Daily Comic Book Mission #019: ROM Spaceknight #1

Alright, gather round and prepare to accept your daily comic book mission from ComicBook.beer. The greatest website in the universe, combining comic books and beer and giant robots and laser beams.

All of these things are great, and so are the 1970s, which is why I'm taking it back to 1979 for today's mission, today's mandatory suggestion that you go out and get yourself a copy of Rom Space Knight issue number one from December of 1979. You know, if people were smart, which they're not, they would have just stopped time that month and just like just stopped it right there. I mean, yeah, the eighties were awesome, but like you could have just quit it. 1979 was like the peak of human civilization when you really get down to it.

Alright, maybe like 1982 if you want to take into account, you know some 80s music and Atari games and whatnot, but definitely need to stop civilization from evolving past woodgrain and into the internet era. So the internet is bad, woodgrain is good, and ROM Spaceknight is also good and I've been pretty excited about this whole era of Marvel comics. 1979, because I'm putting together a larger podcast on Shogun Warriors, which also started in 1979. And ROM and Shogun Warriors are kind of similar in one respect. They're both based on toys. I didn't realize ROM was based on a toy, but sure enough, there's a Parker Brothers toy or action figure, and they built the comic book around it. And Shogun Warriors, same thing, they built the comic book around Shogun Warriors except it didn't last that long which is incredible because I think Shogun Warriors is the better series but ROM went on for quite some time and you can get uh some omnibuses of the ROM comics if you don't want to go out and hunt down the actual issues though they are not expensive. I picked up a stack of ROM comic books and if you look on the website you'll notice that the first one, the issue number one here that I'm talking about is a uh...

It's like, guess a modern reprint. I didn't even realize I bought this. It's the facsimile edition. It's a hard word to say sometimes. Facsimile edition, which I believe was released in 2023. Looks like Marvel got the ROM license from, I think, Hasbro at this point. Originally, it must have been Parker Brothers. And uh, so this is my first facsimile edition comic book that I bought by mistake. I really should have looked closer, but I was so excited about picking up all these old ROM issues.

It doesn't bother me one way or the other. It's a good read, so you can go out and pick up the facsimile edition or the classic 1979 edition, whichever one you want, or the omnibus. Really, it doesn't matter to me. It does matter to Rom, though, who's a space knight.

And the first issue is titled Arrival. And this is illustrated by Sal Buscema, the brother of John Buscema, who did so much Conan the Barbarian work that I love. And Bill Mantlo is the writer. Did a lot of great stuff in this genre. So, Rom is like this silver robot thing. This whole issue, this whole series, kind of reminds me of War of the Worlds meets They Live, the John Carpenter movie with Rowdy Roddy Piper. Because ROM is this space knight, he's, the beginning of the story starts off where Rom crash lands on Earth, and then he's almost run over by this woman driving a sports car, so he trashes the car and then he shoots her with this red beam and she thinks she's gonna die but in fact it's an energy analyzer that just tells whether or not she's a human being or a wraith and the wraiths are the bad guys so this is a lot like They Live.

This whole issue reminds me of War of the Worlds meets John Carpenter's They Live with Rowdy Roddy Piper wearing the sunglasses. The sunglasses in the movie showed who were humans and who were aliens and in ROM Spaceknight, his red energy analyzer, which must have been fun to play with on the action figure, showed who was a human and who was a wraith. So Rom ends up in town, like this 1970s town filled with a bunch of 1970s primitives, and he shoots all the people with his energy analyzer. They think he's attacking them, but in fact he's just analyzing who's a human and who's an evil wraith. And then he discovers two wraiths in the crowd and shoots them for real, with real laser beams.

I hope that the action figure had real laser beams, that would be so awesome. And then they call in the National Guard, because they don't know. And then we get the legend of the Space Knights here, which is like the next part of the story, which tells the backstory of Rom, who is from Galador. He's a Galadorian. I guess they were attacked by the Wraiths, who then summoned this giant space monster that almost killed all of them. Then Rom was like a volunteer. The Galadorians looked like humans. They looked like people!

And they were turned into cyborgs and powerful cyborgs who fought the wraiths, but then this giant space creation kills everybody but ROM who flies away and in search of wraiths who are on other planets including Earth and then the story picks back up with ROM making a mockery of the National Guard and like destroying their tanks and incinerating some of the soldiers who are wraiths but once again they don't know this. They think he's just killing everybody but he's really targeting evil aliens.

And there's an ad in here for the action figure. "ROM has come. Evil is on the run." And look, you do get a plastic blinky red light kind of thing here. ROM's energy analyzer lights up bright red and makes strange electronic sounds. Ooh, I'm all in for strange electronic sounds. Those are my favorite kinds of sounds. There's an ad in here for Spider-Man meets June Jitsu. And they're both advertising Hostess Twinkies, which are good, but not nearly as good as Hostess Fruit Pies. Anyway, that's your Daily Comic Book Mission. Get out there and experience some of the 1970s greatest science fiction in comic book form, the first issue of ROM Spaceknight. I like this one a lot. It's a little confusing, but it's just nuts. It's kind of like Shogun Warriors. It's like we had these, we've got these Transformers also. We've got these toys. Let's make up some ridiculous story, turn it into a comic book and it works because that's what comic books are good for. They're good for being ridiculous. And ROM's a lot of fun, so check it out. Daily Comic Book Mission issue number one. The facsimile edition is alright. I do like that there's nice bold colors. And they even include the classic ads. That's one of the things with the facsimile editions is they have the old ads, but it does lose the character of the old crappy paper quality.

But still not bad. Five bucks, not a bad pickup. ROM, Spaceknight. Fabulous first issue is your Daily Comic Book Mission.