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.

BIG WOW Comic Festival San Jose CA. Mike Zeck

On the Marvel end of this weekend's con in San Jose I'm hoping to get a chance to have a few words with Mike Zeck. I've often cited Zeck as being one of the best comic book artists ever seen and certainly among the very best of the Marvel 80s. His body of work among other great stuff included some awesome penciling at the tale on of the 70s on Shang Chi Master of Kung Fu and later with The Punisher, Web of Spiderman and of course Secret Wars. And who can forget that iconic Captain America annual cover by Zeck with Wolverine slashing at Cap's shield with all those sparks n shit!?
There's at least 3 issues of ROM that Zeck did the cover art for so I'm pretty grateful for that even though I would have loved to have seen him having done at least one issue in the series as far as the interior art goes. Needles to say when you think about Secret Wars you can just imagine how awesome Rom#65 could have been had Zeck been the penciler instead of  . . well you know who.

Cover art by Mike Zeck

Like last year Michael Golden will be there again and as you all know he was another powerhouse Marvel 80s artist who did the cover art for at least 9 Rom issues I believe but never the interior art unfortunately. Didn't get a chance to talk to him he got irritated with me when I pointed my camera in his direction he doesn't like that unless you specifically ask him first. But for me the high light of last year's Big Wow Con was meeting Bill Sienkiewicz who also did the cover art for at least 9 issues and even some interior fill in pencils for a couple of them
http://romspaceknightart.blogspot.com/2013/05/big-wow-comic-con-san-jose-ca-2013.html

Speaking of those Rom covers that Sienkiewicz did, one of them was Rom annual 3 but the pencils were done by someone named WM Johnson. Who is this guy!? His work on that issue was fantastic but I've never heard of him before and internet searches haven't given me squat. Talk about another artist who could have done justice to the series had he stepped in for Sal.