Marvel Masterworks - Omega the Unknown
This review is based on the Kindle™ edition of the book.
The cover says that it collects issues #1 - #10 of Omega the Unknown and issues #76 - #78 of The Defenders. That’s not correct. Defenders #78 isn’t in this collection, nor does it need to be.
I had Omega #5 and the two Defenders issues as a kid. Going back and re-reading those issues plus the entirety of the series, plus the intro by Mary Skrenes and the lettercols that they added, it makes a bit more sense.
Omega the Unknown is the story of James-Michael Starling, a 12-year-old boy who had been home-schooled by reclusive parents. When the family gets into a car accident, he finds that his parents were robots. He has visions of and later sees this strange costumed man. He ends up living in Hell’s Kitchen which is a very foreign world to the intellectual James-Michael Starling.
The costumed man (Omega) is an alien. He exhibits superhuman qualities. Super strength, leaping that looks like flying, some low-level telekinesis, and (when the chips are down) he can manifest energy blasts from the palms of his hands leaving glowing stigmata shaped like the letter “Omega” from the Greek alphabet. Manifesting these blasts causes Omega a great deal of pain.
In a short while, James-Michael also manifests these blasts.
The punch line to the whole story is that they’re both aliens. An alien race had a dying planet and wanted to provide a means for their successors to survive, so they began biologically engineering replacements that could comingle with members of other planets.
James-Michael Starling was sent to Earth. Omega was sent to another planet where he trained in combat. Unknown to his parent race, his new race found a way to harness “biospheric energy” … a powerful force that let Omega shoot bolts of energy from his hands. Through their symbiotic link, James-Michael also begins manifesting this energy.
The alien race proclaims this experiment with the two of them a failure and they dispatch alien goombahs to kill Omega and James-Michael.
There’s a bit of a nod to Superman that’s referred to outside of the stories here. Really, I think the sci-fi content was just a backdrop so that Gerber and Skrenes could tell the story of what it was like to grow up in Hell’s Kitchen. In fact, I think Gerber wrote himself into the story as a kid that (in the comic) got killed after being beaten by punks.
Gerber and Skrenes are really proud of this body of work. There was some required inclusion of Marvel villains and heroes but it was kind of its own story. There were a couple of issues where someone else (Roger Stern in one case) wrote the story, but it was mostly the vision of Gerber and Skrenes. I think that the two of them probably think that it was a game-changer of some sort, but it really wasn’t. I enjoyed the stories well enough on the re-read but it’s not like I went away in awe of what they think they pulled off. They really thought that by putting a 12-year-old boy at the forefront of the story, it was going to resonate more with 12-year-old boys … you know … not seeing him as a sidekick or anything. Skrenes’ foreword mentions this, but I just don’t think 12-year-old boys would relate. I was about that age at this time and James-Michael seemed like a 12-year-old Spock who could shoot energy blasts if he had to.
Recommendation: That said, I think if you liked Marvel comics of the late 70’s, you might enjoy this title.