Posted in: Comics | Tagged: avengers, avengers endgame, marvel, Marvel Comics, Marvel Studios, roy thomas

Writer Of the Original Avengers: Endgame Comic Roy Thomas Just Saw the Movie [No Spoilers]

Published Thu, 25 Apr 2019 13:30:25 -0500

Last updated Thu, 25 Apr 2019 13:37:08 -0500

Once upon a time in 1971, Roy Thomas wrote the comic book Avengers: Endgame. This was around the time he co-created Captain Marvel, write the Kree/Skrull War and generally got down and dirty in the Marvel cosmic universe. Now he has just seen the Endgame movie. The following was sent to Bleeding Cool via Roy Thomas's manager, John Cimino…

Dann and I just got back an hour or two ago from our 26-hour trip to New York City to see a special premiere (just a day or so before the film opens) of Avengers: Endgame. Thanks to Marvel execs David Bogart and Brian Overton for arranging things, and for even fixing it so my buddy and manager John Cimino could join us. I was pleased to see so many fellow comics people in the audience–most of whom I get along with well, a few of whom I don't, but all of us just enjoying the movie, amid other Marvel-related workers, families, etc., in a packaged IMAX theatre (one of two or three in the complex to be hosting the premiere of the 3-hour movie). There were the likes of Danny Fingeroth (my collaborator on the TwoMorrows book The Stan Lee Universe), Larry Lieber, Glenn Greenberg, Neal Adams, Larry Hama, Frank Miller, Carla Conway, Chris Claremont… and I know that a number of others were there, too. It made me feel good to know that so many people who had actually contributed in one way or another, directly or indirectly, to the film had been honored by being invited to that pre-public screening. Me… I'd contributed relatively little to this one, just Carol Danvers (pre-Captain Marvel), Valkyrie, and, I suppose, the name "Clint Barton" for Hawkeye (his real name's used a lot, since they never seem to want to refer to him as Hawkeye)… so I could just sit back and enjoy.

And enjoy I did. Endgame is hardly my favorite of the 22 Marvel Studios films, but it would be up there in the top half or better, even if could've used maybe a half hour of trimming. It's hard to say that much more without tossing in spoilers, and I've no wish to do that. Maybe I can go into detail sometime later, when most people will have seen it. (Like, maybe in the next week!) Let me just say that, while I didn't like every solution the directors and writers made to the problems of this be-all-and-end-all film capping the first 22 flicks in the MCU, I loved a number of them… and appreciated the thought that went into even the ones that (at least for me) misfired. After all, I wasn't there to see the Avengers movie that I necessarily would have wanted to create myself, but to see what others came up with. It's a little like doing my own 70-issues-in-a-row run on Avengers back in the late 1960s and early '70s and then seeing what Steve Englehart, Roger Stern, and others did with those same characters… often from virtually the same starting-point.

There are a million stories that could be told of the Marvel Universe… though unfortunately far fewer could make it into comics over even the past six decades, and far fewer than that could become movies.

This is one of them… and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

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