Loki: Who REALLY Created the Time Keepers

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn who the real co-creators of the Time-Keepers are as they appear on the Loki TV series.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and fifth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

The Time-Keepers were invented by Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio

STATUS:

Incomplete Enough for a False

The characters that we now know as the Time-Keepers made their debut in 1979's Thor #282 (written by Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio and drawn by Keith Pollard and Pablo Marcos), which was part of an attempt by Gruenwald to remove the ability to time travel from Thor, as Gruenwald felt that it was too powerful of an ability for the character (Gruenwald famously tried to have a sort of strict view of how time travel in the Marvel comic book universe worked, and Thor's hammer being able to travel through time wily nilly was a problem with that view).

Thor ran afoul of Immortus in the story, who got Thor to agree to strip Mjolinir of its time-travel ability in order to save the Space Phantom's people. Gruenwald also took the opportunity to sort of tie together the various appearances of Immortus over the years and try to make some sense of them and in the process, he introduced the idea that three beings had made Immortus work for them in dealing with time travel anomalies...

That above panel is therefore treated as the first appearance of the Time-Keepers. However, is that really accurate? I mean, that's certainly enough to count Gruenwald and Macchio and Pollard as having a part in the creation of the characters, but that sure seems to be a far cry from the actual Time-Keepers that we know and have seen in so many Marvel comic books over the past few decades (and now in the Loki TV series), right? They literally weren't even named the Time-Keepers!

That's why I think that Avengers West Coast #61-62 likely counts as being the co-creation of the Time-Keepers, as it was when the Time-Keepers were named and were actually depicted for the first time. Those issues, you might recall, were notable because Roy and Dann Thomas had to take over Avengers West Coast right in the middle of a storyline that writer/artist John Byrne had started dealing with the Scarlet Witch turning evil (sort of like the Dark Scarlet Witch Saga) and at the end of Byrne's final issue, Immortus showed up, so as we see in Avengers West Coast #61, the Thomases took over the book along with artists Paul Ryan and Danny Bulanadi (after Marvel did two fill-in issues to give them time to catch up to speed)...

Okay, so Roy and Dann Thomas and Paul Ryan get to throw their hat into the ring for being co-creators of the Time-Keepers, too, right? That seems fair enough.

But wait...

If you noticed, the issue opened with a little bit saying "With special thanks to R.J.M. Lofficier." That, of course, stood for Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier, a married comic book writing team (much like Roy and Dann Thomas) who had been working with Thomas on Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme for the previous year during Thomas' run on that book on a series of back-up series that delved into Marvel's magical history.

The Lofficiers would plot the stories and the Thomases would script them...

With Thomas thrown into the deep end on this Avengers West Coast story, having to catch up so quickly, Thomas once again turned to the Lofficiers to plot out essentially a back-up story, but this time it would be a back-up story that was intermixed into the main story. The Thomases plotted and scripted the main story, which saw the Avengers West Coast fight against Immortus' agents (the Legion of the Unliving) while the Lofficiers would plot out Immortus detailing his master plan to Agatha Harkness and in that master plan, the Time-Keepers were introduced...

as was the concept of Nexus beings and the Scarlet Witch's whole role in this whole to-do...

And as you can see, while they were still mostly in shadow, Paul Ryan obviously designed the Time-Keepers as their big head designs by this point, which officially debuted in the following issue...

With the characters now being named, Gruenwald quickly picked up on the Time-Keepers and used them in Quasar and then worked with the Lofficiers for a What If...? event called Time Quake where the Time-Keepers were a major focus of the story arc (a first for What If...? which was traditionally a stand-alone series or at least not crossing over with multiple alternate realities like Time Quake)...

So therefore, I think it is only fair to lump the Lofficiers in there with the Thomases, Gruenwald and Macchio (plus Pollard and Ryan for the visuals) as the creators of the Time-Keepers.

Thanks to the Unofficial Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe for its take on the topic (they agree with my position) and they have some words from Jean-Marc about the creation of the Time-Keepers.