Captain Ukraine

This is one of those rare occasions where I'm doing a post here that's not at all ROM related because obviously I have some pretty strong feelings about putin's (tyrant, megalomaniac, war criminal, KGB scum, fool . . .etc.)  idiotic and horrific invasion of Ukraine. When it comes to war time quotes for the history books I'm pretty sure "russian warship go fuck your self" is now among them.

Electronic billboard with US-Ukraine solidarity display off of highway 580 between Castro Valley and Dublin in The San Francisco Bay Area.

 

San Francisco

March 19th Update: I wanted to make a mention about some other sad news from last weekend. William Hurt's passing last week is now the 3rd actor (Stan Lee & Chadwick Boseman) from the MCU that has passed away. And it happened only a week short of what would have been his 72nd birthday no less. Ofcourse Hurt had a successful career in films spanning decades and he was excellent as Thunderbolt Ross starting with the Edward Norton HULK film and later in the Avengers.

ROM Spaceknght 50 tribute fan art

 

This piece is a combination of what is mostly black n white art work borrowed from 4 different artists and arranged together and colored in photoshop. The Torpedo is by Anderson Mendes, ROM is by Steve Butler, Starshine is by Kapandais Nikolaos and the Dire Wraith and Skrulls are by me. 

 

As you can see by the signature this Ron Joseph piece was done 7 years ago and although I've posted Ron's stuff here in the past I never posted this one for reasons I can't explain. Well, I'm gonna correct that little oversight right now.  

Here's another one that's been around for years now but I never posted it before for whatever reason. But I think it deserves a second look obviously. The scene here between ROM, Firefall and The X-Men's Dark Phoenix certainly suggests an interesting story going on here. Would have been nice to get artist Scott Reed's take on his inspiration for this piece.

Here's some more stuff from Ron Joseph with some embellishments from me again. In this case I added ROM to this scene of The Soviet Super Soldiers trying to take down The Hulk and added a little bit of depth with some shading effects. Check out the original source material from Joseph at these links...

 https://www.deviantart.com/ronjoseph-artist/art/THE-HULK-vs-the-SOVIET-SUPER-SOLDIERS-11x17-888596989

https://www.deviantart.com/ronjoseph-artist/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-pencils-pg02-544320560

 

Here's some unpublished Michael Golden Micronauts art I came across last year. It would make for a nice coloring project. albeit a bit a labor intensive and time consuming one.

ROM the original by Tone Rodriguez

The two awesome ROM pieces by Tone Rodriguez have been around for some year now but this outstanding Torpedo fan art piece by Anderson Mendes was done just last month. And he does commissions  anders.mendes@hotmail.com

 

Calgary Herald October 22 1979

Dec.8th Update: Just came across this archival newspaper article someone posted on twitter from the Calgary Herald back in October 22, 1979. That's pretty amazing that ROM's debut issue got any kind of mention in a mainstream Canadian newspaper to say nothing about an actual full blown article. The author Patrick Tivy, may or may not still be around today but if he is it would be interesting to talk to him today in reflection to this article he wrote over 4 decades ago. The article offers some interesting insight into the comic book collecting scene at the time. It's an enjoyable read but the very last part of it annoyed me a bit.

Dec.14th Update: Seeing cool fan art from other artists almost always makes me want to do something new myself so here we go. This is a tribute to ROM 19 in which we learn of the fateful show down between Firefall and a deathwing during Galador's first spaceknight battle with the dire wraiths. Firefall's (Karas) final fate as a soul trapped in Limbo was always a loose end I wish that had been tied up by the end of the series. Could have been something cool for Marvel to use in the post ROM spaceknight series years. But instead, true to form for Marvel they've done almost nothing but shit instead for the last 20 years.

 

Can't think of a good posting title

I was going to save all this stuff for a New Year's Day posting but screw it I just feeling like posting it tonight instead. For openers, this Bill Mantlo tribute fan art envelope is something I mailed off about 3 weeks ago (from California to Greece) but as of this blog posting it still hasn't arrived. The last time it took a whole month for one of my fan art envelopes to get to Greece but the one before that never arrived at all so who knows this time around? Good thing I always take a picture of these at the post office.  

As in my last posting here's something else I've had for a while but never featured on this blog. It comes from The Micromails letter page of issue 40. It's a wonder ROM was not mentioned more then a couple times or so in the published fan letter pages of The Micronauts given that Bill Mantlo was the writer on both titles but we'll take what we can get. Look at that last sentence. Might as well have been another life time ago when you had a new issue of ROM, Micronauts (the real thing, not that fake shit from idw publishing) and The X-Men to look forward to every month. 

A while ago somebody mentioned something on social media about a dire wraith appearance on something having to do with Marvel Legends Darkstar. They didn't include a photo so I had no idea what they were talking about and I just dismissed it as internet noise. Bet then I saw this packaging art lifted from the cover art of Darkstar Winter Gaurd #3 at a big box store recently and it suddenly all made sense. That's pretty cool I'm fairly certain this is the first time the dire wraith have appeared on any published media outside of a comic book or magazine format. The Darkstar Winter Gaurd mini-series is just about the only decent thing Marvel has done when it comes to any ROM related continuity in the past 20 years.

And I also have some newly discovered comic book/sci-fi related public art from The Bay Area to share. I found these murals at Ochoa Middle School in Hayward. How frigging cool that would have been to go to a school back in the day and have these to look at all the time.

Speaking of Iron Man, I was reading issue 164 online recently. This guy who is from what was then (1982) West Germany wrote a pretty long letter to the staff working on Iron Man at the time. As you can see he had no shortage of ideas and suggestions including a couple good ones when it came to all things ROM.

Galadorian Horror Story variant

 So hopefully you've also seen the original version of this fan art in the previous posting. This past weekend I decided to try out some other ROM related fan art source material from the same artist and photoshop it into the piece in the last posting. I think it turned out pretty good, we now have a version of the Galadorian Horror Story in which ROM is facing a more defined and familiar threat.

Well I supposed with Thanksgiving being a bit later this week I should make a mention of what I'm thankful for this year. There's the obvious stuff ofcourse such as having my health and gainful employment in the midst of this never ending pandemic. But I'm also thankful for BILL MANTLO who just turned 70 earlier this month. Without Mantlo, the 80s would have been a bit less awesome and his legacy makes it possible for us to still enjoy reading and re-reading his stuff today not to mention the inspiration for all this ROM related fan art that's still being put out in the here and now. 

 

 I'm gonna make another addition to this posting. Here's something I've been sitting on for a while now that I never got around to posting for whatever reason. It comes from New Warriors 35 (1993). I only came across this as a back issue a few years ago but when I read it I realized how much more abilities the torpedo armor gave it's user then we knew of when Brock Jones was using it in the ROM series. As the reader you can draw your own conclusions why that may have been but I'm guessing the writers of New Warriors came up with some of that for the sake of making Turbo a bit more interesting and or formidable.

Galadorian Horror Story

I've been bugging my good friend (and fellow artist and ROM fan) from Greece for the past couple months or so to do a little more ROM fan art. And sure enough on Halloween day no less he sends me this amazing piece. When asked what was his inspiration for it he replied with the following . . . . 

"Well, for me reading Rom always felt a bit like a horror story so I wanted to draw something that gives a sense of that and making the threat vague to the viewer I believe it works better sometimes."

Revisiting some good ROM fan art by Preston Asevedo and Rich Wentworth

The following fan art is stuff that's been on social media for years now so you might have seen it before but tonight I felt like it was time for these works to take their place on this blog. Up top from Preston Asevedo we have a rather creative "What If" themed concept of what a cross over between The Spider-Man and ROM story lines might have looked like. Creative, interesting and well illustrated from basic drawing principles stand point. Just the kind of fan art I love to see. Plus, with the Venom sequel having recently come out it seemed fitting to feature this one from Asevedo here.

Now these 3 by Rich Wentworth are also cool for many of the same reasons. Although they each scene deosn't have as much going on in them as the Asevedo piece they still feature ROM in some sort of setting that kinda plays with your imagination and in general they have a certain style to em that I like.

October 13th Update: I'm making a late addition to this posting with this here fan art by Lou Russo. I can't imagine what sort of "what if mutliverse" kind of scenario that would have brought together these three franchises. But given that I love Star Trek, the first two ALIEN films (the rest sucked) and ofcourse ROM, I can't help but be intrigued. Seems appropriate to update this posting with this piece from Russo's today given that William Shatner a.k.a Captain Kirk was actually just in space today.