over to Len and never thought about it again,” he told Chris Hassan in an online interview that year. “Other than that, I left it to Len, who did a good job. And then, of course, it really took off a couple of years later when Len decided to put him in the X-Men right after I had left my role as editor-in-chief.”
But in 2019, Thomas co-authored an article published on CBR entitled, “Weapon X-plained: Wolverine Co-Creator Reveals the Truth Behind His Origin.” The tone here is almost breathless in its insistence on Thomas’ role in Wolverine’s creation. Nearly every aspect of the character’s genesis is said to trace back to Thomas himself: “The idea and concept of Wolverine was birthed by Thomas,” the article says. His instructions to Wein were, “the blueprint. The idea. The concept. The groundwork.” The article concedes that the adamantium claws given to the character were the notion of Wein and Romita, but only because Thomas’ past creation gave them the wherewithal for it: “Ironically though, the metal Len wanted the claws to be made from was adamantium, which was also created by Roy back in Avengers #66 (July, 1969), with art by Barry Windsor-Smith.” Even the house ad that touted the character’s first appearance is Thomas’s work: “The advertisement Roy Thomas used to promote The Incredible Hulk #181 features the coming of the deadly Wolverine that was seen in three issues.”
That same basic narrative structure – Thomas’s tripartite contribution to Wolverine’s character; followed directly by Romita’s design; and finally landing on Wein’s arrival as scripter – is echoed in a one-page contribution Thomas wrote for artist Rod Reis for the Marvel Comics #1000 anthology comic that same year. Staged as an imaginary dialogue between Wolverine and his various silhouetted creators, Thomas here has himself quizzing Wolverine on his “name,” “nationality,” and “attributes,” while Wein’s role is relegated to two elements alone – “voice” and “adamantium." The latter, it might be noted, Thomas’ contribution, too, if only by the transitive property. In 2022, this received what until now may have come closest to a stamp of approval from official quarters, when a Marvel.com blog post touting Thomas’ X-Men Legends comic referred to “one of his greatest co-creations – Wolverine!”
The co-author of the CBR article is John Cimino, a promoter and collectibles dealer who has served as Thomas’ right hand man since 2015 (on the Roy Thomas Appreciation Board Facebook group Cimino operates, he describes himself as Thomas’ “sidekick and manager”). Indeed, the article itself appeared on Cimino’s own blog, under his own and Thomas’ joint bylines, several months after Wein’s death. After Marvel Comics #1000 was released, Cimino wrote a post on Thomas’ Facebook group glossing the nature of the page: “The silhouettes of the directors backstage are the creators of Wolverine and what they brought to the character (each drawn to their exact likeness from 1974). The first panel is Roy Thomas, who came up with the whole Wolverine concept, the second panel is John Romita Sr., who designed the character, the 3rd panel is Len Wein who wrote the story and gave Wolverine his voice.”
Cimino has been particularly active on social media, where he has rarely hedged in asserting Thomas’s creative role. Commenting on YouTube in 2020, he wrote: “Len Wein didn’t CREATE Wolverine, he didn’t even come up with the character or concept! That was Roy Thomas that conceived of the Wolverine character because he wanted to attract more Canadian readers and came up with the name, nationality, attributes and oversaw the overall project as editor-in-chief. … as Wolverine’s fame grew, so did Len’s ego as he was soon calling himself the ‘CREATOR’ of Wolverine (his custom convention banner stated this) and that‘s a shame because he was intentionally putting out false information. … I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that his wife was a copyright lawyer.” Contacted for this article, Cimino also claimed credit for the alterations to the Wolverine wikipedia page earlier this year.
If the extent of Thomas’s push to be recognized for his role at Marvel has escalated in the past half-decade, Valada sees no mystery in Cimino’s role.
“Until [late March] I had never heard of the name John Cimino,” Valada said. “But that appears to be who most people think did it [edited the Wikipedia pages for Wolverine]. And I have seen now with stuff that people have been sending me how he has been systematically defaming my husband for quite some time. … I’ve got this thing that was sent to me talking about, you know, Len’s ego. ‘He got a little bit of fame and, you know, he went crazy.’”
Valada finds the notion that Wein found fame from Wolverine laughable, even in his later years. She drew my attention toward a ledger that her husband kept throughout his freelance years recording the issues, titles, and payments received for his various books. For Incredible Hulk #181, “And Now … The Wolverine!,” he received the princely sum of $323, $73 less than he was to get for “The Triumph of the Toad!” the following year.
***
In May of 1938, the first Superman story appeared in the inaugural issue of Action Comics with the following credit in the first panel, underneath the character’s logo: “by Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster.” This was not out of the ordinary. Indeed, all of the features appearing in that anthology issue bore the names of their cartoonists, a tradition sensibly carried over from the world of newspaper strips, where comic artists could achieve considerable popular and financial success. Nor was it atypical for Action’s publisher, the variously-named entity that would one day become DC Comics, since Wonder Woman and Batman would each bear the names of their creators (Charles Moulton and Bob Kane, respectively) throughout the period in which they worked on their characters – in Kane’s case, all the way to the mid-1960s (though the definition of “work” does some heavy lifting here).
Siegel and Shuster’s credit persisted throughout the early to mid-1940s and across Superman’s expanding number of comics, even after Siegel was called up for the draft and Shuster’s eyesight began to decline, forcing both men to rely increasingly on ghost artists and writers to work on stories under their names. Sometimes the ghosts were hired by DC directly, without the involvement of Siegel and Shuster at all, especially after the arrival of a new editor in the form of Mort Weisinger, a bullying, domineering sci-fi literary agent who was to become legendary for his habitual verbal abuse of freelancers and underlings.4
By 1947, as their lucrative contract with National/DC comics approached its end, Siegel and Shuster began to fear that the writing was on the wall – that National, facing the prospect of expensive creators and a cratering comics market, might try to cut out Superman’s inventors entirely.5 So, in a bid to preempt the publisher’s action, they tried a gambit of their own, suing National Comics for control over the Superman copyright once more.
It was a catastrophe. In 1948, the Supreme Court of the State of New York ruled in favor of National, and Siegel and Shuster were promptly shown the door. With them went their credit on the splash page of Superman’s stories. No longer was Superman the creation of known individuals with legal rights or expectations of credit and glory. He was, on the contrary, a wholly owned corporate entity, sprung Athena-like from the brow of National Comics, Inc., and its subsequent corporate parents. Even when Siegel returned to the Superman line in the late 50s, his name (indeed, the name of every creator at DC during that era) was absent from the stories he penned. Superman, and comics in general, had moved beyond the humanly attributable, and into the obscuring shadows of the work-for-hire economy.
Asked by the fanzine The Comic Reader in 1962 why Superman writers and artists, including Siegel, were uncredited on the books he edited, Weisinger scoffed at the notion. “You must remember that the vast majority of our 35 million readers are naive enough to believe that the entire Superman production is the work of one man, or one team. To tell them that an issue of SUPERMAN (with 3 stories) was written by Jerry Siegel, Edmond Hamilton, and Robert Bernstein, and penciled by Curt Swan, Alferd [sic] Plastino, and Wayne Boring, but inked by George Klein, Stan Kayte, and John Forte, colored by other men, and lettered by still others – well, they’d think the whole magazine is a sausage-factory operation,” he said. When Siegel and Shuster again attempted to sue for control of Superman in 1969, National responded by daintily erasing Siegel’s name (but not that of co-creator Bernard Bailey) from a reprinting of the origin of the Spectre.
In the mid-1970s, the announcement of a major Superman film in the works prompted Siegel to begin openly agitating for boycotts of his erstwhile publisher, and he and Shuster found themselves somewhat belatedly becoming a cause celebre among both fandom and the larger comics creative community. Neal Adams and Jerry Robinson both undertook the task of negotiating with Time-Warner (by then the owners of DC Comics) on behalf of the two men. On the last night of the negotiations, Robinson gambled for one final, essential concession from Warner: Siegel and Shuster must have their names listed as Superman’s creators in the credits of the film. Time-Warner balked, but Robinson was insistent. As he explained to the Comics Journal in 2004:
I knew that no matter what the money amount was in the settlement, the lawyers fees and health care and annuity and all of that — which was essential — if they didn’t have the credits, they would not have their self-respect as creators. You know, they had lost their humanity. Jerry would get physically ill walking by a stand selling Superman, his creation, which didn’t have his name on it, you know, or seeing the Broadway Superman show and so forth. That was one thing that I was very concerned with…
I said, “This is not going to be well-received anywhere down the line that you left these people in such a plight, particularly the writers and directors who jealously guard every credit on a film, you know what that is.” I knew that the arts community would be outraged. Because Shakespeare is out of copyright, you don’t take Shakespeare’s name off of Hamlet. Because Arthur Conan Doyle is out of copyright, you don’t take his name off of Sherlock Holmes. It’s created by Arthur Conan Doyle. That’s forever. And that’s the way it should be with this, irrespective of their rights. So I knew that they were very concerned about that if they put their name on it they would somehow be giving them more leverage or more rights.
Time-Warner conceded. The names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster appeared as creators of Superman on the credits for the 1979 film, as they have on Superman media ever since. Weisinger, for his part, was never reconciled to it. Decades later, in an interview with Alex Grand and Jim Thompson, Weisinger’s son Hendrie had this to say: “He liked Jerry. He thought he was actually a good writer, but being honest, he thought that his talent was limited. In the sense that he came up with a character, but he did not develop it. He did not develop the mythology. I think it’s well known that if there was one person that deserves the credit for developing the entire Superman mythology, it is Mort Weisinger. I always felt that on the Superman movie. … And Jay Emmett’s whole thing was, ‘We don’t need bad publicity. Let’s give them some money, and just shut them up.’ I always felt that while it said, “Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster”, it should have said, underneath, ‘Developed by Mort Weisinger.’”
***
When Roy Thomas took his first staff job at a comic book publisher in 1965, it was for Mort Weisinger, where he worked as an assistant. It lasted eight days before Thomas was looking for the door. A casual meeting with Stan Lee at Marvel led to a writing test, and then to an offer to come on-board as Stan’s assistant. Over the next seven years, culminating in Thomas’s ascension to Marvel’s overall editor in 1972, he would increasingly become Lee’s right-hand man in both scripting and editing; an heir apparent to the Marvel line if ever there could have been one.
Roy Thomas would rather not have been speaking to me for this article. I know this because it was the first thing he said when I reached him by phone. “I’m kind of reluctant to mention it again, because I find the whole thing so ridiculous,” Thomas told me. “I mean, the Comics Journal have not always been the best. But John [Cimino] asked me to do the interview, so I’m doing the interview."
This is typical of Thomas, whose relationship with the comics press could be fairly called contentious: his habit of writing flinty, argumentative letters to fanzines and news magazines both foreign and domestic stretches back to the 1960s,6 and has had the tendency to give his persona the inverse reputation of Stan Lee’s smiling, affable demeanor.
But let us establish at the outset that Roy Thomas’ legacy as a writer and editor does not need to be justified. As the first writer at Marvel after Stan Lee to establish himself as a distinctive and recognizable voice, he is in large part responsible for the move in superhero comics toward a deliberate and self-conscious literate sensibility – one that incorporated a knowledge of, and reference to, a broader range of art, literature, and political relevance within its genre conventions. If this was not always a net positive, it was nevertheless a key factor in the expansion of comics into an older and broader, albeit not necessarily more sophisticated, demographic.
Thomas’ stint as writer of the Avengers series introduced the characters Ultron and the Vision, both staples of the publishing line since then, and both featured prominently in later movie adaptations. His celebrated collaborations with Neal Adams on the Avengers and X-Men supplied the first enduringly epic storylines of the post-Jack Kirby era. His tenure as editor was formative in creating what we now think of as a consistent and coherent Marvel Universe within the publishing line. His run on Conan the Barbarian alone, arguably equal to the original prose stories of Robert E. Howard in shaping the modern popular perception of the character, would be enough to lend him a place in comics history.
My point in all this is that Wolverine or no Wolverine, the historical impact of Roy Thomas is not in question. In any case, Thomas’s impatience with me was perhaps justified by the fact that one day earlier, he had given an interview to Forbes laying out his position in the matter of Wolverine, which he had hoped would put the situation to rest. He was, nevertheless, willing to reiterate his position to me once more.
As Thomas tells it, it was Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox in 2017, and the subsequent announcement that Deadpool and Wolverine would be released under the Marvel Studios banner, that spurred his decision to reach out to Marvel for co-creator credit. “I contacted Marvel some time in the last few months,” Thomas said. “I was aware that the Logan movie [released by Fox in 2017] had, without any input from me or notification in advance, listed about eight or 10 contributors [in the credits]. It listed me first in a group where Len and John Romita were second or third. That was because of my co-creation of Wolverine.”
The case of Logan is an interesting one, insomuch as it cuts both ways in this debate. On the one hand, Thomas is correct about the vast set of names included in the film’s credits. Moreover, news articles published after that movie received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2018 typically listed either three or four creators as responsible for the character, including Wein, Romita, Thomas, and sometimes Herb Trimpe. Thomas, Wein, and Romita were likewise all listed when the film received a USC Scripter Award nomination that same year. But when the nominations were read aloud during the Academy Awards telecast that year, Thomas’s name was nowhere to be heard. Logan was matter-of-factly stated to be “based on characters created by Len Wein and John Romita, Sr.”
Christine Valada, as it happens, thinks that broadcast might have been the instigation for Thomas’s current push. “Seeing Len’s name on the last Wolverine movie was something that made him very happy, because he saw that before he died. And he would have been thrilled to hear his name read at the Oscars in 2018,” she said. “We did not know that was coming. There was a large group of us sitting in the living room watching, and we just erupted because that was just like the greatest thing. I expect that some of this stuff [with Thomas] came directly from that.”
For Thomas, the question is simpler. “I felt the credit was right,” Thomas said. “I just felt that if guys like Jim Starlin, and Steve Englehart, and others were given individual credits on movies for characters they created in Guardians of the Galaxy – including characters like Mantis that bear almost no resemblance, as Steve has said, to anything he actually did with the character – I felt like it was time to ask about [credit], because I’d always felt I deserved it. … It didn’t make any difference because I wasn’t after any money or anything like that. It was just a matter of, I would like to see it formalized that Len, John, and me are all given credit.”
Here is how Roy Thomas recalls Wolverine’s creation to me now. “I decided I wanted a Canadian character,” he said. “I decided he should be called Wolverine. I told Len – sometimes he remembered this; mostly he forgot it and seemed to think he had come up with it on his own – that he would be short, unlike most heroes who are kind of tall. I wanted him to be short because a wolverine is a small animal. And I wanted one of his main characteristics to be that he was really a fierce, bad-tempered guy, because of the fact that wolverines are known to attack animals five or 10 times their own size. It's also one of the reasons why I chose Wolverine instead of Badger, which was another consideration of a name I had at the time. I gave those four things to Len, and I asked John [Romita] to do a drawing. And it was John who came up with the claw motif and so forth.”
There are a few points here that have shifted slightly since 1982. Thomas has, here and often in more recent years, become much more explicit in claiming credit for Wolverine’s short stature; it’s absent in such certain terms from his interview in the X-Men Companion, but given his mention of the Atom as a character model, we may fairly give this the benefit of the doubt. More directly at odds with Valada’s claim is Thomas’s recollection that it was he, rather than Wein, who asked John Romita to create the character design.
This is an important point, as both Wein and Thomas agree that Romita’s design contributed a host of important elements to the character: not only his overall visual appearance (including the visually distinctive pointed cat-ears), but also his trademark metal claws. If that design was created – as Valada says – in collaborative consultation with Wein, it means that Wein and Romita played a dominant role in putting together what makes Wolverine unique. If, contrarily, it was Thomas who approached the art director, it plays into Thomas’s larger portrait of himself as the instigating force and coordinating hand behind Wolverine’s creation.
In his own recollections prior to his death in 2023, John Romita tended to remember the design of Wolverine as something he took largely independent of any outside observer. But in an interview with Roy Thomas himself from Alter Ego #9 in 2003, the two of them recalled things thusly:
RT [Roy Thomas]: I’d forgotten that you designed Wolverine, after I told Len Wein I wanted a character by that name. Why you, and not Herb Trimpe, who was going to draw that first Hulk story?
ROMITA: Len came to me and asked me to do it. My way of doing things is to look them up in an encyclopedia. So I saw that a Wolverine is a mean, vicious little animal with claws, kind of catlike, and I went with that.
RT: That’s interesting, because I’d told Len – whether he passed it on to you or not – that I wanted Wolverine to be short and really fierce. If the story had come in with a six-foot Wolverine, we’d have had a problem!
When I brought this interview to Thomas’s attention, he was less certain than earlier about the order of events. “Herb Trimpe said that John designed it, and he was in the room with John at the time. My office was separate,” he told me. “If Len had something to do with it, that’s fine. It was obviously under me as editor, not Len, for John to do that. John wouldn’t have been doing it except that he knew I wanted him to do it.”
Perhaps not. But in a 2002 interview with Tom Spurgeon, Romita recalled that, “After I had created a few villains for Stan, other editors started to come to me. Guys like Marv Wolfman and Len Wein and Gerry Conway when he was writing Spider-Man.” And, with regards to Wolverine, in that same interview, Romita again depicted himself as operating with precious little guidance of any sort from either Wein or Thomas: “When Wolverine was asked for... the typical arrangement was that somebody would come and say, ‘We want a character called The Wolverine.’ Now I don't believe anybody told me anything about the size. What happened is I went to the encyclopedia we had in the office, and I get a picture of a Wolverine. I have to tell you, I wasn't very bright at the time. I thought a Wolverine was a female wolf. So help me. [Laughter] I never knew that a Wolverine was a completely different character than a wolf. I see a picture, and it describes it as a small, ferocious character with tremendous claws, and it's cat-like. Which was a surprise to me. So I envisioned a guy who was very short and powerful. I described him as 5 foot 4, 5 foot 5. I also said he was very ferocious, always angry. The only thing different than what he's evolved into is I had a very small set of ears on him that was cat-like.”
Thomas is unfazed by any of this. “It's basically John's design, and that's his claim to fame. And if Len says he had a hand in it, well, I don't even care,” Thomas told me. “I don't remember if he did or not. You know, it was so unimportant at the time. It was just a whim of mine that I felt we should have a Canadian character. That was the important part – not ‘wolverine,’ not claws, not anything else. I wanted a Canadian character, and I came up with a few things that I thought would make a good Canadian character. One can argue about it legally. One can argue about whether it's a specious argument. One could argue about whether a person who's the editor should take credit for creating something. My feeling is, why not? I created it. Whether I was the editor, whether I was the writer, whether I was a guy off the street, I'm the guy that came up with the general original idea. And then Len took it from there, expanded on it, did the story, and so forth. And that's his claim to fame.”
Thomas’ definition of creation (or, in his case co-creation) is in fact decidedly similar to that of Stan Lee, who, in the 2007 documentary In Search of Steve Ditko, said, “I really think the guy who dreams the thing up created it. You dream the thing up, and then you give it to anybody to draw it.” In both cases, the crux of the standard is not only that the editor in question has the initial idea for a character, but that they, as editor, took the agency in instigating the creative process – a kind of first-mover principle of comics creation. Once that happens, the subsequent development of a character – their appearance, scripting, and visualization in print – are ultimately beside the point. The editor was already a creator at the source.
One former editor who finds this notion risible is Mark Waid. It would be a vast understatement to call Mark Waid outspoken. Over the course of his four decades in comics, he has made a small habit of his vocal, controversial, and sometimes acrimonious disputes with creators, editors, and readers alike. In his record of prickly verbal tiffs in and around the comics industry, he is at least the equal, if not the superior, of Roy Thomas himself.
So it is no surprise to find that Waid has not been shy in condemning Thomas’ claim on credit, and he reiterated his objections to me over the phone. “Besides the fact that it's just gauche, it sets a bad precedent for equity in characters going forward, because Roy was working as an agent of the company at the time,” Waid said. “So that's a very short leap to people at the company seizing individual equity in properties.”
Waid says that he can point to a number of instances from his own tenure as an editor at DC in which he instigated creative ideas or characters for which he did not, and will not, take credit – he points to Brian Agustyn and Mike Mignola’s Batman: Gotham by Gaslight as a prominent example – but he believes on principle that for an editor to claim creative title is a violation of the corporate creative arrangement, and one that is, in the long-term, dangerous to the financial equity of freelancers working for these companies. “If he had been a freelancer, that's a completely different story. But if you are an editor working on staff, your reward for doing your job is your salary and your benefits, which your freelancers do not have.”
Asked about other cases of an editor taking a similar co-creator credit on a character, Waid said the only one he could recall was that of Sana Amanat receiving credit in the recent Ms. Marvel Disney+ series and The Marvels film for the character of Kamala Khan. In that case, however, he says that “I can't imagine some separate unique deal was not struck that makes everybody happy there. I don't know. I can't speak to that.” Waid is also aware that Thomas was credited for “creative contributions” on the first appearances of the characters Brother Voodoo, as well as creative credit in his capacity as editor on the first splash page of Luke Cage: Hero for Hire. But Waid draws a distinction between these cases – where the editor's role was publicly conveyed and presumably approved of at the time of publication – and what Thomas is doing now, decades after the fact.
Thomas, however, sees no risk in the notion that other editors (or their heirs) might subsequently push for credit on characters they instigated. Indeed, he told me he would be much in favor of it. “I don’t see why not. For example, I have always considered that in many ways, the main creator of Luke Cage is not me, or Archie [Goodwin], or John Romita, who designed the character, let alone [artist George] Tuska, but Stan Lee, who came up with the idea that there was going to be an African-American hero and had certain things he wanted. … And Julie Schwartz obviously had as much or more to do with the creation of Justice League of America. It's a little tangled with Flash and Green Lantern. because those were revivals of other characters, but if you count John Broom and say Gil Kane as the co-creators of the Green Lantern of 1959 – well, hell, who do you think told them to do it, and reminded them he was a guy with a power ring, and this and that. Yeah, Julie was the co-creator of those characters. He sure as hell was. So is Stan.”
There is something a bit audacious in using Stan Lee as a case study of someone who did not claim enough credit for creative work, but there is no mistaking that it is a statement of intellectual principle. Whether that principle is one that can ultimately be defended is the question with which Waid takes issue.
“Did he mention Jack Kirby by any chance?” Waid asked me. “The fact that Roy drills down on, ‘well, you know, people should get more credit, and here are the people, and they're all writer and editor friends of mine’ – I'm trying to articulate my irritation at the fact that Roy is campaigning for other people who are dead.”
Kirby is a meaningful example to point to, if only because he and Steve Ditko are exhibits A and B when it comes to creators who historically did not benefit from an editor-friendly definition of character creation. Ditko, in fact, felt obliged to rebut the definition directly, in an essay written for The Comics newsletter published by Robin Snyder in 2003. In reference to Stan Lee’s claim to be the creator of Spider-Man, Ditko wrote: “There can be no clear solo ‘creator’ claim to be made or believed, that one person cannot claim and keep on claiming the he alone with his ‘idea’, the first idea, regardless of whoever the artist – Kirby, Ditko, etc. – that the ‘idea’, by itself, alone, could ‘create’ the exact same Marvel-published SM [Spider-Man]. If Stan told his ‘idea’ to any other writer, would that writer have written the exact same dialogue as Stan?”
Roy Thomas finds it all beside the point. “If Len Wein had gotten sick for a week or two, or if he had balked at the idea of doing Wolverine in the story … Jerry Conway, or maybe Marv Wolfman, would now be listed as the co-creator of Wolverine. They would have taken the same things I did, and they would have obviously done something different than Len did.”
True enough, though it might equally be said that if Roy Thomas had resigned as Marvel’s editor a year earlier, leaving Wein to succeed him in the position, the entire present argument would then have been rendered moot. Neither alternate history, in the event, occurred.
As for Mark Waid’s objections, Thomas is unmoved. “Mark Waid’s always been an asshole,” he said. “He’s a good writer though.”
****
In his interview with Forbes, Roy Thomas compared himself with Bill Finger, the Batman co-creator who spent 50-some years in general obscurity before being publicly credited for his role in crafting the character. Finger had been perpetually overshadowed in life by Bob Kane, who was in many respects the historical inverse of Siegel and Shuster. Where the latter two men had seen their Superman credit line taken away by National Comics, Kane held on to his up through the late 1960s (even despite mountingly implausible art jobs still running under his byline). Finger’s substantial role in the invention of Batman wasn’t unknown. Jerry Bails published a celebrated essay about it in the mid-'60s, and this in turn led to Finger’s invitation to the second New York Comicon in 1965, during which the New Yorker matter-of-factly referred to Finger in a profile as Batman’s creator.
But that publicity led to an outraged response from Kane himself, sent to Bails and published in the fanzine Batmania. In the wake of this, Finger – still struggling to make ends meet as a freelancer, and unwilling to compromise his professional opportunities – dropped all further public claims of being a Batman creator. It was not until 1981 that Batman was first referred to as “a co-creation of Bob Kane and Bill Finger” in a DC Comics publication, courtesy of an essay printed in the back pages of Detective Comics. In 2015, Finger received co-creator credit on screen for the first time, in the film Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
The writer of the 1981 Detective Comics editorial was Paul Levitz, at that time an editor at DC, and later a vice president, executive vice president, and president and publisher until 2009. Among other acts during his long tenure, Levitz was instrumental in bringing about the first payments to comic creators when their creations appeared in movies and TV projects, even in cases (typical among older generations of creators) when no pre-existing revenue-sharing contracts were in place.
Len Wein was among those who benefitted strongly from such arrangements. In 2013, he told the Los Angeles Times that while he was bothered by the absence of his name from the credits of the X-Men movies up to that point, the appearance of Lucius Fox in Warner’s Batman Begins and its sequels “earned me a great deal more money than Wolverine ever has, although I will say that for the latest film Marvel did send me a nice check.”
As an editor and a publisher, Levitz has worked with Thomas, and he has worked with Wein, and when he spoke to me, he stressed that he has no intention of taking sides between the two parties. He does, however, have his own opinions on where credit for character creation ought to be assigned based on precedent, and he was happy to share them with me.
“It's a long-standing policy generally throughout the industry – not absolutely, but generally, and parallel in other industries – that staff editors do not get credit when the work is being done by freelance writers and artists,” Levitz said. “Editors are credited as editors. They get salaries. They get certain fringe benefits. Whether it's a better gig or a worse gig, you can argue all day long, but it is a different gig. And your job is to guide the talent and to get them to do their best work. And if you go back, and you read [A. Scott] Berg's biography of Maxwell Perkins, you can see that that was true going back to being the editor for Fitzgerald and Hemingway.” To the question of posthumously crediting editors like Julius Schwartz in the manner Thomas proposed, Levitz is blunt: “I think Julie would be nauseated by it,” he said.
As Levitz sees it, the point of assigning creative credits is particularly vexing because so much of comics history – either by accident or design – took place in a nebulous realm of work-for-hire that lacked clear contracts and assigned roles. “The whole idea that you can retroactively singularly point to someone as a creator is kind of peculiar to comics. In most cases, these things either exist because they exist as a contract from the beginning going forward – happily, that's mostly the case in comics today. But you know we didn't keep great records. Nobody thought any of this stuff mattered.”
Even so, Levitz, like Waid, can easily point to cases where he himself contributed character concepts in his capacity as editor, and feels on principle that it would have been (and still would be) inappropriate to seek the credit or the monetary rewards that might be attached to them. “When I was editing a book called Men of War, I knew more about war history, perhaps, than [writer] David [Michelinie] did,” he says. “And I gave him a great deal of what the character codenamed Gravedigger would be. David at one point said, ‘You know, Paul's really a co-creator of this." And I said, ‘No, I'm not. I was the editor. I did my job as editor'.”
Levitz broached subsequent payments for TV and film as potential reasons why there are meaningful outcomes for who gets called a co-creator. Thomas said in his interview with Forbes, and reiterated when he spoke to me, that “I’m not getting a penny, as far as I know,” as a result of his new credit in Deadpool and Wolverine. Levitz is not in a position to know about Thomas’s case, but Marvel creators who spoke to me both on and off the record wondered if Thomas was being honest in the letter of his statement, but not the spirit.
The nature of the payments Marvel gives creators when their work provides the basis for film and TV projects is not always easy to discern. In many cases (the bulk of more recent creators, and often older freelancers who arranged subsequent contracts) the nature and scale of payments is set by individual agreement. Even where that isn’t the case, however, multiple sources confirmed to me that a system exists whereby Marvel sends a gratuity check to creators along with a ticket to the relevant film’s premiere – the terminology on the check tends to be the vague, “For your contributions.”
There does not appear to be a standardized amount for these payments, and it is presumed by many creators I spoke to that it scales upward depending on the extent of a particular creators involvement. One creator, who asked to remain anonymous, said that the check they received for contributions to one Marvel film in which they received “special thanks” was in “the mid-4-figures” but that, “I’d assume it’s more [for a created-by credit], I expect there’s no way it’d be less.”
In any case, the checks are typically sent without advance fanfare or notice, along with invitations to a movie premiere, for which reason a number of people I spoke to felt that Thomas was being disingenuous in saying there is no payment involved in his arrangement. In the words of the creator quoted above: “If I recall, he said he’s receiving no money that he knows of … my guess would be that he’s pretty confident he’ll get money but since it hasn’t happened yet he can deny knowing it because he can’t be sure — Marvel might change their policy or something.”
But any presumption of payment to Thomas is speculative at best, and based on prior policies that Marvel has followed. Thomas, for his part, is clear and adamant that money was neither his motivation nor, as far as he knows, his reward. That said, there are other avenues to profit beyond immediate studio dollars. Thomas has in recent years undertaken a number of conventions and other events to promote his involvement with the character. In 2022, he and Cimino brought out a series of “Incredible Hulk #181 Roy Thomas Adamantium-Edition 11×17 Prints” enhanced with foil metallic ink. This past February, Thomas was announced as a participant in a private CGC signing for Wolverine’s 50th anniversary, alongside Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, and others. If credit in a Marvel Studios film isn’t the reason for any of this, it gives it a certain stamp of imprimatur.
Which is not to say that Wein didn’t do the very same. During our conversation, Thomas was critical of the way that Wein, later in his life, excessively took credit for the character for the sake of his own signings and other events. “He's been given virtually all the credit; tried to take all the credit at various times,” Thomas said. “He had a banner that said ‘Len Wein, creator of Wolverine,” a year or two before he died. We had a phone conversation, in which I confronted him about the fact that he was going around claiming he was the creator of Wolverine, and I felt Herb and John and I had a little something in that part. And he admitted, ‘Yeah, you did.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I never claimed to be the whole creator of Wolverine.’ And I'm sitting there with a photograph of his poster.
(Thomas could not recall what year, or at what event, he saw the banner in question. However, a photograph does exist of a banner at the Long Beach Comic Con Expo 2014 reading “Creator of the Greats! Len Wein. Creations: Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Storm, Thunderbird, Jigsaw, Swampthing [sic], Human Target, Lucius Fox, Mongul & more.” Christine Valada says that Wein began using a different sign after the language was brought to his attention.)
Quite clearly, there is money to be mined from the word creator. And from Thomas’s perspective, we may well ask what harm is being done in expanding the number of people who profit from that word – while no one would confirm one way or another, there is no indication that Valada will be receiving less from Marvel as a result of Thomas’s credit.
But there is a principle here beyond the mere making of money, and that is the direction in which it flows. Wolverine is a character that belongs to no one save for the Walt Disney Company. To the extent that there is any egalitarian pattern to the history of the comics industry, it has been in its halting and gradual progress toward sharing the fruits of its characters’ profits with the human beings who invented them. The money, in the best case, moves downward to the writers and artists, not upward to the corporate coffers. Len Wein, though on staff at Marvel Comics in 1974, was a freelance creator on that issue of Incredible Hulk. Roy Thomas, though in other times and places a credited writer, was in this case a salaried company man. Whether that makes a pertinent difference says more about the modern comic business than either party might realize.
***
“Honestly, I feel like Herb Trimpe is more of a creator of Hulk than Wolverine, because he added so much character to it that that carried through to later issues and other media.”
This is Alex Trimpe, son of Incredible Hulk artist Herb Trimpe, speaking to me about his father’s role in the creation of Wolverine. Alex is largely echoing the statements Herb made during his lifetime (the artist died in 2015, having exited the comics industry decades earlier during Marvel’s staff downsizing during the 1990s). Trimpe, to be sure, was not always consistent in his recollections. In a 2009 interview with the Green Skin’s Grab Bag website, he said of Wolverine: “I didn't do that. That was John Romita's design. I drew him first in Hulk #181. But it was Romita's vision based on Len Wein's idea.” But six years later, speaking with interview Dewy Cassell for the book The Incredible Herb Trimpe, he remembered things this way:
So the answer, what I’m going to say now, is going to be completely different than if I live to be a hundred, okay? But no, it was a character that was conceived by Roy, designed by John Romita, animated and introduced by me, and given a voice by Len Wein. That’s the basic structure. I [recently] got in touch with John Romita and Roy Thomas and I didn’t tell them [anything], I just said, “How did it happen? How did this character actually come about?” And both of their memories were exactly like my memory.
What remained the case, regardless of the other shifting details in Trimpe’s recollection, is that he gave himself little credit for anything beyond dutifully following John Romita’s design sheet. In this, both the elder and younger Trimpe might be selling his contributions short. We must remember that 1974 was deep into the era of the vaunted and notorious Marvel Method, under which the panel-to-panel continuity – and thus vast swaths of the plots of individual issues – were left to the heavy lifting of a book’s penciller. To the extent that Wolverine’s character emerged from his actions and visual mannerisms as much as his dialogue or overall character traits, Herb Trimpe would have been the man responsible.
Alex Trimpe says that neither he nor his mother, Herb Trimpe’s ex-wife and former Marvel staffer Linda Fite, have received any money for adaptations using the Wolverine character (they are unsure whether Trimpe’s second wife has received any income from those sources; she could not be reached for comment for this article). He is not wholly happy with that fact. “It's definitely a scraps fight,” he said. “People fight over scraps, and they fight over huge sums of money, and then you go, 'Oh, why don't you just be happy? You have a huge sum of money.' And they're like, 'No, I want that other sum too.' I don't know. People will fight about everything. But I grew up in a house with a pretty artistic bent, I guess. So I'm just biased towards artists. It does feel like there's a certain disregard for these people.”
Both Trimpe and Fite were bemused to find that Fite herself had recently disappeared from the co-creator credits of the character the Cat, whose first appearance she wrote, and whose civilian name, backstory, and supporting cast she recalls creating. The writer now credited on that page is Roy Thomas, who, as Fite remembers it, supplied her only with the name of the superhero and perhaps the city in which she was to be based (Thomas himself has previously remembered that it was Stan Lee who came up with the name). Asked whether Fite deserves credit as a co-creator of the Cat, Roy Thomas replied, “Definitely [Fite deserves credit], along with Stan, Marie, and to a certain extent me as a co-plotter of #1.”
Fite has never received subsequent payment for media use of the Cat, who has not to date appeared in any theatrical films. At any rate, she finds the notion of these debates over creation mildly ridiculous. “The age of seriousness hadn't really come yet,” she said about the period when she worked with Marvel. “All those writers that came in that second wave, [Chris] Claremont and all those guys, they were much more serious, and I was more whimsical … I mean, that's what Roy was: a fanboy. He was a giant fanboy. And Herb and I used to talk about it. And we always noted that – this is a generalization – the artists could give a shit. You know, the artists weren't paying that much attention to all these little ins and outs and nuances; they just wanted to get the costumes right and not mess up something that had happened before. But those little fanboys, they were like, ‘no, he’d never do that!’ And we used to mock them, but Roy started it, and he hired people that, like him, appreciated that stuff.”
Even so, Trimpe can’t help but feel that the credit for Wolverine belongs as much to the evolution of the character as to its conception. “If I was to look at it without the money part, because that's all legal stuff, I just think [who deserves credit] is a lot trickier to slice than other things,” he said. “Because it's so many hands over so many years and so many issues. Oftentimes, it's not that you wouldn't say Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created the X-Men, but it seems so weird to say that and not say Chris Claremont and John Byrne, or Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum. Is it just an interpretation? The characters are totally different or almost totally different. And the same goes for Wolverine: Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont/John Byrne, is what really established the character much more. It's funny. The character wouldn't exist without the people who designed and named and came up with whatever meager backstory they had initially. But you couldn't say it was the same without these other [later] contributions. And then you're starting to weigh contributions, you know what I mean? If you put a dollar amount on it, I have no idea. I can see why people wouldn't want to do that, but it does seem fair.”
Trimpe’s point is an important one, since a vast swath of Wolverine’s characteristics belong to writers and artists who make no claim to involvement in his initial conception. There is the artist John Byrne, for one, who as penciller and co-plotter of the X-Men series was in large part responsible for elevating the profile, popularity, and fictional attitude of what rapidly became the book’s most popular character. His counterpart during that era was writer Chris Claremont, and if there is one person who may be most associated with Wolverine, he would surely be it: his decade-plus tenure as writer of X-Men meant that without his additions to the Wolverine character and background – his “bub”-inflected speech patterns, his “healing factor,” his semi-immortality and samurai background, even his adamantium bones – Wolverine as we understand him, and as Marvel has profited from him, would be inconceivable.
Neither Claremont nor Byrne could be reached for comment for this article, but Byrne, as is his typical wont, commented somewhat obliquely on his private Byrne Robotics message board – with a position largely, as it happens, favorable to Roy Thomas’s case. “Marvel now assigns creator credit on the basis of involvement, no matter what the degree,” Byrne wrote. “Look up Alpha Flight and you will often find Chris Claremont and me listed as co-creators — and sometimes Chris as sole creator! — on the basis of Chis [sic] having been first to script them, and despite him having nothing to do with the actual development of the characters. It’s a far cry from when I started at Marvel. Then it was policy to deny any creator credit, for fear it would imply ownership. Creation in comics is often a drawn out, cumulative process. David Micheline and Todd McFarlane make some minor changes to an existing concept — mostly developed by Roger Stern — and claim creation of Venom. Roger himself is credited as creating Hobgoblin, tho the character is derived entirely from the Green Goblin. It’s something parallel to my complaints when someone adapting an existing character to another medium is credited as ‘creator.’
"And as for Wolverine — remember that Len’s concept was for an eighteen-year-old with claws that telescoped out of his gloves. And he disagreed quite strongly with how Dave [Cockrum] and Chris developed the character.”
Within Byrne’s comment is an important point: that neglecting to formalize creation credits was as much a matter of deliberate legal claim on Marvel’s part as it was a product of accidental oversight. It is partly for this reason that Marvel’s royalty system has historically not been called a royalty at all, but rather a “bonus” for high sales – and at least an added advantage to the vague phraseology found today on the “for your contributions” checks sent along with film premiere invitations. Then-Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter once stated his company’s policy succinctly in a deposition: “The author of [X-Men] is Marvel Comics.”7
But when, retroactively, attempts are made to broaden the financial remuneration due to the actual hired hands contracted by that “author,” the consequences are more than legal sophistry: they pose real and immediate financial complications. As Paul Levitz points out, this is more than sophistry: it has real financial and legal consequences.
“My old joke on [media payments] – because it wasn't a DC [property] – that I would use with people would be, ‘You're the benevolent receiver of the X-Men in bankruptcy, and they've just made an X-Men movie. What portion of the money that you receive are you giving to Stan, to Jack, Roy, Neil, Len, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, etc., etc,’” Levitz said. “All of those people added value to the X-Men in very significant fashion. And the word creator is a very powerful word. Certainly, the blank piece of paper is more clearly Stan and Jack than anyone else. But if you are attempting to be equitable in the situation, how do you figure that out?”
This not unique to mainstream corporately-published comics, but it is particularly severe. In his book All of the Marvels, Douglas Wolk uses the example of Daredevil to demonstrate the evolutionarily collaborative nature of American superhero comics: here was a character notionally created by Bill Everett, and designed by the same artist (albeit with substantial input from Jack Kirby, who also drew the character’s initial design sheet and first cover), and scripted at first by Stan Lee. But that first costume was thoroughly revamped into the far more recognizable red design we know today by Wally Wood, whose input into series plots as an artist was so sizable that he would later quit the book in protest under his lack of credit for it. And to the extent that Daredevil’s character and personality were shaped by those early stories, they were almost completely reinvented under writer/artist Frank Miller during his own celebrated run two decades later.
None of this is an excuse to throw up hands and concede that the credit for creation is impossible. Indeed, in the absence of defined contracts and written arrangements, it makes the work of sorting out that history and those credits all the more vital: financially, personally, and on paper. But it is a messy thing, and the more we look at the process of character creation and evolution, the more we start to feel the vertiginous sensation that maybe, alarmingly, Mort Weisinger was right.
***
It gets messier. If the creation of Wolverine’s character moves forward in time from 1974, it moves backward, too. Wolverine’s first appearance was drawn by Herb Trimpe; his second appearance, and a further 27 appearances between 1975 and 1982, was drawn by Dave Cockrum, the first artist on the relaunched X-Men series. Predating Wein’s involvement as writer on the book, Cockrum’s role in creating the rebooted team was substantial. Prior to coming to Marvel, he had done a stint at National Comics on the Legion of Super Heroes series, for which he had prepared a pitch and set of character designs for an unused spinoff team called the Outsiders, and their villainous counterparts the Strangers. Those presentation pages, which survive, reveal much of the primordial DNA that would make its way into Cockrum’s co-created X-Men: two early characters that were merged into the later Storm are there, as is a fully-formed Nightcrawler already complete with name and costume.8 And among the Strangers, there is a character named Wolverine – feral, small, and sporting a hairdo strongly reminiscent of the one Cockrum would first give to Marvel’s character a few years down the road.
This is relevant to our story because Cockrum always insisted that he had shown his presentation pages to Roy Thomas when he had first arrived at Marvel, prior to that company’s Wolverine making his debut. Cockrum said so in an interview for the X-Men Companion in 1982:
Sanderson: "How about Wolverine? Did you have anything to do with his creation?"
Cockrum: "No, but I resented his existence for a long time because I had come up with a Wolverine and shown it to Roy (Thomas, editor of the X-Men at that time) before this Wolverine. I had a series of characters I suggested could be X-Men. … How should I put this? I did a montage piece of art with a lot of brand-new characters on it, none of whom was really identified as anything. One of them would up later being used as Tyr in the Legion of Super-Heroes, the guy with the gun on his hand. But anyhow, two of them were brother and sister. She was a vampire who, by one method or another, was going to try to keep it under control, possibly just bite people once and leave them alone, and not kill them off. He was a vulpine type: animalistic, bestial, feral, whom I called Wolverine."
Sanderson: "Complete with claws?"
Cockrum: "No, he didn't have claws. But he had fangs and he was a nasty son of a bitch. He had almost the same haircut that Wolverine has now. In the interim, somewhere along the line, Roy suggested to Len, 'How about a Canadian mutant called Wolverine?' I assumed Roy just forgot that I showed him my Wolverine. I was kind of miffed about the whole thing, but it seemed kind of pointless to carry it on. I never did like Wolverine for a long time..."
Thomas has always maintained that he has no recollection of seeing Cockrum’s character, but he doesn’t deny that it might have happened. In any case, as of 1982, he didn’t believe that coming up with the name Wolverine alone mattered all that much. As he told Sanderson: “I don’t have any conscious memory of his doing that. And of course, it doesn’t take much brains for either of us to come up with a name like Wolverine anyway. Animal characters are a big thing.”
Cockrum died in 2006, but his widow Paty Cockrum was working in the Marvel Bullpen in 1974. She, like her late husband, doesn’t believe that he ought to be considered a creator of the character, and stresses his own opinion that he didn’t much care for Wolverine even during the time he was drawing the X-Men.
“If all of this interest is about Wolverine, big whoop!” she said. “Dave always considered him a thug. A not quite civilized animal, I think. Claremont was trying to do something more civilized with him, so Dave would throw in some not quite civilized whimsy, like the … carving of tic-tac-toe games into rare and valuable antiques. And other than giving Wolvie his face, Dave did not, I believe, have anything to do with his creation at Marvel.”
She does make a point, on the other hand, of noting that neither she nor Dave had been involved in Wolverine’s media adaptations, either financially or otherwise. “No, neither Marvel nor Disney has reached out to me to advise me of celebrations of the 50th anniversary of anything,” she said. “Dave didn't even get a free ticket to see the X-Men movies. The local theater let us in for free after they found out who Dave was, and had him sit in the lobby signing handouts for the movie. I believe they did give him a credit line in the second or third movie. Big whoop here! And Walmart did a special set of one of the movies which had a second disc with interviews from people who worked on or created the X Men. We didn't get a copy of that, either, to my knowledge.”
Still: Cockrum didn’t consider himself a creator, name and facial likeness notwithstanding, so that would seem to settle at least part of the matter. It was not, however, the first time Thomas would have encountered a character under that name. In February 1973, the first issue of FOOM, Marvel’s in-house promotional magazine, ran a contest inviting readers to submit their own designs for new Marvel heroes, the winner to be featured in a forthcoming Marvel comic – and all entries to become the intellectual property of Marvel Comics, of course. The runners-up in the contest were featured one issue later in FOOM #2. Among them was one submitted by Andy Olsen for “The Wolverine.” Olsen’s character has little visibly in common with the later Marvel creation: he appears to be a kind of cyborg, albeit stockily built and wearing a striped costume reminiscent of his animal namesake.
Olsen first came to any kind of public attention in 2014, when Rich Johnston of Bleedingcool.com found and interviewed him for an article about his forgotten character submission. Olsen at the time had long since fallen away from comic books, but he recalled being castigated by his commercial artist uncle for donating his IP to Marvel free of charge: “You did WHAT?? You idiot! Don't you know what these guys did? They pulled ideas from you kids, made money off it and paid you NOTHING!!"
Olsen has had time to think things over since then. When I spoke with him, he had previously been made aware of Thomas’ new credit on the Wolverine character, and he is convinced his submission played some role, however minor, in Thomas’s later notion. “I'm not calling anybody a liar,” Olsen told me. “Perhaps he did come up with it just off the top of his head. But I guarantee you – and being a graphic artist myself, and worked in newspapers, I understand how publishing works – I guarantee my drawing wound up in a morgue file. And I guarantee [Thomas] probably was tasked by somebody else ‘Hey, come up with a character. I need it on my desk Monday morning.’... And I'm willing to bet you a buck that he came across this drawing and said, ‘What's this? Wolverine.’ And I guarantee he didn't have it in his mind that ‘I'm going to rip off Andy Olsen.’ I don't think there was anything evil in his mind. I think it's like, ‘I've got this task. I've got to get this done. And I need an idea.’”
Does Olsen think he, too, deserves some credit for Wolverine’s creation? “Well, yeah, I think so,” he says. “But I honestly believe that the way the process works, [Thomas] did not give me a single thought.”
For whatever it’s worth, Thomas would have seen Olsen’s submission – he was one of the three credited editors on that FOOM issue, and he later told Back Issue Magazine, “I probably saw this, as I saw all issues of FOOM”; it was said the following issue that it would be Thomas who developed the winning contest entry into a Marvel character. Regardless, it would be a leap to call Olsen’s design, divorced as it is from any characteristics associated with the character we know, an influence on Wolverine. Save, perhaps, for that name.
Then there is the matter of nationality. The second of Thomas’s tripartite contributions to Wolverine’s creation was his insistence to Wein that a Canadian character be introduced, the better to appeal to Marvel’s foreign markets. Wein himself always accepted this, and we may fairly conclude that it was the case. But he wasn’t the only person at Marvel who had the notion. In his interview with Sanderson, Thomas leads off his memory of the new X-Men’s creation with a story about Al Landau, the president of Marvel’s parent company, who called Thomas into a meeting a few months after Wolverine had been conceived:
What happened is that when Al Landau, Jim Galton’s predecessor, was the president of Cadence back in that ‘73, ‘74 period right before I left, there was a meeting that he and Stan [Lee] and I were at – I suspect also John Verpoorten, maybe one or two other people – in which Landau mentioned that it would be a good idea to have an international team of some sort. You see, he had his own company called Transworld, which at that time was reselling Marvel’s work overseas by the page. And he knew that if we, for example, had big markets in three or four countries and we had a team that had three or four characters in it, one from each country, we’d have a terrific hit on our hands overseas.
Meanwhile, in February 1973, Cosmicon II was held at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Roy Thomas wasn’t there, but Len Wein was, and future Eclipse Comics publisher Dean Mullaney, of all people, remembered it in a letter published in Incredible Hulk #184, when responses were printed for Wolverine’s first full comics appearance. He wrote:
Last year I travelled [sic] up to Toronto for Cosmicon II and learned a lot about Canadian fans’ feelings toward American comics. They each have their own favorite artists, writers, books, etc., but they gave me the impression that they felt left out. They implored the writers on one discussion panel to inaugurate more Canadian-bred superheroes.
I don’t know if this has anything to do with the reasons behind the introduction of Wolverine, but I remember you [Len Wein] being present as a member of that panel, and since you wrote this particular issue of the Hulk, I put two and two together.
None of these things actually constitutes a case against Thomas’s argument for himself as a creator. But it does complicate things. Roy Thomas certainly proposed the name “Wolverine” – Len Wein always remembered this. But so did Dave Cockrum and Andy Olsen, and Thomas didn’t think there was anything altogether original about the name to begin with – he almost went with “Badger,” anyhow. Thomas also certainly proposed a Canadian character – but so did one of the guests who told it to Wein at Cosmicon, and more importantly so did Thomas’ erstwhile boss Al Landau. Thomas might have insisted that Wolverine be short and quick-tempered, but accounts on those specific points differ.
Does all of this constitute creation? Or is it something more ephemeral: the act of creatio ex nihilo on the part of an editor, undertaking the sacrament of four-color transubstantiation that turns a set of vague characteristics into an intellectual property for all time.
***
Who cares?
In the end, does any of this matter? We are discussing a character created 50 years ago, certainly by more than one person, and none of whom (whoever or however many they may be) own any kind of legal stake in his fortunes save for the contractual agreements or willing largesse of Walt Disney. Nobody involved in this process or these claims would think to say that their work constituted high art. It is no insult, but rather a statement of commercial fact, to say that what Marvel produced in the 1970’s was disposable entertainment for children, or perhaps collectible entertainment for steadily aging adults. Certainly since the 1990s, the number of comics that contain Wolverine (vast as they are) is nevertheless dwarfed by the number of licensed objects that bear his image: toothpaste tubes, fruit snacks, sticker books, valentines cards, birthday napkins, Popsicle(
) brand popsicles, action figures, trading cards, posters, t-shirts, sleeping bags, beach towels, and Chef Boyardee canned pasta.
Roy Thomas says money is not his motivation. “I don’t want any money,” he told me. “I've got a lot of money. I mean, I'm not super rich, but I got a lot of money. I don't need another dime. If Marvel never gave me another dime, I could live for the rest of my life and still leave money to my heirs. I don't care. I just want credit for what I did. It offends me that I didn't get quite enough credit, and I wanted it. I don't really feel it diminishes Len's legacy. You know If they want to say ‘major creator,’ you know, he did a lot more work than I did on it. But he didn't do everything.”
Thomas’ critics also believe that money isn’t the driving force here. They just think that makes it worse. “I don't really believe it's about money at the heart of it,” Mark Waid says. “I believe Roy feels forgotten. I believe Roy feels like his contributions to the field have not been properly acknowledged. He's 83 years old. I understand the fear that your legacy will be forgotten; that you will be forgotten. I totally understand that. That's why so many guys turn to Comicsgate, the Chuck Dixons and so forth in the world. It's a place where they can go, and they can be worshiped, and not have to face the fact that their time has come and gone. So with Roy, I strongly suspect that it's just clawing at every opportunity he has to elevate his presence in history.”
If Thomas’s creative legacy needs burnishing, it is in part by his own design. In 2015, Thomas was interviewed by Aaron Couch at the Hollywood Reporter, and their conversation included the following exchange:
Couch: You’ve said you actually didn’t want to create too many things for Marvel. Why was that?
Thomas: I knew I wouldn’t own any of it. I accepted the work for hire, and as a result I didn’t want to create characters that much because I knew I would get resentful if they ever made movies and TV shows and merchandising out of it that I didn’t get money and credit for. I was never going to sue over it or anything like that, I just knew what I was doing when I did it, and I wasn’t going to claim otherwise later. Even if you don’t try, you have to make up a few heroes here and there, and you have to make up villains. You can’t keep using the same characters all the time.
From Thomas’ standpoint, this is an imminently rational position: the stance of someone who entered the industry a generation after the systemic exploitations of Siegel, Shuster, Kirby, Ditko, et. al., and had come prepared to learn from their mistakes. Thomas was not naive, and his decision to limit his own creative donations to company employers was no doubt wise. But that decision presupposed a world in which creators like Thomas could never expect to see any kind of long-term financial benefit, let alone credited glory, accrue to their creations. And from the vantage point of 2024, it leads to some unfortunate outcomes.
Consider the Avenger called the Vision, perhaps Thomas’s most celebrated creation, certainly in recent years given his Paul Bettany-portrayed depiction in Marvel’s Avengers films and the WandaVision TV show. The Vision is credited as the creation of Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema; this is reflected not only on the character’s wikipedia page, but on-screen in the credits of the WandaVision show. Yet here is how Thomas described the process of creating the Vision in the 50th issue of his magazine Alter Ego in 2005:
Thomas: In the case of the Vision, I’d always wanted to bring Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man back into the Avengers, but Stan wouldn’t let me. Finally, he decided he wanted a new Avenger, and for reasons that to this day I do not know, he decreed it must be an android. I wanted to bring in the original 1940s Vision, whom I’d seen in a couple of stories, light green skin and all. He was from another dimension, so I was going to have him come into our dimension and be stuck here. But Stan said, “No, I want an android. I don’t care how you handle it, but make him an android.”...
I took the old Kirby costume and drew a diamond on it, which I swiped from the Fawcett hero Spy Smasher. The Vision was hard as a diamond so it made sense.
By Thomas’s lights, it would seem from this description that three more creators ought to be added to the Vision’s official list of parents: Stan Lee (the editorial instigator, as well as the originator of the key “android” characteristic), and the team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (creators of the original 1940s Vision). Indeed, according to John Cimino, Roy Thomas believes that all of those names should be added alongside his own. And to say so is not to detract from Thomas’s very real, and very memorable, creative accomplishments in this instance. It is simply to recognize that in the field of commercial comics, expanding the list of creators through time and space begins a process that can be very hard to end.
None of this is a disparagement of Thomas’ creativity in the case of the Vision, or in any of the other characters or books on which he worked. His contribution was very real indeed, and it would be sophistic to argue that the Vision, as we understand the character, would in any sense exist if Thomas were eliminated from this chain of events. It’s just that the scenario comes perilously close to being a mirror image of the case of Wolverine, with Thomas playing the role of Len Wein.
In any event, if Thomas’ viewpoint has changed since the days when he avoided overly-original creation, it may be because the priorities of a twentysomething writer and editor, very much in the financial grind of the work-a-day comics business, are different from those of an elder statesman looking back on his legacy. Which is another way of saying that at Thomas’ age, it isn’t money that counts for the most.
One comic creator, who asked to remain anonymous, put it this way: “I think his current manager wants Roy to have a larger spotlight, both to burnish his importance and to maybe position Roy as the next Stan…Roy’s in his 80s now, and a shot at the kind of promo spotlight Stan had — or even half that level — must seem pretty attractive. So having as much credit as possible for the post-Stan-as-editor wave of Marvel successes like Wolverine, the new X-Men, Power Man and the Punisher, all of which he was involved in editorially, elevates him.”
Stan Lee, like Thomas, like Siegel and Shuster, like Kirby, had cause to look back ruefully on a life spent contributing creative concepts to a corporate edifice that ultimately did not care whose bounty it was taking. In an only recently-unearthed private recording he made during a dinner with the film director Alain Resnais in 1969, we find him already beginning to question the choices that had led him to down the path of comics:
“I’m not underpaid,” he told Resnais. “I make a lot, but I can’t keep it, you see. I don’t have any ownership. Everything I’ve written, nothing belongs to me. If somebody wants to reprint one of the stories they pay the company, they don’t pay me. It went on this way for about 29 years. Last year my publisher sold the whole company to one of these big conglomerates. I had to sign a contract for five years saying that I would work there for five years. The contract could be broken and I can break it at any time but there’s a clause in the contract that if I leave I must not do any comics work for one year. All the time that I worked there, I never thought of leaving because I was loyal to this publisher but now it is owned by another company, and I figure, for the first time, at my age, I feel it’s time I started thinking of other things.”
But (rightly or wrongly, and increasingly controversially) we do remember Stan Lee. Those co-creations he never owned, and may ultimately have regretted, have continued to outlive him, not to mention out-earn him. Partly, it’s true, this is a result of Lee’s having done exactly what Thomas is doing now: promoting his own role in the process of creation over and above that of his collaborators, come whatever criticism he might receive. But it is also simply because Lee was a unique product of cultural history. He existed in a very precise time, in a very precise moment in both pop culture and the comic book business, and amid a very talented and uniquely inspired group of artistic individuals, and the result was a set of characters that – for better or worse – left a permanent and indelible stamp on the culture that received them. But simply, we remember Stan Lee not just because he demanded it, but because for whatever ineffable reason, his public demanded it, too. We may loath him or love him, we may argue about him, but we cannot, even despite ourselves, forget about him.
This is not true of Roy Thomas, nor could it be, and no amount of creative additional credits is capable of changing that. Stan Lee isn’t a title capable of being passed: it was bestowed once, by historical accident, and having passed away exists for us now only in plentifully licensed corporate memory. Legacy, however substantial, can’t be granted on a movie reel.
So again: why does any of this matter? If reputations and legacies can’t be grappled over by force, if creative history is too muddy and complicated to lend itself to easy answers, if all we are left with are the wounded egos and fading rivalries of creators increasingly long gone, why then is this of any concern to us at all?
Well, maybe it isn’t. Lord knows the world has greater things to worry about than whose name is filed under what category on a portion of a movie that half the audience might not wait to sit through. But if the story of the comic book business has been the story of writers and artists whose names have been deliberately obscured and whose stories have been neglectfully erased, then surely we owe them at least this: to state the facts clearly and truthfully, and to say that creation has meaning, and the people who undertake it mean more. It’s the least we owe them, and it’s the least we owe our own history.
“It’s not about recognition, but it’s about accuracy,” Linda Fite told me. “I mean, the fact is the fact. It's not about credit, or recognition, or pats on the back, or any of that. It's just if Joe Schmo actually created this character, then Joe Schmo should get the acknowledgement of that. One wants to be factual, doesn’t one?”
Christine Valada has written a letter, sent to a number of key personnel at Disney and Marvel (including Disney CEO Robert Iger; Marvel Chief Creative Officer Kevin Feige, Marvel President Dan Buckley, and Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy) stating her case, and requesting that Thomas’s co-creator credit for Wolverine be removed prior to the film’s premiere. At present, as this article is being written, she has not received a response.
So it remains for the rest of us to sort out the history, and the humans, and worth behind it all. Comics is a sausage-factory operation, all right. But the names of the sausage makers ought to mean more than the names of the sausage.
* * *
The post Logan’s Run: Roy Thomas, Len Wein, and the curious case of the Wolverine appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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