I don’t normally post press releases, but this one’s pretty cool. Heroic Publishing will be releasing a new Roy Thomas series (ANTHEM) in a short while, and they got Thomas to basically write a love letter to the WWII superhero comics he’s been writing off and on for the last 30-odd years. I’ve always been a fan of his All Star Squadron stuff from DC, so ‘Anthem’ may end up being right up my alley - we’ll see.

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A Hymn to ANTHEM
A preview of Roy Thomas’ ANTHEM can be found on the Heroic Publishing website at www.heroicpub.com/previews/anthem1.jpg

On January 25, 2006, Heroic Publishing will present the first issue of Roy Thomas’ ANTHEM, a new series set in the darkest days of World War II, in a world decidedly different from our own. Recently, we caught up with Roy and asked him some comments on ANTHEM, which he was kind enough to provide:

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If I want to do something, I never give up trying… and sometimes, not always but sometimes, it pays off.

Ever since THE INVADERS was cancelled at Marvel in the late 1970s (and even more so since I wrote a four-issue INVADERS mini-series about ten years ago)–

And even more so ever since I developed ALL-STAR SQUADRON for DC, only to see it undermined by DC’s wish to combine all its intriguing alternate Earths into one big happy world–

–people have been asking me if I’d like to do either or both series again. The answer, of course, has always been a resounding yes… but nothing has ever come of my several attempts in that direction.

At various times in the 1990s, I sent concepts for a series I wanted to do to the appropriate editors at both Marvel and DC, in that order–one for an alternate-Earth INVADERS, one for an alternate-Earth ALL-STAR SQUADRON–with the subtitle “World War II–You Only THINK You Know Who Won!”

My idea–which actually I had been on the verge of proposing to DC around the time the plug was pulled on ALL-STAR SQUADRON due to that damnable CRISIS–was to have the “reality” of the WWII-set series I was writing suddenly begin to veer off in a direction that was contrary to known history, so that the INVADERS series (or ALL-STAR SQUADRON, in the DC version) would henceforth exist in an alternate universe, a la Earth-Two and the like, in which anything could happen. No longer would the readers know that the tide of war would begin to turn for the Allies vs. the Axis in 1942, with the war ending in spring 1945 in Europe and a few months later, after the A-bomb blast over Hiroshima, in the Pacific.

In this new reality, for all the readers knew, the Axis might totally destroy London or New York or Los Angeles… might even win the war. To signal this new anything-can-happen approach, I suggested killing off both Captain America and President Roosevelt in the INVADERS version (I figured, hey, just about any reader would have heard of at least ONE of that pair)… and several prominent JSAers/Squadders along with FDR in the DC version a bit later.

I never got much in the way of response from the editors to whom I sent them. I suppose expecting professional treatment, even if it was only polite rejection, after my more than three decades in the field at the time, was too much to ask.

Around the same time, writer/artist Rob Liefeld used a WWII grouping called The Allies in a few scenes in one of his Image titles; so, in conjunction with my old HULK collaborator Herb Trimpe, I suggested to Image editor Jim Valentino the notion of our doing an ALLIES comic. Jim said Rob liked the idea… but then nothing happened.

So when a proposal to start an “online comics” company came my way in the late 1990s, I submitted a variation of the notion there, as well, and it was favorably received… but that whole project never really got off the ground.

Then, at the very end of the 1990s, enter Dude Comics–which, despite its very American name, is a small Spanish comics company that had just been founded. I was asked to write a regular series for them, and I made up the idea of ANTHEM–its title inspired not only by our own national anthem, but by the title ANTHEM given to a novel by Ayn Rand. For a lark, I decided to name as many of Anthem’s members as I could after phrases in the Star-Spangled Banner, which led me up some strange creative alleys, but was fun to do.

By this time, Herb had declined to proceed, and several different artists were tried out for the project by Dude. Jesus Merino (who has since done work for US publishers) did some of the initial concept drawings from my ideas, but then got too busy with his other work to do the actual comic, so Daniel Acuna stepped in to draw ANTHEM #1. With #2 (and an alternate cover of #1), Jose Santamaria Garcia became the artist. I feel fortunate to have had three such talented artists all contributing to the mix that is ANTHEM.

As for the storyline–well, I suppose it’s the latest incarnation of the “everything you know is wrong” concept, but this time, instead of it being everything about Superman or Spider-Man that the reader thinks he “knows” being transformed, it’s World War II itself that is changed beyond recognition–starting in the middle of the war, some months after a Pearl Harbor which was a quite different affair from the one you caught on the History Channel the other night. Like, there were no flying saucers or Godzilla-sized monster attacking the Americans at Honolulu on Dec. 7, 1941–unless I missed something in history class.

Although the market wasn’t right for this book in Spain in 2000, one issue was published there, and I plotted several more. Indeed, the pencils were finished for #2 and #3 by Jose Santamaria Garcia, and those are the first three issues you’ll see from Heroic Publishing, all in full color, with (we hope) many more to come.

Because there’s nothing I’d rather do than examine super-heroes in a World War II setting for the rest of my natural-born days…

–Roy Thomas

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