A Marvel 80s Hanukkha for 2024

Now this one here I retrieved from my fan art archives. It's the only Jewish culture and ROM crossover piece I've ever come across and unfortunately I still don't know who the artist is because I sure would have a few questions for him or her about it. The four or five of you who will see this posting probably aren't old enough to recognize the little "girl" here. She's an android from this late 80s sitcom called Small Wonder. This artist had a quite a vivid imagination. Well, Happy Hanukkha whoever you are. 

 

I really wanted to close out the year with some original fan art of my own so in honor of the first night of Hanukkah I came up with this sketch card a couple days ago. There ofcourse are a number of other Jewish characters from Marvel Comics such as Moon Knight and Alpha Flight's Sesquatch but I decided to use the ones that I think worked best for this gathering around the menorah scene. Please spare a thought and maybe even a prayer for the hostages still in the terrorist Hell hole of gaza who will be missing their second Hanukkah in a row now. Bring Them Home Now!

January 18th Update: Tomorrow will be the first day of phase 1 for the ceasefire for the hostages deal. Let's hope it holds and eventually results in the release of all the hostages in the coming weeks from those hamas bastards. 

Anyways, on a much much less serious topic . . . images of these new Marvel Legends action figures have turned up yesterday on social media. At exactly 20:20 in this presentation video we get a detailed look and description of the ROM figure.

https://www.youtube.com/live/u0wYt4ysVm8?t=1199s

Happy Birthday To Me

This is some fan art by Greek artist Kapandais Nikolaos that's based on the unpublished pages from Cloak & Dagger featuring Sabra as seen in the previous posting. I've had this art work for a little while now but I've been waiting for the right time to feature it as I love to do with good fan art. So with it being my birthday today I guess this is a good time as a treat to myself.

Coincidentally I also discovered this new fan art commission by artist Jeff Slemmons which was posted to Comic Art Fans just a few days ago. I would definitely say this is the best ROM related fan art for 2024 I've come across. ROM blasting away Dire Wraiths is nothing new when it comes to ROM fan art including this year with a fictitious cover by Bob Layton and a 3D rendering I saw on farcebook more recently that was kinda cool. But Slemmons does it best here hands down. 

https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=2074609

 December 12 Update: And look what else I just found! A new commission piece by one of the best and possibly most under rated Marvel 80s artists Ron Frenz. All that aside I'm always happy to have more Jewish superheroes in my posts.

 December 21 Update: Here's the color version. I can't decide which version I like better . . . 

https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=2079247

A New Comic Book Day unlike we've seen for decades now

Last month we had a New Comic Book Day that had a unique ring of nostalgia to it that even a few months ago I would not have believed would have ever been possible. Even though just a reprint, it was nice to see ROM back on the shelves of a comic shop in the new comics section. I didn't pick up the copy you see here I had already a couple days before placed an order for a foil cover variant. Unfortunately when I showed yesterday to pick it up I found out those dumbasses somehow ordered a standard copy for me. I was so pissed, it's really something else check it out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmCH08g_RYU

And just to be clear, I'm talking about the genuine article and not the pale and pathetic imitation that was a commercial flop from idw publishing. Same goes for idw's MICRONAUTS reboot.

All this buzz about the ROM facsimile variants along with all the other upcoming ROM reprint projects has got me in a nostalgic mood this weekend so here's some new fan art. This one is a tribute to ROM 63 which was what I considered to be the last issue from the series where the art work was still decent. Plus it was always one of my favorite covers of the series.

https://viewcomiconline.com/rom-63/

 

I recently came across some Marvel Over Power cards for Sabra I had never seen before. I like the art work on them (artist/s unknown unfortunately) it's almost like discovering new fan art. 

October 9 Update: Speaking of all things Israel, I'm sure even those of you who are not much into politics have heard something about the war that broke out in Israel thanks to what was nothing short of an invasion by those iranian regime backed jihadi nazi mother fuckers in gaza. This is a photo I took of the scene in Redwood City yesterday which is about 30 minutes south of San Francisco on the other side of The Bay from where I live.

I have something better then flowers for Valentine's Day this year

Although this piece has been around for well over 2 years, for reasons unknown this is still largely undiscovered by ROM fans. I'm a bit more partial to ROM fan art that's a bit more creative theme wise, but still I gotta say I've got nothing but love for this one. Not because Valentine's Day is just around corner, but because the figure composition in this piece is so perfect along with how ROM's armor looks with this artist's (Idan Knafo) particular style. And the colors, the colors are almost down right mesmerizing. This is where I found it . . .

https://twitter.com/artofidan/status/1330456189294043136 

This is actually something I threw together in photoshop several years ago with some borrowed 3D renderings  I found online but for some reason I never posted it. But back then this piece only consisted of Brandy Clark and Hybrid. Thanks to photos that have turned up on social media in the past year or so of Alberto Diaz's insanely awesome custom electronic ROM doll I now can include him in the scene. 

For those of you who have never read ROM Annual 3 or maybe it's been a while I included this clip art in order to give the art work some context. That last panel still grosses me out to this day

I just by chance discovered this cool Sabra art work which belonged to a podcast episode from early December last year. The episode covered part of the Operation Zero Tolerance story arc in which Sabra was temporarily teamed up with some members of  The X-Men (Ice-Man and Marrow) as well as with Dr. Cecilia Reyes. Hopefully most of you noticed the Giant Sized X-Men Annual 1 cover art homage in David Wynne's art piece here.

February 14th Update: A poll closed this afternoon on the BacktotheBronzeAge twitter page. They periodically have these polls and sometimes ROM shows up in one of the categories. If memory serves me right, more often then not his category gets the most votes just like it did today. ROM had an early lead but toward the end The Micronauts started to close the gap but couldn't quite catch up by the time the poll closed.

Something Dire This Way Comes

Last weekend I got this idea to do a spot light piece for the dire wraiths. I wanted to do something in particular that was as menacing and creepy as possible with out depicting any sort of out right gore. My fan art that includes the wraiths usually features them getting banished, dismembered, stabbed or blown up so I decided to do something a bit different this time. Ofcourse I could never do anything that would come even close to the days of Bill Mantlo's writing, Sal Buscema's pencils with Akin & Garvey inks. But I'm pretty happy with this sci-fi horror movie poster kinda look that resulted from my efforts.

 

 

It's been quite a while since we've seen ROM or any reference to him in any sort of publication. But at least in this month's issue of BACK ISSUE magazine 137 he gets a name drop in an article about Power Lords which was a short lived toy line that DC Comics made into a 3 issue mini-series. It's nice to see that ROM still gets some recognition today when it comes to published articles about comics from licensed properties of the 70s and 80s despite more then two decades of Marvel's poor attempts at continuity for the original series and ofcourse idw's atrocious reboot. All of which can be said for The Micronauts as well.

And speaking of invasions by evil and vile creatures, please stand with Ukraine.

 

ROM's Cafe

Located on A street in Hayward California I swear when I first saw this place the logo looked like it was directly taken off from any issue of the ROM spaceknight series. Just a coincidence I'm sure but pretty cool to see just the same.

A new commission fan art piece by artist Jim Califiore. Well I'm posting it here so obviously I like it and I don;t even mind the minor artistic liberties Califiore took with ROM's armor. In fact, this is a nice basis of what IDW's reboot could have looked like. I'm quite positive this would have gone over much better with the fan base both new and old.

 

One of the things I love about fan art is that you don't have to worry about any sort of legal red tape when it comes to who you want to feature together. This latest here is by you're truly. I've had this cross over character concept idea for a while now I'm glad I finally got around to getting to it.

 

I spotted this a couple days ago along the side of some kind of portable office for a moving company in San Francisco. Just another good example of the cool public art you can find around here when it comes to all things comics and sci-fi.The first two films from the ALIEN franchise were absolutely classic iconic sci-fi horror and I love em both. However, I can't say the same for the rest unfortunately. 

I was recently reflecting on the "ROM Remix" project from several years ago https://romremix.tumblr.com/ as a concept it was kinda cool but ultimately poorly executed due to the poor quality artists that contributed to the project. The lone exception being Robert Duckett who did page 4. He did a fairly good job especially in the first few panels.

Finally! An animated series from marvel that doesn't suck. The Black Panther

I'm only 2 episodes into this 6 episode Black Panther series and I'm already convinced that this is the first good animated series from Marvel Comics in over 20 years! What makes it so good exactly? I'm glad you asked. First of all, it's well written. And not just because it's boarder line R rated with shit like booby traps that impale people and villains seeing prostitutes. It's funny with out being campy, touches on social issues like religion and race in a very fearless way and is heavily steeped in history and international politics in something of a James Bond kinda fashion. It takes everything that was good about The Black Panther movie and expands on it but at the same time it feels a little more like the Black Panther you grew up with in the Marvel Comics universe. I usually expect this type of sophistication in animated features from DC so it was nice to see it in Marvel for a change.

Did I mention all the appearances by other characters in the Marvel Universe? Even within the first few episodes you'll see over a half dozen of those. Here's Captain America while on a covert mission in Wakanda having something of a misunderstanding with Black Panther during WW II.

So far, I really can't say enough good things about this animated series and it's got me even more stoked for Avengers Infinity War later this month. Who doesn't love Storm right? And you'll get to see several other X-Men to.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to get back with my Black Panther binge watching today on Youtube. I'm trying to get through the rest of the episodes (just 3 more to go) before I have to go to bed it's Monday tomorrow and we all know what that means.

So here we are a few hours later and I managed to finish watching all 6 episodes and even our sweet little 12 year old corgi beagle mix (Chevy) enjoyed it. So much so that we managed to get her to hold still just long enough to get this adorable photo. So in closing folks this was some really good stuff and little did I know this series goes back to 2011.



Episodes 1 - 6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry8e5ldzLDQ&t=667s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGTw6pfKayg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWr5oIRueTQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF2OWH7vghQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Q721QWX2w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBm2-TPxIuY&t=2s

Also yesterday, I saw this on the news and it had me cracking up so I recorded it with my iphone and posted it on youtube.

Captain America vs nazi scum david duke

It seems appropriate to open this posting with this bad ass Sabra splash page (Patrick Zircher) from New Warriors 59 that I've been looking for an excuse to post for a few months now.

I gotta say I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I only recently learned about a twitter feud between Chris Evans and the piece of shit Jew hating trump supporting kkk nazi asshole david duke going all the way back to February of this year. Talk about missed by the mainstream media! I'm not gonna bother to post the actual tweets here because they're easy enough to find through a Google search but suffice it to say the feud started over duke expressing his disapproval of the sort of women Chris Evans has been known to date. Being the classy guy that he is, Evans responded to duke's white supremacy fueled ramblings with some heart felt and thoughtful rebukes as opposed to the more straight up ad hominem attacks I would have unloaded on duke.
Now that being said, I certainly hope the obvious irony here isn't lost on any of you. Captain America, who is a virtuous symbol of American idealism is a character that was created by a couple of Jewish guys. And as you all know he's been fighting his entire super hero career against every incarnation of nazi ideology from the 3rd Reich during WW II to Hydra and The Red Skull. So now you've got Chris Evans, who as a person seems to be almost as virtuous as the character of Captain America he plays. Who also happens to have had a series of heated twitter exchanges with a real life nazi based on their ideological differences. Chris Evans may only be a regular guy in the real world but he's no less of a hero then the Avenger he plays so very well.

Left click to enlarge

So let's close out this posting with another match up that's a little less ideologically charged. Hopefully most of you remember the classic ROM vs The Herculoids 4 page sketch story arc from Ron Joseph a couple years ago. Some other artist on deviant art did a fantastic job of coloring the last page. Hopefully we'll get to see the other pages in color in the not so distant future.

The original uncolored Ron Joseph pages....
https://www.deviantart.com/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-inks-pg01-545293978
https://www.deviantart.com/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-inks-pg02-547745355
https://www.deviantart.com/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-pencils-pg03-544320568
https://www.deviantart.com/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-pencils-pg04-05-544320573

ROM the action figure arrival for 43 dollars

Left click to enlarge

Left click to enlarge

Well here we go folks my figure just arrived in the mail. Yep, I just decided to say fuck it and hit that "Buy Now" button on ebay when I saw it for only $43 with free shipping. That was by far the cheapest deal I had come across after having looked around for the past couple weeks. I didn't really see much point in waiting another two weeks or a month on the chance it turns up by another seller for a few bucks less I just wanted to see what the figure is like beyond photos on the internet sooner then later. Plus the seller I bought it from very quickly answered my questions before I committed to the purchase which pretty much was the final selling point, customer service really can go a long way with prospective buyers. As for the dealer you might be interested to know according to him he purchased two of the Hasbro sets for the express purpose of breaking them apart and selling off the individual pieces. So now that I have it I'm pretty happy with it despite what ever imperfections it might have. Shit, I don't understand why there aren't any better photos of this thing on the internet it's virtually as articulate as a Micronauts or G.I.Joe figure. As an over all product for a ROM fan it is still profoundly more satisfying then the the poorly handled ROM related continuity from marvel in the past 17 years and more recently that horrible mighty mugg doll and ofcourse IDW's Rom in name only series. Coolest ROM spaceknight merchandise I've gotten since my T-shirt from Redbubble a while back . . .
http://romspaceknightart.blogspot.com/2014/09/gods-of-galador-my-new-rom-t-shirt-fits.html

Any of you out there watch The Defender's first season yet? I went through the whole season last Sunday and damn I have to say it was pretty good. I know the whole independent heroes becoming reluctant allies thing in the Marvel Universe might be a bit of a cliche at this point but it's still fun as hell to watch if it's written well as was the case also for The Avengers. The chemistry between the characters is great and the quips gave me more then a few good laughs. The other strong selling point is that the series seems to have found a really good balance between the original source material and the NetFlix reinterpretations of the characters and that includes Elektra. And it some ways that especially goes for the Misty Knight (SO HOT!) character you'll be like "holly shit" when you see what happens to her in the final episode. The only little bit of a let down I had was that I was hoping to get a Punisher appearance some where in the season even if it had just been as part of a cliff hangar at the end of the final episode. Can't imagine him not showing up at some point in the following season or seasons of The Defenders.

Left click to enlarge

I thought this might be a good time to share this from The Fear It's Self series a few years or so ago. The dire wraith appearance in this story line never was explained or other wise made any sense but this was kind of a cool moment with Luke Cage.

ROM vs ROM in The SD Comic Con Universe

So I feel like it's time for me to weigh in on this. Have you noticed how many of this loose ROM SDCC figures which are originally part of a Hasbro set have turned up on ebay already!? The price range seems to be between 50 to 60 dollars. Makes you really wonder where the Hell these people are finding these things but I'm sure the answer to that is multifaceted. Now as for the figure it's self I'm not sure why, but I'm glad it fundamentally is based on the original ROM spaceknight design as opposed to IDW's version which I really hate as you all well know.
For some old school ROM fans the fingers alone are gonna be a deal breaker but I've never really minded the concept of an updated version of ROM having fingers so that's not much of a problem for me. I do wish however that it twisted or other wise moved at the waist which it does not appear to do upon close inspection of larger resolution photos on the internet. But still, what a massive improvement on all accounts over that stupid ass hero mighty mugg whatever bullshit from the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con. That thing was garbage and it was sad to see some ROM fans out there be in denial about it just like some Star Wars fans when The Phantom Menace came out. So at least now there's actually some none comic book ROM merchandise worth buying out there....for the right price that is. And that might take some patience and time. Trivago might be able to help you find the right hotel for the best price but when it comes to a loose SDCC ROM figure you're on your own.

Side walk chalk drawing at Calicraft Brewing Company Walnut Creek 

August 7 update: Just as an after thought I thought I'd add some cool images of public art I've spotted in The San Francisco Bay Area in recent days, enjoy.

Public art on city utility station, Hayward

By Preston Asevedo

Aug 11th update: A bit more of a thorough job of inking would have gone a long way to giving this scene a bit more depth but this is other wise some pretty solid fan art for both ROM and Starshine. Brings back some good memories of the good ol days.

Customizing your comic collection box lid

For many many years my dad used to work in data processing going all the way back to the tail end of the 70s. He used to bring home "computer paper" boxes like the one you see here for storage purposes and one day some where in the mid 80s I think I started using them for my growing comic collection at the time. At one point I had about 7 of these boxes filled with comics but I've down sized over the years to now only 3. In the past I've decorated my comic boxes with pasted on clip art from beat up issues that were worthless but had cool and corresponding art with whatever collection I had in that box.
So right now I have a ROM spaceknight box, a Suicide Squad box and one other newly acquired box re-purposed (I like that word) for my miscellaneous issues that didn't contain any art work on it. But it does now, although not with published clip art. Instead I wanted to personalize it a bit more by using color copies of my own fan art featuring ROM with other Marvel characters. Maybe some day I'll get around to also covering the sides of the lid and perhaps the whole box to but this will do for now.

A couple weekends ago I picked up this People magazine special on Carrie Fisher. It was really interesting especially in regards to a lot of crazy shit going on behind the scenes during the shooting of the original STAR WARS trilogy including and affair with Harrison Ford and even Fisher doing coke in between shoots. I also really liked some of the vintage photos of Fisher and felt like posting them for other fans who might not know about this issue of People.