Rose (Marvel Comics)

The Rose is an alias used by several fictional characters appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The original Rose first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #253 (June 1984), and was created by writer Tom DeFalco.

Tom DeFalco recounted:

When I created the Rose, I wanted a character in middle management. We had all the big crimelords, and then the second-tier crimelords, and this guy was supposed to be second-tier. He doesn't fight, he hires people to do the fighting. I put him in a mask to make him distinctive. It was not a plan that he would have a secret identity. But at some point later on, I was reading something about the big mystery of "Who is the Rose?" I didn't realize there was a mystery! So I realized I'd have to come up with something for the Rose, and I figured I'd use Roderick Kingsley, because we'd already eliminated him as the Hobgoblin but he fit perfectly as the Rose.

DeFalco was fired from The Amazing Spider-Man by editor Jim Owsley before he could reveal the Rose's identity. A subsequent issue of Web of Spider-Man, written by Owsley, revealed the Rose to be Richard Fisk.

The character of Rose is depicted as a well-dressed, calm, calculating and gentleman-like crime lord who favors roses and wears a leather, lilac-colored mask.

The first version of Rose was Richard Fisk, the son of Wilson Fisk, who sought to overthrow his father after learning the latter was the Kingpin of Crime. He later became a Punisher-like vigilante, calling himself Blood Rose. He was eventually shot dead by his own mother Vanessa Fisk. However, he is later brought back by his father using the tablet of life.

The second version of Rose was Sergeant Blume (first name unrevealed), a police officer seeking revenge on the Kingpin for the death of his brother, another policeman. While Blume allied himself with Richard in hopes of doing good by breaking the Kingpin's hold on the city, he ended up implicated in several crimes while in the Kingpin's service. He ultimately was shot and killed in a confrontation with Richard's men in the Catskills after he had kidnapped Peter Parker's Aunt May and wife Mary Jane Watson, mistakenly thinking that Peter had discovered information that would blow the lid off of the Kingpin's organization, thus revealing Blume as a double agent.

The third version of Rose was Jacob Conover, a reporter at the Daily Bugle, who took up the Rose identity as payment for saving the life of crime lord Don Fortunato many years earlier. He was loyal solely to Fortunato, as the Kingpin had not returned to power at the time, and his principal enforcer was the cyborg powerhouse known as Delilah. Conover faced a repeated threat to his territory from the Argentinian crime lord known as the Black Tarantula, eventually being present without his Rose disguise when the Tarantula launched a direct assault on Fortunato's home. Preparing to gun down the Tarantula and a roomful of witnesses, Conover was stopped by Spider-Man and carted off to jail.