The Four Color Media Monitor

Around the time the issue of Roy Thomas giving the assignment of creating Wolverine in the Bronze Age first came up, Forbes also interviewed Christine Valada, Len Wein's widow, who doesn't approve of Thomas' wish to get his own credit as the editor who oversaw development of Logan. And what's odd here is that she seems to be claiming it's not about money, in a bizarre "reflection" of what Thomas said:

Christine Valada, an entertainment and copyright attorney in Los Angeles specializing in creator rights issues, took exception to many of the points made in the story. Valada, who met Wein in 1989 and married him in 1991, manages her late husband’s estate, which has been receiving both credit and financial compensation from Disney (owner of Marvel) since 2014. Wein himself died in 2017.

“I’m not privy to what the financial arrangements might be [with Thomas] and I don’t particularly care,” Valada said in a phone interview on April 2. “This is not about finances. This is about stolen valor. This frankly calls my husband a liar for his entire career.” [...]

Valada says Wein remained consistent in his account of the character’s creation since the beginning. While acknowledging that Thomas had assigned him to introduce a Canadian character named Wolverine in The Incredible Hulk, which Wein was writing, Wein said he did all the original research that shaped Wolverine’s powers and personality. Wein, who studied art in college, claimed he even contributed to John Romita’s character design.

This last point is disputed by Herb Trimpe, the artist who drew the first Wolverine stories, who died in 2015. In an interview that took place in 2012, Trimpe said:

“I was in the office a good part 0f the time and I was there when John [Romita] was working on the model for the character. The way it worked was Roy Thomas came up with a concept. It was his. He came up with the name of the character Wolverine and he handed it directly over to John Romita in the bullpen to develop a character sheet, which he gave to Len Wein, who was the writer at the time.”

Trimpe continued, “I don’t want to take away anybody's ability to make a few bucks, but it was it Roy's concept and John's character design. The writer in my opinion gave the character a voice and actually collaborated with the artist in terms of bringing the character to life, which is no small thing, but it's not really the originator of the concept.”

Valada disagrees. She said she has great respect for editors, but said that you can never compare what they do in the course of their staff jobs with the toil that writers and artists put in bringing ideas to life. “It’s their sweat and blood that goes into the creation, while editors go home and collect their paychecks,” she said. “It's simply not true that Roy was in any way shape or form a co-creator of the character. To me, co-creator means that he either contributed to writing the story or he contributed artwork, and he didn't do either. He made suggestions, as an editor does.”

It sounds like Mrs. Valada, regrettably, is not willing to recognize that an editor can come up with a "rough sketch" of the idea they'd like to see realized, and assign them to official writers and artists to develop. Granted, she's trying to avoid making it sound like she only cares about money, which shouldn't be everything. Even so, it's sad Valada doesn't want to acknowledge editors can and do deserve credit for pitching ideas that might not have come about had it not been for their thinking.

But since the issue of valor comes up, how would Valada feel if any of Wein's creations suffered the same kind of woke abuse Thomas' and even Bill Finger's did? Why, how about the time when Brian Bendis made particularly awful use of Wolverine in the Marvel crossover tales he'd engineered over 15 years ago, or even the time when Logan was put in a comics grave for nearly 3 years just several years ago? If Logan's undergone any kind of abuse by Marvel writers that does more harm than good, isn't Valada disappointed with that? It's hard to say you care about valor when you don't say a word about dignity for both the writer's efforts and the creation to boot.

She cited the example of Wein himself, whose career included several notable editorial roles. “The list of characters created while Len was Editor-in-Chief at Marvel is several pages long,” Valada said. “Of course, he was editor of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen at DC [in 1986]. He would never dream of taking co-creator status on anything he edited, no matter what he contributed to the process.”

Point: if Wein didn't pitch the idea himself, and it really was Moore's idea to write Watchmen with DC's approval, then this is hardly the same thing. But, next comes something that makes it hard for me take her side:

“Seeing Roy Thomas's name as a co-creator makes me sick to my stomach,” she said. “The man should have stayed in his lane as the editor, taking his accolades for that, and not try to usurp credit that he's not due and that he has not earned. If I sit back and let this roll by, where will it stop? It’s only going to get worse.”

Valada says it is not too late for Disney and Marvel to walk back this move. “Look what NBC Universal did last week [reversing course after the hiring RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel caused an uproar]. They should say, look, we made a mistake. And people will be very impressed that they were able to acknowledge that in the name of truth.”

Oh, what's this? Something that reeks of political bias, sadly enough. I don't know if Thomas is a Republican per se, but if that's got anything to do with Valada's complaints, to the point she'd run the gauntlet of being rude, then I can't sympathize with her. Besides, it's unclear if she cares about artistic integrity, which seems lacking in this whole affair. So what good does this do?

Here's another Forbes article about veteran Thomas' role in the creation of Wolverine 5 decades ago, and his reasons for development:

In 1974, Thomas was working under Stan Lee, who was Marvel’s publisher at the time. According to Roy, The impetus for Wolverine’s creation came from the fact that roughly 5 to 10 percent of Marvel readers were Canadian. Thomas wanted them to have their own hero to root for.

Roy said he was thinking of animals that live in both Canada and the United States to liken Marvel’s first Canadian character to in both name and demeanor. Two animals stood out, a badger and a wolverine.

“I thought about the two of them and Badger, well, it's a good enough name. As a matter of fact, there was a character— an imitation of Wolverine started a year or two later after he became big who was called the Badger and ran for quite a few years,” Thomas told me over Zoom in late February.

“But I just thought, Badger, it sounds like the verb. It kind of means to annoy. You badger somebody. And so it wasn't quite as good a name,” Roy said. “And Wolverine had that kind of wolfy sound and the V in it. There was just something about it.”

I wonder if this helped Mike Baron to create Badger the following decade, since the character name was left easily accessible? I assume that's what Thomas was talking about, though it took nearly a decade after Wolverine's introduction in the pages of the Hulk for Baron to first produce Badger at the original Capital/First Comics.

But honestly, Thomas' motivation for creating Logan has since unfortunately been exploited by tons of liberal propagandists to produce all sorts of leftist social justice propaganda under the claim that "everybody should have their own hero", even if it means basing their creation upon ideology rather than nationality, and now, look what kind of woke damage has occurred since. Make Wolverine Canadian if you must, but it shouldn't be simply because there's plenty of folks in the great white north who read Marvel's output. It should be based on entertainment value, and without it, that's exactly why Logan's been brought down as a concept since along with sales figures.

After Thomas had the name, he remembers going to one of Marvel’s top writers for the story, Len Wein, who was writing The Incredible Hulk at the time. Roy previously wrote for the title.

“I called in Len and I told him [five] things,” Thomas stated. “I said, ‘I want this character in right away.’ Because I just wanted to establish it soon. I said, ‘He's Canadian. He's called Wolverine. And like a wolverine—’ It's a small animal so I wanted [him] to be short.

“Most of the heroes are all six feet, six and a half feet. I wanted this to be a short hero. And the other thing was that wolverines are especially noticed— badgers, that could have worked for it too, is they're noticed for, the wolverine, in particular, [noticed] for attacking animals up to 5, 10, or more times their own size. I mean, they don't just defend themselves. They sometimes attack. They're just vicious creatures. So I wanted him to be especially ill-tempered and kind of fierce.” [...]

Thomas trusted Len’s writing ability and left him alone while he crafted the story. That trust would yield some key details to the character that fans still cherish 50 years later.

“Len, on his own, besides this kind of background of this Canadian secret organization that was in charge of Wolverine and so forth as Weapon X kind of thing; he came up with that. And he came up with the idea [the claws] were made of adamantium, which is the hardest substance known,” Roy recalled.

“I didn't have anything to do with that, but I was particularly happy since I had invented adamantium for an Avengers story a couple of years earlier. And so I thought, ‘Well, that's cool.’ But that was up to Len. Once I did my little bit, I was content to have him do the rest of it.”

On adamantium metals, yes, that was put to use in stories involving Ultron. So, Thomas does have something that can help strengthen a claim to giving the assignment as editor to a writer/artist.

Thomas also trusted Wein’s ability to edit. He primarily left the revisions up to Len as well.

“I kind of let Len do his thing and probably every word in there is entirely his,” Roy said. “And he worked, of course, with the artist who was then drawing the Hulk, Herb Trimpe, who I always have [credited]. I know Len did. A co-creator kind of, of (Wolverine) because you draw that first story, you have to do so many things. But sometimes, he gets left off the list of creators. But I feel the guy who actually drew the first story and set up all those things has to be counted too.

“So it was really a kind of a committee. I came first, but then you had John, you had Len, you had Herb Trimpe. Maybe Stan (Lee) was the only person who wasn't involved. He finally saw a cover thing, he says, ‘Yeah, that's good.’ That was it. Because he wasn't intended to be a big character.

[...] The Incredible Hulk #181 is now considered a holy grail comic, with even low grades commanding thousands of dollars, and #180, with the cameo, demands a pretty penny these days as well. The first-full appearance of Wolverine (#181) was published in November of 1974, though Thomas notes back then it was customary for a book to be in stores around two months before the pub date.

I'm honestly irked every time I see an emphasis on back issues sold on the speculator market, instead of how they've since become available in trade collections, paperback and hardcover. And it makes no difference that Forbes is a business magazine. That aside, would Valada have had any complaints about the late Trimpe being given clear credit for his role as artist in Wolverine's creation, if Trimpe hadn't received it properly? If not, then again, it becomes a case of selfishness. I do recall though, that the late Steve Ditko had fallouts with Lee in past decades over how he was credited as the creating artist for Spider-Man, even taking issue with Lee's statement he considered Ditko his co-creator (he said he takes issue with the word "consider"). I think Ditko was overreacting, and it's sad, because it was making far too much of a fuss over something I'm sure Ditko was given residuals over as time went by, and Jim Shooter did make an effort, however flawed, to ensure creators got certain residuals based on use of characters when he was Marvel's EIC.

I suppose the best way to give writers credit is if they receive first billing, the artist second, and the editor third or fourth. But to say editors aren't allowed even remote credit will only next lead to situations where even the inkers, colorists and letterers won't get any either. And there's doubtless plenty of those kind of employees from decades past who deserve credit of their own for bringing these creations to light. To say Marvel fans still cherish key details about Logan 50 years later, however, ignores that today, after so much deconstruction by woke writers and editors, there's not much left in terms of key details that anybody can appreciate. When bad writing and art become the norm, it's hard to appreciate anything going forward.

Labels: good artists, good writers, history, Hulk, marvel comics, msm propaganda, X-Men