Roy Thomas is a name amongst comic book greats. Despite having nearly a 60-year career in the industry, the legendary creator isn’t showing any signs of giving up just yet. In fact, Thomas recently went on a signing spree at a local comic shop that’d rival even the busiest of tables at Comic-Con.
Weeks after celebrating his 81st birthday, Thomas visited the crew at Las Vegas’ Torpedo Comics for a private in-store signing. There, as Thomas’ manager John Cimino tells us, the creator signed over 4,000 comics in a single day. To be precise, Thomas signed an astonishing 4,295 comics throughout an eight-hour period.
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Factoring in an hour-long lunch break, and three 10-minute breaks throughout the day, that means he was adding his signatureย to 11 books every minute.
“Things slowed down a bit the next day on December 3rd,” Cimino tells us. “Then, Roy went at a more reasonable pace and signed ‘only’ about 3,000 more. The man really is filled with the power cosmic.”
When we spoke with the creator last month, he tells us that these days, he primarily signs the earliest appearances of Wolverine and Ghost Rider.
“They had a lot of leftover copies of theย Infinity Incorporatedย books, so I was signing a lot of the DC stuff. But also, there’s always a lot of Wolverine now that people know that I co-created that character. And when I’m drawing, the thing I draw the most is one of the early masks of Wolverine. I do these really awful drawings,” Thomas said at the time.
He added, “The other is Ghost Rider, which is funny because they’re not two characters that I wrote. I co-created in a certain way, especially Wolverine, and Ghost Rider, I helped my wife, Gary Friedrich, Stan Lee, and Mike Ploog, all four of us working on it. And it was Gary’s original idea. And those are two characters I didn’t really write much at all. But I get The Vision, or Red Sonja and Conan. Sometimes people leave it to me, and then I draw Captain Carrot.”
