Famed editor, author, writer, school teacher and all around great guy Roy Thomas was kind enough to spend a few minutes with Scoop recently.

Those who know him know that he is an encyclopedia of information, as well as an excellent storyteller. While his greatest claim to fame may be as the first editor to succeed Stan Lee at Marvel, Thomas has been active in comics and comics history since just about the time he learned to read.

One of his earliest projects was the original fanzine, Alter Ego. First published in the early 1960s on a spirit-duplicator as combination newsletter and nostalgic history, the Alter Ego of today is comfortably placed between two color covers and, on many occasions, exceeds 100 pages in content.

One of the most appealing aspects of the current run of Alter Ego is the flip cover, which is a part of the magazine through its January 2005 issue. Once or twice a year, the cover on the other side features space given to The Fawcett Collectors of America.

Scoop wanted to see if we could find out a few things about Alter Ego, so we got in touch with the editor, Roy Thomas. We are extremely grateful to Mr. Thomas for graciously returning our calls and for also spending a lot more time than he had originally planned. During our conversation, he covered the past and future of the magazine, as well as a few other topics of interest.


Scoop: What brought Alter Ego back?
Thomas: It just kind of edged in. The first thing happened was that I had been in contact with Bill Schelly on some fan projects. He had put out his own Best of Fandom. When someone reviewed that title, they had said that they would love to see Alter Ego be reprinted. So the topic came up between Bill and me, and we decided it was a good idea; I'd always wanted to do it anyway, and now I had someone who would publish it, so we worked on it together. In 1997, we did a book that featured the best of the original Alter Ego from the '60s and '70s.

Scoop: What title was it published under?
Thomas: Alter Ego: The Best of the Legendary Comics Fanzine. It collected best of what of what we could squeeze in, and sold between one and two thousand copies, I believe. We may reprint it one of these days, since it's out of print.

Scoop: Any chance some of those missed articles will see the light of day?
Thomas: Since our book didn't reprint everything we felt worthwhile, I'm putting more from the original series in AE #46, plus a reprinting of my 1969-70 Bill Everett interview with tons of art-since the original printing (and reprinting) had only a handful of illustrations. This will be the Everett interview the way we should have done it years ago, I guess. I'm using enough art to fully emphasize some of the things Bill was talking about during the original interview.

Scoop: When did the idea of a new version of the magazine come into play?
Thomas: The "Best Of" volume whetted my appetite to do more, I guess, so you can blame it all on Bill Schelly--and John Morrow and Jon B. Cooke. I saw an ad for a forthcoming new magazine, Jon's Comic Book Artist, which would be put out by John Morrow, the owner of TwoMorrows Publishing and editor of The Jack Kirby Collector. I contacted John, he put me in touch with Jon, and Jon soon invited me to make an updated version of Alter Ego the flip side of Comic Book Artist. After only one or two issues of CBA/AE had been on sale, they ganged up on me at a San Diego Con to urge me to make Alter Ego into a full magazine.

Scoop: Was this something you were jumping to do?
Thomas: I have to say that, at the time, I was reluctant. So I agreed to try a few specials-but by the time it debuted as a full magazine, we'd made it a quarterly. Next thing you know, we increased to eight times a year. Finally, we went to 12 times a year. That was because of the number of articles and interviewed that came flooding in. It has helped me to no end that I can count some people for contributions every month-like Michael T. Gilbert with his Comic Crypt, and Bill Schelly on fandom in most issues, and more recently Alex Toth, who often has great insights on the industry in which he is a major artist. Jim Amash's spate of interviews was what tipped the scales to going monthly-and interviews by him and others are still piling up faster than I can print them, alas.

Scoop: How did The Fawcett Collectors of America (FCA) end up on the flip cover?
Thomas: Editor/publisher P.C. Hamerlinck has told me since that he was thinking of discontinuing FCA as a separate entity. All I knew at the time, though, was that I contacted him to ask if I could reprint some old FCA material to help fill out AE at a time when I thought I might be in over my head. Paul said he preferred to do new material, so we did that, and he published the old material as a book called Fawcett Companion.

Scoop: How do you determine features for each issue?
Thomas: I get a lot of letters that ask me to do certain features, but the truth is, I am limited by the articles I actually get. I don't have the time to do whole issues myself, since I'm still finishing my master's thesis (just now sending off the first draft of that monster of 170 pages on the comics of the Cold War, thank God). I do suggest to some people who contact us that they write something, especially if they are the ones suggesting a feature. For every 100 pages I publish, 150 stack up. I would love to be able to use everything that gets submitted, but, for a variety of reasons, we can't use everything.

Scoop: What is one of the biggest requests you get?
Thomas: I would love to include more Silver Age, which of course is the time that I came into the field. That always is at the top of people's lists. However, right now, I feel I have to give more attention to the artists we still have with us who were around during the Golden Age. I don't just want to deal with a handful of the best known artists or publishers, I want to get out there and make sure that the lesser-knowns are also acknowledged, since they often have as much to contribute in terms of history, etc., as the better-known creators.

At the same time, I need to make sure that there are features in every issue get the readers' attention. What I really want are things that I have never heard of. I really put whatever I want to in the magazine-and as long as enough other readers are interested in that, I'll go on publishing it. Whenever they don't, I'll fold my tents and let someone else carry on. Since the magazine isn't designed to make a great profit, I see no reason to cater to other people's wishes, which I'm not too great at anyway. Luckily, several thousand people every month seem to want to read and look at some of the same things I do-though it does grate on me when someone writes in to say he isn't interested in this or that-because my immediate response is, "You damn well should be!"

Scoop: Can you give us an example?
Thomas: We are doing a special issue mostly about Matt Baker, the "good girl" artist. He did a lot of work for Fiction House and numerous romance titles. As well known as he is among collectors, he needs to be brought into the public light more. He was incredible. Speaking of Fiction House, I would like to run a major piece about them as a whole and really focus on the art, but I don't know anyone who's both willing and able to write it! Also, a lot of the art during WWII was being done by women. They did some incredible work during that time and we need to bring that fact into the spotlight. There's no end to interesting subjects.

Scoop: Your next issue focuses on the Justice Society of the 1980s, as well as the incredible work you did on Infinity, Inc.
Thomas: This promises to be one of our most popular issues ever. There is going to be a lot of interesting material that has not seen the light of day until now. I will be printing the original proposal that I made to DC for the Infinity, Inc. series in 1982, and there are some real surprises in it-including for me, when I stumbled on it and actually read it for the first time in years. I wish I could persuade other pros to dig out their own proposals. Even if a proposal never sold, the stories behind them are always interesting. People have no problem coming up with unpublished art, but for some reason they are reluctant to show the written submission that didn't sell. Sometimes, those proposals can show the road not taken. That is always interesting.

Scoop: That upcoming issue links directly back to your work on The All-Star Companion. That trade-paperback was an incredible read. We were glad to see that it went to a second printing with an update.
Thomas: That was a book about a very important comic book. I loved doing it. However, it is not the only book that should be getting that kind of detailed recognition. I'm currently working on The All-Star Companion, Vol. 2, which will be out in2005. It's been delayed by the press of work, including the master's thesis. It will deal with the original JSA and the 1960s-70s material, of course, but will focus to some extent on the All-Star Squadron and its 1940s roots, with something like a 50-50 mixture of 1940s and 1980s art, including a lot of never-seen art by Jerry Ordway, bless 'im.
On a similar note, I was asked about ten years ago by DC to put together suggestions for ways to package reprints of Infinity, Inc., but after I did it, it was never used. With all that art by Ordway and McFarlane, you would think there would be a market for these volumes. Well, actually, I'm sure there is-DC just hasn't figured it out yet. It would be nice to get as much work as possible out there, so a whole new generation can stay in touch with the history of the DC Universe-and not just the current post-continuity version, or the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths variety, which I don't much care for. I think the success of DC's great Archives series, as well as the success of trades themselves, should speak volumes about fans' thirst for interesting historical material.

Scoop: You can almost say the same thing about comics in general.
Thomas: There should be more comic strip collections being published. I really miss them. There was a golden age of newspaper comic strip reprints about 30 years or so ago, but now the emphasis seems to be on reprinting comic books. I like seeing the comic books, but we need the comic strips reprints, as well.

Scoop: Do you have any suggestions?
Thomas: I loved Smokey Stover. It would be nice to see some of those put out for the public to discover. Look how popular he was at the time. Millions read Bill Holman's work every day. The same goes for strips like The Gumps. They were just phenomenally popular. Fantagraphics has a hard time keeping Pogo going. This is nothing against them; they did a great job with the reprints. The problem is that the public doesn't know these strips are out there. I run into fewer and fewer people who ever heard of Pogo or Little Nemo or Krazy Kat. I'm glad to see Alley Oop reprints are continuing, but we need more. Lots more!


Scoop: This started out to be two questions and look where we are. We can't thank you enough for your time.
Thomas: My pleasure.

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