New Brevoort Formspring

Roderick Kingsley. Tom basically said that he conceived the Rose to be, essentially, a middle management crime figure, because he thought there’d have to be characters like that. And when he started writing him, he didn’t have any particular secret identity–it wasn’t a mystery he was deliberately building. But then, when the readers grabbed onto it in the ripple effect of the Hobgoblin identity mystery, Tom says that he decided that he needed to make the Rose some known character. And he settled on Roderick Kingsley, who was in the series at that time. But the Rose’s identity didn’t get revealed until Tom was off the book, so it wound up being somebody else.