Roy William Thomas Jr. is a prolific American comic book writer and editor, most notable to this wiki for expanding the world of Robert E. Howard's character Conan the Barbarian - who has been retroactively incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos since his early stories - in the 1970s.
As a man with a lifelong love of and strong participation in the fandom and fanzine culture of Weird Tales, including bringing out his own professional fanzine Alter Ego, Roy Thomas did more than many in driving the rediscovery and popular culture resurgence of H. P. Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction. Thomas is famous or notorious depending on one's point of view for being the first professional writer and editor in comics to really relentlessly mine the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s for pulp and comic book characters, and bringing them into the contemporary world of fiction. It is hard to imagine how revolutionary this was when he began the practice since it is now a commonplace. But it began with Thomas.
In a minor way, he began incorporating not just details of the Mythos into Marvel Comics where he was the assistant editor in chief and then editor in chief but also the sensibility of the style of story common to the Mythos, complete with repeated use of a mysterious location as a setting for stories. In the case of Thomas, this was Rutland. Vermont.[1]
Rutland was where Thomas and his wife lived in the early 1970s and as a result Thomas used it to set spooky stories such as the original "Titans Three" team-up that would become The Defenders super team, as well as having a professor of mathematics from Miskatonic University show up there during a Halloween parade - notable in the case of that story as being the very first occasion cosplay made it into popular culture.
Thomas drove the Conan craze that began in the 1970s but he equally drove the heightened awareness of the works of Lovecraft and Derleth.
Selected Bibliography[]
- The Horn of Azoth (1990)
- "Within the Mountain of Madness" (1995)
Gallery[]
