Articles with the Tag Roy Thomas

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 49: Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07

books and books review, Comix
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Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07
Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, Rich Buckler, John Buscema and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #138-159 and more (September 1973 – June 1975)
Get this for: The FF enter the Bronze Age — three stars

For the penultimate entry in this series we got Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 7, the first volume to feature neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee. Instead Gerry Conway handles writing duties for most of the run collected here, both on the regular series and on the five Giant-Size issues also included. Roy Thomas takes over from him with #156, after a fill-in issue by Len Wein. The art is taken care of by John Buscema, then Rich Buckler.

The period of The Fantastic Four collected here is one I know relatively well, having read these issues in Dutch translation years ago, buying them for a guilder at a time from a market stall. These were doublesized with cardboard covers and like the Essential collections, in black and white, so I had something of a deja vu rereading this.

At the time I first read these issues I wasn’t what you call critical of what I read: if it had superheroes and villains, especially new ones, that was good enough for me. Rereading them again it’s clear that these are not nearly of the same quality as even the worst of the Lee/Kirby collaborations; they’re quite mundane in fact, for all their non-stop action and attempts to emulate Kirby’s creativity. Lee and Kirby created the Inhumans, the Watcher, the Kree and Skrulls, the Black Panther and Wakanda and so on, basically creating the whole Marvel Universe from scratch. With Conway, we get a race of abominable snowmen, who are reverted to normal humans at the end of the story — not quite the same, is it?

Not that Gerry Conway and later Roy Thomas were bad writers, but they missed the creative spark of the Lee-Kirby collaborations. Instead both fall back on reusing established villains and soap opera to hold the reader’s interest. So we get the return of the Miracle Man, last seen in issue 3, Annihilus and Doctor Doom on the one hand and the maritial problems of Reed and Sue Richards on the other. Most stories also take more than one issue to complete, not always a good thing. It’s not all bad: I quite like that very distinctive, early seventies energy these stories have and both Conway and Thomas keep them flowing, sweeping you along with them.

On the art side there’s little to complain off, with first John Buscema and then Rich Buckler as penciler. Again, if you compare them to Kirby, both are a bit on the bland side here and certainly Buscema had and has done better elsewhere. I think that , as with the writing, the art suffers a bit from being forced into the Marvel Housestyle, trying to ape Lee and Kirby when it would’ve been better if both had followed their own paths.

Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07 collects a low period in the Fantastic Four’s existence, when the title was in a creative slump. There are some points of interest, but they’re few and far between. For me it was an exercise in nostalgia reading these issues, going back to a time when I was much less critical of comics and could still enjoy these kind of stories for what they were.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 42: Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 06

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Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 06
Stan Lee, Archie Goodwin, Roy Thomas, John Buscema and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #111-137 (June 1971 – August 1973)
Get this for: The Fantastic Four within Kirby or Lee — three stars

Curse my luck! Just as with the Essential X-Men yesterday, I never managed to get volume five of Essential Fantastic Four either, which means I missed the end of the Lee-Kirby run. Instead volume six offers Big John Buscema on art duties, with Stan Lee, Archie Goodwin, then Lee again and finally Roy Thomas handling the writing. Good though these gents are, their work can’t compare to what Jack Kirby brought to The Fantastic Four. Even though Stan Lee himself is still around for a while here, the chemistry he had with Kirby is gone. Kirby and Lee could always spark ideas of each other, now Lee had to do it all himself.

It’s not all bad though. For a start, this volume contains the first Fantastic Four comic I ever read, #113, translated in Dutch as Vier Verdedigers Classics #59 which an uncle had in his collection — and I have now. That issue was the start of the Overmind saga and its cover is burned in my memory. It was not just the first FF comic I read, but must have been one of the earliest superhero comics I ever saw and it fascinated me. It’s a typical late Silver Age Marvel issue, continuing directly from the previous issue, with cameos from the Hulk and Agatha Harkness and a guest star appearance by the Watcher, while the action never stops, all drawn in that wonderful expressive, larger than life John Buscema style and it’s just crack to a certain kind of geek boy (or girl) like me. It may not have been half as good as what Lee and Kirby had been up to before, but I didn’t know anything about that.

The whole Overmind story showed that some of the creativity of that earlier run was still present in The Fanastic Four, as the Overmind turned out to be the last living survivor of an ancient alien race, the Eternals, scource of the cosmos, who had conquored all before them until they reached the planet Gigantus, which dwarved Galaxies and was their doom. As the Eternals’ own planet died beneath them, they put all their mental power into the Overmind and send him into the universe to sleep and wait until the time was right for the Overmind to come from beyond the stars and crush the universe! The Fantastic Four are helpless before him, even need to teamup with Doctor Doom to fight him but even that is not enough, though Doom does get his crowning moment of awesome as he fights an unequal battle with the Overmind but keeps standing for he is … DOOM! In the end though it’s the Stranger, revealed to be the combined might of the people from Gigantus who tames the Overmind.

The Overmind is however the only original villain to fight the Fantastic Four this volume, as for the most part they fight old enemies and even menaces originally introduced in other series. Diablo and Galactus return for rematches, they get involved with the Inhumans again, the Frightful Four come back with a new member, and so on. There are other changes in the status quo though. Roy Thomas lets Sue Richards quit the FF and makes Medusa of the Inhumans her replacement, while the relationship of Johnny Storm and Crystal also ends, as the latter falls for Quicksilver, the mutant Avenger. On the whole The Fantastic Four is much more soap opera orientated then before, less interested in exploration as well, more going for fighting “conventional” villains. It’s not as wild as the Lee-Kirby runs, but it’s far from bad either.

As for the art, John Buscema is as great as Kirby in his own right and I do like the grandeur he gives a character like the Watcher, as well as the body language he gives his characters. A more conventional artist than Kirby perhaps, but you can hardly fault him for that. I love how he poses his characters, the stances he gives them which betray their emotions and character. Every now and again, often in just some small throwaway panel I just have to stop and study his art, bask in it.

A letdown after the sheer mastery of the first four Essential Fantastic Four volumes? Perhaps, but Buscema’s art and the efforts of Lee, Goodwin and Thomas make up for a lot.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 38: Essential Avengers Vol. 05

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Essential Avengers Vol. 05
Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Barry Smith and friends
Reprints: Avengers #98-119, Defenders #8-11, Daredevil #99 (April 1972 – January 1974)
Get this for: The end of Roy Thomas’ and the start of Englehart’s run — four stars

The fourth volume of Essential Avengers ended with the best Avengers story Roy Thomas ever did: the Kree-Skrull War. How can the fifth volume ever improve on this? Well, how about a three issue epic with the Avengers search for their missing member Hawkeye turning up both Hawkeye and ex-member Hercules, pits them against the Olympian god of war Ares as well as the Asgardian goddess the Enchantress and culminating into an epic battle reuniting every Avenger past and present, including the Hulk and the Swordsman?

It’s a good start, especially when the art on these three issues is done by Barry Smith. It’s the best the Avengers look this volume, even though such good artists like John and Sal Buscema, Rick Buckler, Bob Brown and Don Heck are responsible for the art in the rest of the book. they’re good, but Barry Windsor Smith even back then was in a class of his own. You wish he could’ve done the art for longer, but of course he never was the fastest artist in the world and beside, his tourist visum had expired and he was deported…

After the ten issue epic that was the Kree-Skrull War, both Roy Thomas and his succesor Steve Englehart limit themselves to shorter stories for a while. Thomas has the Avengers traveling to Olympus, then plots the return of the Grim Reaper before unleashing the Sentinels again. The X-Men had just been cancelled and so their old villains were fair game for the Avengers, something Englehart would also make use of by letting Magneto attack the Avengers. Englehart also plunders storylines from other series, tying in Captain America’s fight together with Rick Jones against Madame Hydra, in which the latter died, with his own Space Phantom & Grim Reaper teamup, by revealing the former had stood in for the actual Madame Hydra in that earlier Captain America story, hence the real Madame Hydra was still alive. It’s an early example of how complex Marvel continuity could become in the seventies and eighties, with writers building not only on the work done before in their own series, but bringing in loose ends from their own earlier ventures, as well as adding to stories originally done by others.

Though Englehart and Thomas do limit themselves to shorter stories, both let these stories flow more naturally into each other. They’re much less self contained as those Stan Lee wrote originally for The Avengers. This means there’s more room for interpersonal conflict and soap opera and Englehart makes good use of this. Roy Thomas had dropped the first hints that the Scarlet Witch and the Vision might have been attracked to each other; under Englehart their romance, after may false starts, came out in the open. This romance is one of the mainstays of his run here. Another constant in Englehart’s run is Hawkeye’s, well dickishness towards the other Avengers. Always a bit of a hothead, here he’s just obnoxious at times, throwing a hissy fit when the Scarlet Witch choses the Vision rather than him, later getting into an actual fight with Daredevil over the Black Widow, in a Steve Gerber penned issue of Daredevil also collected here. It may not have read that way originally, but here it seems the sexism fairy has visited Hawkeye.

Like the previous volume, this one too ends with a multi issue epic, as Englehart loses his inhibition and starts a story on par with Roy Thomas’ Kree-Skrull War. But this time this epic is not contained in one series, but involves The Defenders as well, which was also written by Englehart at the time. Dormammu and Loki manage to trick the Defenders into finding the six pieces of the Evil Eye, last seen in a Fantastic Four issue in order to cure the Black Knight, but in reality to give Dormammu the power to rule the universe. Loki gets cold feet and involves the Avengers by tricking them into believing the Defenders actually want to rule the world. Chaos, as they say, ensues. The Avengers – Defenders War is the ancestor of all those crossover epics that would excite and bore us later in the eighties and nineties and it already includes that page showing every hero in the world fighting the main villain’s evil hordes all over the world — or at least New York.

This is neither Thomas’ nor Englehart’s finest hour, but this is still a great volume to see how one great writer hands over the baton to another one.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 32: Essential Avengers Vol. 04

books and books review, Comix
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Essential Avengers Vol. 04
Roy Thomas, John and Sal Buscema, Neal Adams and friends
Reprints: Avengers #69-97, Incredible Hulk #140 (October 1969 – March 1972)
Get this for: Roy Thomas’ best work — five stars

I learned two things from Essential Avengers Vol. 04: Roy Thomas’ dialogue was still pretty much influenced by Stan Lee and he was overtly fond of the word “stripling”. But this innocent peccadillo can be forgiven, as Thomas is the first writer to release The Avengers‘ full potential, unleashing the first classic cosmic crossover: the Kree-Skrull War! It’s the climax of an incredible volume, in which Thomas mixes both standard supervillain threats with more outlandish foes, keeps up the pace throughout but does not neglect the personal either.

The volume starts almost as strong as it ends, with the first great Kang the Conquoror and the Grandmaster, using the Avengers as pawns in their cosmic chess game, introducing the Squadron Sinister, the first of two Justice League of America pastiches. It’s a great, fun story which also reveals one of Thomas’ obsessions, WWII/Golden Age heroes, as the climax of the story takes place in Paris 1941 and features the Golden Age Captain America, Namor and the Human Torch, amongst others. A second great cosmic story is the twoparter with Arkon the Imperiator, the leader of a barbaric world from another dimension, who wants to destroy the Earth in a nuclear holocaust to save his own home planet.

As said, Thomas also has more mundane supervillains threatening the Avengers, with several old foes (the Grim Reapder, Living Laser, Swordsman, Whirlwind and the Man-Ape teaming up as the Lethal Legion to destroy the Avengers together. There’s also the threat of Zodiac, an Astrology based criminal army as well as Cornelius van Lunt, the businessman who seems to finance them. Zodiac is an enemy that returns a few times, first seen in #72, then again in #77 and for the third time in #80-82. They’re not the only ones to return to plague the Avengers once more: Arkon is another villain to pop up again.

The same goes for the JLA pastiches, as in issue 85 and 86 four Avengers travel to a parallel Earth where they meet the Squadron Supreme, with quite obvious standins for several heroes from the Distinguished Competition: Hawkeye (Green Arrow), Thom Thumb (the Atom), Lady Lark (Black Canary), American Eagle (Hawkman), Dr Spectrum (Green Lantern) The Whizzer (Flash), Nighthawk (Batman) and Hyperion (Superman). Nighthawk also turns up in #83, the Rutland Halloween Parade as the costume worn by Tom Fagan. Rutland’s Halloween parade would feature in quite a few Marvel and DC comics books during the seventies, sometimes even forming unofficial crossovers as Fagan was a lifelong comic book and science fiction fan and friends with writers like Thomas, Len Wein and Steve Englehart. It’s one of those neat traditions that has sadly fallen by the wayside since.

Speaking of science fiction, this collection also features the two issue Harlan Ellison written crossover between The Avengers and The Incredible Hulk and sadly it hasn’t aged well. More attention seems to have been paid to horrible puns riffing on Ellison short stories than to a real plot, but at least it did introduce Jarella and the subatomic world she lived on to the Hulk. I can see why people would’ve been exited to see an established and well respected writer like Ellison dabbling in comics, a sign that comics had grown up, but almost forty years on it feels like stunt casting.

Something else that hasn’t aged well is Roy Thomas continuing attempt to put some relevance in The Avengers. So in issue 73-74 the Sons of the Serpents are used once again to talk about race matters and how both sides are equally wrong and manipulated by greedy men for their own gain. Issue 83 is no better, featuring an equally heavyhanded approach to “women’s lib”, as several female superheroes decided the best way to advance feminism is to destroy the Avengers as male chauvenist pigs, under the influence of the Enchantress disguised as the Valkyrie. It’s all written from a well meaning liberal point of view, but it’s politically naive and ultimately supportive of the status quo and the myth that America is a land of opportunity for all, evidence be damned.

And then there is the Kree-Skrull War, running from Issue 89 to issue 97, one continuing story and if I remember correctly then the longest story ever told in a Marvel Comic. Thomas takes the two longstanding alien threats from Fantastic Four and Captain Marvel, mixes in the Inhumans as well as unsubtle analogies to the 1905ties communist witch hunts and of course his own obsession with Golden Age superheroes and makes it all work.

What helps a lot in selling it all is having Neal Adams coming aboard for the artwork. Not that the art has been bad up untill then, with John and Sal Buscema spelling each other on art duties until then, but Adams kicks it up a notch. All three artists are good at showing the grandeur and the glory of the Avengers, each in his own way is more than able to visualise the battles and settings Thomas comes up with, but everything Adams does is just that little bit more special. It’s this that makes the Kree-Skrull War special, something every other Avengers writer will try to emulate and top from then on, rather than just another good Avengers story like e.g. the Kang-Grandmaster clash earlier in the volume.

So yeah, for some of the best of what The Avengers could be, this is the volume you need.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 26: Essential Avengers Vol. 2

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Essential Essential Avengers Vol. 2
Stan Lee, Don Heck, Roy Thomas and friends
Reprints: Avengers #25-46, Special #1 (February 1966 – November 1967)
Get this for: Avengers hitting their stride — four stars

Essential Avengers Vol. 2 starts where the first volume ended, with Lee and Heck getting into their stride and the Avengers themselves reduced to Captain America and his three juvenile deliquents: Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. This combination worked much better than the original Avengers, who all had their own titles and didn’t mesh together that well. Of the New Avengers on the other hand only Cap had his own title, which meant there was room in The Avengers for some character development. It took a while for Lee to get a handle on the new team, but in this volume he has managed it.

The “kooky quartet” did not stay a quartet for long however; in the second issue collected here Giantman and the Wasp join the team, Giantman rechristening himself as Goliath. They’re not the only additions to the team: both the Black Widow (last seen in Iron Man) and Hercules (from Thor) drop by later in the volume and keep hanging around. In the King-Size Special things go even further, as a long running Avengers tradition was established as every Avenger but the Hulk and the Black Widow teamed up to defeat the Mandarin.

This volume is wall to wall action, with few issue to issue subplots, apart from the Black Widow’s problems with her old masters back behind the Iron Curtain. Lee doesn’t try to do anything difficult here with the Avengers, but just keeps throwing villains at them, from Attuma to Doctor Doom to the Living Laser to the Sons of the Serpents. It’s all very entertaining if a bit slight. things do pick up a bit as Roy Thomas takes over scripting duties, but here he’s not doing that much different from Lee.

The only time Lee does add some depth to The Avengers is with the Sons of the Serpents story, in which the Avengers take on a KKK standin and reveal it to be led by … a foreign communist leader. This also has the first appearances of Bill Foster, one of the first Black supporting characters in a Marvel comic. Yes, he is largely used solely for a clumsy parable about the state of race relations in America, but at least Lee means well…

Don Heck handles most of the artwork in this volume and his sleek style started to win me over. In the previous volume he wasn’t at his peak quite yet, here he has a good handle on all the characters and especially seems to have fun to draw the ladies. It’s less flashy and more restrained than a Kirby’s or a Ditko, but it suits the less powerful Avengers team.

This is still not the classic Avengers, but it’s getting there.