Hi everyone,
Today I'm writing about the ninth issue of Marvel's ROM: Spaceknight. The cover features our hero (brilliantly drawn by Michael Golden), unknowingly trailed by a menacing-looking reptilian. The story, "The Stalker in the Night!" had a cover date of August 1980.
The first panel shows ROM standing at the bottom of a deep cavern, after falling through an empty grave while fighting Dire Wraiths in the previous issue. The Spaceknight discovers that his rocket pods are malfunctioning, and he cannot fly out of the chasm. He quickly recalls the series of events that led to this predicament, which began with his trailing wraiths in disguise as they led a funeral procession in the rain toward the Clairton cemetery.
ROM exposed the ruse, tearing open an empty casket, and was soon attacked by a shadowy deathwing that was conjured by a wraith sorcerer. The flying foe eventually consumed the sorcerer, but interfered with ROM's circuits enough to distract him, and he fell deep within the Earth itself.
Before the sorcerer met his demise, he revealed that ROM's neutralizer, which had been stolen by wraith hellhounds a couple of issues earlier, was on its way to their Project: Safeguard headquarters in Washington, D.C. The silver Spaceknight vowed to find and retrieve his weapon, and soon summoned his energy analyzer to find out that the cave was full of energy from an unknown source. Determined to find its source, ROM moved on deeper into the cavern.
Far above, at the lip of the empty grave, an orange reptilian humanoid stood by himself. He decided to crawl down into the hole, curious about the silver being that had dispatched his fellow enemies and wanting to know more about the neutralizer that some of the wraiths had talked about, in the hopes that he could use it to vanquish them as well. We then learn that this creature goes by the Stalker of the Night, or Serpentyne.
At Clairton General Hospital, ROM's human friends Brandy Clark and Steve Jackson wait with several others, anxiously awaiting news of their friend Artie Packer's status. Packer was seriously wounded during their battle with the wraith-created thornoid in issue #7. Clark's boss still wanted to know more about the attack that happened behind locked doors, and Clark told him and the sheriff about ROM's attempts to save the town from the alien Dire Wraiths.
As expected, their companions didn't believe Clark's story. One of the officials accused the couple of aiding a murder, and the sheriff went so far as to put handcuffs on the pair before the surgeon arrived, with the grim news that Packer had expired on the operating table just minutes earlier. The group shuffled away quietly, not knowing that the surgeon was actually a Dire Wraith in human guise. We only find out that the surgeon isn't who he appears to be when we see a ghostly alien visage appear above him after the county coroner arrives and announces that he is going to Washington, D.C. with the birth records of other citizens that ROM "murdered" who coincidentally have the exact same birth date.
Meanwhile, in the cave, ROM walks on until he finds piles of ash left behind by wraiths along with skeletons. He starts to wonder who slew his enemies and is startled by the sound of Serpentyne's voice behind him. The reptilian proclaims that he is Serpentyne, the one-eyed, the stalker in the night, and the last of his kind. He tells the Galadorian about the history of his kind.
Serpentyne begins his tale with a nuclear bomb test in the desert, whose radiation caused several reptiles in the area's evolution to accelerate drastically. They became humanoid in form and gained intelligence. Some of the evolved reptiles chose to fight the human military members who invaded their realm, and battled until they were stopped by Ms. Marvel (aka Carol Danvers, as recounted in issues #20 & 21 of her first comic). Danvers convinced the reptiles to free the humans that they had captured, after hypnotically erasing the memories of the skirmish from their minds.
However, not all of the freed humans were indeed human. At least one wraith was in the group. Unaffected by the hypnotic erasure, he reported what he had seen to his colleagues. This led to a wraith attack on the reptiles' home. Many of their kind fought valiantly, but lost their lives in the process. After that, Serpentyne embarked on a personal mission to vanquish Dire Wraiths in retaliation for the lives of his companions that were taken in their battles.
ROM then told Serpentyne why he came to Earth to protect the planet from the wraith threat. He went on to explain that his neutralizer banishes wraithkind to limbo, and does not destroy them. Seeking the neutralizer for his own, Serpentyne lashed out and attacked the Spaceknight, catching him off guard. ROM didn't wish to fight Serpentyne, and noted that they both sought the same end goal. He went on to express concern for the potential for great harm that could happen if his powerful weapon were wielded by anyone else.
The two tussled underwater in a small pond until ROM's rocket pods functioned once more, and he drove them up into the air and back on land again. Serpentyne decided that he had no other alternative but to kill his opponent, and fired his blaster up at the ceiling, bringing down a sizable portion of the cavern. ROM caught the rock fragment and hurled it at his attacker, a piece of which knocked the pistol from Serpentyne's hand.
ROM hurled himself at the reptile, stressing how they could be partners instead of enemies and battle against a common foe instead. Aggravated by Serpentyne's resistance and flat-out refusal to listen to reason, ROM reached his breaking point and flung Serpentyne through a nearby stalagmite. The reptile quickly recovers and takes the broken stalagmite into its hands as a new weapon. He fails to heed ROM's words until it is too late.
As he charges, Serpentyne trips on a skeleton and falls forward, impaling his chest with a piece of the stalagmite that broke off and pointed itself up toward him. The Spaceknight ran to his foe, who came to his senses in his dying moments. ROM wished that Serpentyne rest in peace and acknowledged that he understood just how his former adversary felt.
Writer Bill Mantlo was great at reintroducing older (and often lesser-known) characters from other titles, although I wish that Serpentyne had stayed around for more than just a couple of issues. It would have been nice to see more of his kind survive and join the fight against the Dire Wraiths. It was another great issue that was full of action and continued to move the main and sub-stories further along.
Next time, I'll write about ROM #10, when the silver Spaceknight begins his journey toward Project: Safeguard and the goal of freeing his neutralizer from the Dire Wraiths' clutches. Until then, have a great week and don't forget to be kind to one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment