Co-creator Roy Thomas commented on the character's conception, "The Black Knight was a combination, visually, of the Black Knight that Stan Lee and Joe Maneely made up in the mid-1950s, with the concept Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had done as a villain of that name, complete with winged horse, in The Avengers. There was also a bit of an homage in there to a DC hero I'd liked in the 1940s, Shining Knight. I shouldn't have named his horse Aragorn, though. I wasn't even that great an admirer of The Lord of the Rings. John Buscema, was scheduled to be the artist of the story that introduced Dane Whitman dressed in the Black Knight costume into THE AVENGERS, but that wound up being a guest stint by George Tuska when Stan Lee took John off the book for one issue to do something else. It was John Verpoorten and I that designed the costume."