#ROM the Spaceknight

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Rom the Spaceknight - art by Jean Frisano (1981)

[all-action-all-picture]

1980 ads for the Rom series, by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema, from Marvel.

[therobotmonster]

The Dire Wraith, Marvel's Perfect Monster

It's no secret I love ROM: Spaceknight.

I've been relatively cool on latter reboots, largely because the things they change to dodge the IP holdings of Parker Bros/Hasbro or Marvel (respectively), always lose something essential.

The largest problem is that the dire wraiths are incomparable villains, and Marvel invented all their meaningful lore. And what lore it is.

The Dire Wraiths are alien demons, creatures that come from a world orbiting a black star in the center of the Dark Nebula. They distill the paranoia of cold war pod-people infiltrators and the demon-loving satanism scare villains of the 70s (and 80s... and 90s... and...) into a single, diabolical package.

Well, two packages, actually-

The wraiths are revealed to be a highly sexually dimorphic species, both in form and social role. Male wraiths were the bulk of who we had dealt with before. They used science and stealth to their advantage.

Their base form was always a placeholder for when Parker Brothers eventually made a Dire Wraith toy for ROM to fight. They never did, so Marvel got to come up with their own finalized design.

And like comic artists are wont to do, they wanted ladies to draw. Look, the artists couldn't resist disrobing them in their first full on-page appearance. Typical.

The Dire Wraith women had been hidden in spooky robes the whole time, so this made it easy. A gender-based murderous uprising later, and we've got our new wraith phenotype.

Now that's a monster! Not some vaguely humanoid, vaguely froglike pale imp, but a starborn demon in the flesh. Froglike hands and feet with melty, loose wax-like flesh pooling about them, more adept at prowling on all fours like a predatory beast than walking like a human being, long whiplike tail, and the face! A lobster-like maw with a lengthy barbed tongue.

A barbed tongue that drips acid.

Before the ladies showed up, it wasn't explained what happened to humans the wraiths replaced. They'd get snatched, there's a replacement, you're pretty sure they're dead.

Now the truth is revealed. The tongue is used to pierce the victim's skull, allowing the wraith to devour their brain and absorb their memories and personality, reducing the whole body to foul ash.

Mind you, they don't have to do this. They can shapeshift all they want on their own. Its questionable if the males even had these barbs, and they may have been doing it like their skrull ancestors.

Yeah, the wraiths are an offshoot of the skrulls... in the same way a cenobite is an offshoot of humanity.

It's the feeding/replacing process that really makes the Dire Wraiths shine as bad guys. They take your life and everything that came with it, your memories, your shape, your identity. But it isn't some infection that changes you into one of them. There's no transition to stop, no 'real you' to reach. It's not a possession you can shake off or have exorcised.

You're dead, and some thing from space is wearing your face, doing unspeakable horror in your name, using your knowledge to do it.

And their motivation is pure malice.

The dire wraiths seek to conquer not just to acquire territory, but because they loathe other forms of life. The science wraiths were merely genocidal and ruthless, moving in secret were possible.

The sorcery wraiths embrace sadism and intimidation as primary weapons, and they love their work.

A science wraith plot is "bind a human bigot to the armor (read: corpse) of a fallen spaceknight so he can kill Rom for us and we can get back to infiltrating the world governments and SHIELD."

A sorcery wraith plot is "torture kidnapped people to death in a sewer so their blood can be infused with a ritual curse, then add that blood to the transfusion supply so demons can hatch out of the most vulnerable in the places where all the medical resources are so we can spread terror, make people afraid to seek medical attention, and kill as many doctors and nurses as possible to make reacting to our other plots more difficult."

Now, some people may say that a group of villains that are literally pure evil are boring. Sometimes this is true. But the wraiths have a couple of advantages.

The first is they're written as having an intense need to be clever. They like their enemies off-balance and afraid, so straightforward villainy is off the table. They have to show off to their fellows by being not just brutal, but diabolical.

The second is the chain of command. Moral ambiguity is for all the various dupes that wraiths set in the Spaceknights' way and individual villains looking to cause trouble, whether its the wraiths pitting the police, SHIELD, or the Jack of Hearts against Rom, the Mad Thinker looking to get a chunk of his tech, the Mole Man mucking things up, or Hybrid setting the X-Men (and later brotherhood) on Rom while plotting a mind controlled harem of X-Waifus...

The wraiths get to subsist on an unrelenting delight in the suffering of all other creatures.

And on the subject of attracting third party attention, Some of that's on the Spaceknights themselves. Because their weapons that send the Wraiths to limbo: Rom's Neutralizer, Starshine's eye-beams, Karas's living fire? The knights see the wraiths revert and get banished.

Outside observers see a metal man disintegrating their neighbors on the street. Even in defeat the Wraiths cause suffering and sow distrust.

A World that is Hell Orbiting a Star that is the Devil

But as witches, the wraiths need their devil to serve and draw power from. And that power is their home solar system: Wraithworld and the Black Sun it orbits.

Both are living things, lovecraftian horrors with will and desires of the most malevolent sort. The black sun radiates dark sorcery and vile mystical energies to sustain Wraithworld and the rest of the dark nebula, and is actually a hole to a reality that is anathema to life as we know it.

Wraithworld is hostile to all life that isn't dire wraiths, and will adjust itself to be hostile to anything that can survive it, up to and including Galactus. The big guy tried to eat both, and was soundly rebuked to the point he fled in fear for his life.

The star's entire surface is covered by an inky blackness that it turns out is hordes of deathwings, living shadow-demons that are among the most potent weapons in the wraith arsenal.

Compared to most of the marvel universe, they're more demonic than most demons, more alien than most aliens, and more horrifying than the vast majority of the monsters. The only other contenders in my book are the Warwolves (who execute a similar shtick in a more surreal and undignified fashion) and maybe the Brood on body-horror merits if they weren't overplayed.

In the end, Wraithworld may have been banished to limbo, but only a more powerful demon could keep the wraiths out of the spotlight permanently.

That demon is, of course, intellectual property.

[sandmandaddy69]

[autoacafiles]

(For the record, the Coalition of Planets does not exist in the canon, just in this side continuity.)

[artist-bearded]

Rom the spaceknight is somehow the second comic in a row I've read dealing with not feeling at home in their own body

[deepdreamnights]

Spaceknights in Training

From the 1981 "ROM the Spaceknight" TV series.

I'm going to be posting my various reference pieces for my 80s Rom Music Video through the week.

The premise of the project was "What if ROM got a TV Show in 1981." I don't think I entirely hit the mark as Vidu couldn't consistently give me the tokusatsu look I wanted for the Spaceknights and effects, but perfect is the enemy of the good, and I wanted it out in time for Valentines weekend.

And it was an excuse to do some fan-casting.

I couldn't just pick A-listers of the time, however, because if it was a Marvel project in 1981, you got Reb Brown, not Burt Reynolds.

Ron Ely as ROM. Tarzan was over, he could grow his hair out or wear a wig.

Haywood Nelson as Karas/Firefall I - Haywood would have been two years out from the end of What's Happening? and Karas's human form in the comics was yet-another-long-haired-white-guy, so a good fit in my book for Rom's best bud.

Cheryl Ladd as Landra/Starshine I - She would have been one of the major draws from the show, as an ex-Charlie's Angels actress.

Erik Hexum as Rem/Terminator - We never saw Terminator's human form or got his Galadorian name in the comics. Here he's reinterpreted as Rom's brother and Erik Hexum, because I'm still upset about Voyagers being canceled.

My thought is that a TV adaptation would use flashbacks to Galador, dream sequences, and "how I see myself" VS "the real me in the mirror" scenes to give the lead some actual face-time.

Thinking like a TV producer, matching the Galadorian uniforms to the eventual spaceknights they would become, and while i love Galador, it's civilian clothes are dorky as hell. Rom's was first, with Karas and Terminator's photoshopped and in-painted off his.

I generated roughs of them in Midjourney with a combination of text and image prompting. Once I had a stack, each of the costumes were inpainted and photoshopped, and composited faces from various 1978-1981 actor head shots both the old fashioned way and with some help from Huggingface spaces.

Video post is here.

[dynared]

Well, Year Two of the Energon Universe is in the books with the Free Comic Book Day Special, and with the spoiled appearance of Matt Trakker of M.A.S.K., albeit not looking identical to Duke anymore, it's once again time to check on the other Hasbro properties and see if any of them are viable to also enter the Energon Universe, especially with a fourth slot for the books open, since Robert Kirkman was adamant that they would not publish more than four books at a time.

Well M.A.S.K. is set, but whether they get their own book or not is a question mark. Ever since Hasbro bought the property, they have had a loose connection to G.I. Joe as separate but allied organizations, culminating in a Matt Trakker figure being released under the Joe branding.

They could easily fill the role of a private organization studying the Cybertronians, or even what the Bay movies tried and failed to do with the Order of the Wittwicians, having a group aware of the Transformers and dealing with them in secret.

ROM and the Micronauts: When it first appeared that Marvel was going to be reprinting the ROM and Micronauts stories, there were some assumptions Hasbro had given up on trying to make stories about the characters independent of Marvel. Two years later, while ROM Vol 1 is the bestselling Marvel omnibus of all time, there has been no word on trying to make a new ROM or new Micronauts story. They could potentially return to the Energon Universe but would face the same problem they did in their atrocious IDW comics, trying to rebuild the mythology of the Spaceknights and Inner Space from scratch, and not being able to use any of the characters Marvel had came up with, although Marvel’s attempt to use them without the Micronauts resulted in Quantumania, aka the moment where the public opinion of the MCU started to shift considerably more sour than at any point prior. They may be available, but it may be an incompatible mixture. I don’t suppose Marvel is interested in them again, are they?

Action Man - Originally the branding for European releases of the original G.I. Joe figures licensed by Hasbro to British company Palitoy, Action Man was eventually turned into a do-it-all super spy when Hasbro directly bought the rights to the franchise, both as a competitor to Mattel’s Max Steel toyline and TV show (which also was about an extreme athlete turned spy. No word on whether or not the XXX franchise also took inspiration). A spy character could work as a supporting character for another book, but the last time Hasbro tried to do an Action Man comic, it died in four issues, leading Hasbro to awkwardly shove him into the critically panned low selling Revolutionaries comic. He may just not be worth the hassle to be his own star, but can work better as a supporting role.

The Visionaries - While it was originally believed that after the failure of Transformers vs Visionaries that the Knights of the Magical Light would be shoved into a corner to be forgotten, they get namedropped in Void Rivals. Furthermore, unlike the IDW versions, Hot Rod appears to have a rather favorable opinion of them, speaking fondly about a “Prysmodian wedding” (Prysmos being the planet where Visionaries takes place). They could easily be the focus of a Void Rivals arc where our heroes (depending on who you follow the book for, that’s either Darak or Solia, the titular Void Rivals, or Hot Rod and Springer, who seem to be on half the covers to boost sales) visit the planet while the magical war is going on. But getting their own series might be tougher.

Hell, so far that seems to be the issue with a lot of the non-Joe/TF franchises that could theoretically be in the Energon Universe. They would be potential interesting additions to the stories of G.I. Joe and the Transformers, but are far less likely to carry their own books. That leaves one Hasbro property, one that IDW adored even when it sold like crap. One Hasbro seems to have declared radioactive.

Jem and the Holograms.

Yes, Jem.

https://youtu.be/m6G_o1MYECg?si=ekg9_H_lVSs5xB8V

The theme song may say Jem is truly outrageous, but after the legendary failure of the Jem movie (less than $2 million profit on a paltry $5 million budget) and the comics from IDW selling the worst out of all of the Hasbro licenses, Hasbro tends to think she’s truly radioactive.

She has been mentioned ONCE during the Energon Universe’s run, in a letters page in the Cobra Commander miniseries from writer Joshua Williamson.

You know, there might be something to this. But it would be a radical departure from Jem as was done in IDW and might just piss off just about everybody.

What if Jem was a Dreadnok, or at the least, a member of Cobra? Someone whose family went into a cause that she could care less about when she just wants to sing? Only now she’s potentially armed with Cobra technology which she can use to start her music career, including a computer that will allow her to assume a disguise so no one know who she is.

The only problem is that she’s still a homicidal Dreadnok, one not afraid to kill anyone who starts with her. Think Hannah Montana meets Dexter.

If that’s too radical a departure for Jem, the alternative is Jem being someone who is trying to start a career, only to run smack dab into the insanity that is the Energon Universe. Cobra saboteurs because someone thinks a band called Cold Slither is good PR. Alien technology and robots interested in music. Black market tech and battles when she just wants to sing.

It would potentially be the most radically different of all the EU books no matter what route you chose, but a slice of life/music story in the same universe as all the shooting and robot wrasslin could potentially open up a lot of possibilities as to how the world has changed. The question remains is if Jem could attract an audience. A similar issue occurred with DC’s attempts to make Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld a thing and how DC could not find a market for her, because she was a character that was meant to appeal to young girls, constantly given to people and put in stories that wanted nothing to do with young girls, resulting in what can best be described as Tryhard horror stories that appealed to no one.

So two years later, it seems we have a lot of supporting characters, but no one who could lead a fourth book. Don’t suppose anyone at Skybound wants to write a Shinkalion comic, do they?

[luimnigh]

Wait, Forge was first introduce creating weapons to help fight the Dire Wraiths?

Fucking hell, ROM is really integral to a lot of Marvel characters.

[leresqbricks]

My custom Rocket Raccoon villain, Spaceknight! 🌌

A disgraced and unnamed survivor of the Galadorian race, Spaceknight desires to use a Cosmic Cube to resurrect his dead planet on top of Xandar

[ariel-seagull-wings]

@thealmightyemprex @piterelizabethdevries @themousefromfantasyland @professorlehnsherr-almashy @themetropoliskonboy

"Yes, it seems Rick Jones and Brandy put out a distress call for the heroes of Earth to come to ROM's aid.

And they all answered.

And that, everyone, is why it's nice to be a professional sidekick sometimes. You make so many friends.

And like with "The Technis Imperative", we see that an event doesn't need to have the death of characters in order to show how serious the situation is or to cause drama.

"ROM" is not an event comic. Hell, it's a toy-licensed comic for a toy that wasn't even being sold anymore.

And yet, after 65 issues of ROM fighting alone, the stakes growing larger and larger, seeing the threat the Wraiths bring first-hand, and the fate of the world unclear, we can see in this story something more awesome and glorious than half the big crossover event comics where heroes are slaughtered for no good reason, or heroes fighting each other, or the dark, dreary depression that comes with some of those tales.

The superheroes of the Marvel Universe stand alongside ROM and fight a great evil.

We're invested in these characters after everything they've been through: emotional connection, a difficult journey, and a triumphant finale.

That's all you need!"

(LINKARA: ATOP THE FOURTH WALL - THE ROMTROSPECTIVE, #41-75)

[texasthrillbilly]

[all-action-all-picture]

Rom has come...evil is on the run! 1979 ad for Rom the Spaceknight from Parker Brothers.

[therobotmonster]

It's 1981. Drunk on power, the executives at Marvel Productions greenlight a ROM: Spaceknight TV series made possible with a new whiz-bang special effects by the best Tokusatsu FX team they can blackmail into doing it.

The series ran for three years, with a couple of follow up direct-to-TV movies, keeping on budget with frequent flashbacks to Galador that let ROM be out of costume.

Of course, all of this is 100% unreality in this ramshackle universe.

The usual tutorials and breakdowns are to come. For now, enjoy some Spaceknights in Love.

[sandmandaddy69]

[daydreamerdrew]

The Incredible Hulk (1968) #296