According to Omega the Unknown‘s co-creator Mary Skrenes, she and her collaborator, Steve Gerber, were originally given the go-ahead for the series from Marvel Comics publisher Stan Lee with the stipulation that they bring in already well-established Marvel characters as villains (or guest stars) on a regular basis. That policy seemed to hold through issues #2 and #3, which saw the enigmatic title character going up against the Hulk and Electro, respectively. But it seems to have fallen by the wayside as early as issue #4, which (as heralded by the Howard Chaykin-Frank Giacoia cover shown at left) introduced the menace of… El Gato. And as we’re about to see as we make our trek not just through OtU #4, but through #5 and #6 as well, “Stan the Man” may well have had the right instincts in this case.
As issue #4 begins, we find our narrative continuing to reside in the hands of Gerber and Skrenes, as well as penciller Jim Mooney, who like the pair of writers has been on board since Omega the Unknown #1. While the veteran Mooney had handled full art chores for the first three issues, he’s joined here by inker Pablo Marcos, whose textures add just a little touch of grittiness to Mooney’s solid, straightforward drawing.
The ruminations of our strange visitor from another planet are interrupted when he notices a human figure plunging from the bridge. In the finest tradition of “caped men” everywhere, he bounds into the air to intercept the fall of the would-be suicide, a young woman; unfortunately, her momentum carries them both down into the river. But that’s only a temporary setback for the man dubbed “Omega” by the Daily Bugle; mere moments later, the two break the water’s surface, and holding the woman under one arm, Omega promptly swims with her safely back to the dock.
As he uses his power to project energy from his palms to make a small fire in a handy trash can, Omega ponders the “emotionality” of our world’s inhabitants, so different from the stoic calm he himself was socialized into back on his home planet. He wonders at the psychological forces that have driven this woman to attempt to take her own life, since he can’t conceive of any logical route one could take to arrive at such a decision…
Yes, that’s right — it’s Omega’s first word! But don’t get too excited, as it’s also going to be his last fo a while.
At this point, our story jumps ahead to the following morning, and to the series’ second protagonist — the supposedly “ordinary” 12-year-old human boy named James-Michael Starling — as he glumly reports to New York City’s Junior High School 41 for his second day in the public education system. He’s quickly greeted by the two students who’d befriended him the day before, Dian Wilkins and John Nedley, the former of whom offers him a gift: a copy of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “A novel?” James-Michael sniffs. “I generally prefer more factual reading matter, Dian.”
We now return to Omega, who has taken the woman he rescued to the home-cum-pawnshop of the one real friend he’s made on Earth so far, “Gramps”. Telling her benefactors that her name is Teresa Mendez, she explains that though she’s grateful for their aid, she can’t stay — she is cursed to bring death to all those whose lives she touches, ever since she crossed the man called El Gato…
(If you’d glanced at El Gato’s yellow-and-purple ensemble on the issue’s cover and thought. “oh yeah, your standard supervillain costume”, well, join the club. And we weren’t wrong, exactly; it’s just that this getup is evidently also everyday wear for our story’s bad guy. Well, we’ve seen stranger sartorial choices in the Marvel Universe, I suppose.)
Following her mother’s funeral, Teresa went home; that very night, she had troubled dreams of the brujo, and awoke the next morning to find her pet fish floating dead in their aquarium, the heater and filter having suddenly and inexplicably failed. Things soon got a lot worse, as, within a week, her fiance was struck and killed by a taxi while crossing the street to meet her. A few weeks after that, the roof of her apartment building fell in, crashing though her room; and while Teresa had been absent at the time and was thus unharmed, a young man on the floor below was killed. That last incident convinced the young woman that the only way to end El Gato’s curse was to take her own life… and she remains convinced that, if she remains with Gramps and “Sam” (the name that Gramps has given to Omega), they’re doomed as well.
Judging that he’s better equipped to counsel Teresa in her distraught state than the silent Sam, Gramps advises his friend to take a walk; and as Omega complies, the scene shifts back to J.H.S. 41:
Of course, James-Michael and John deny tampering with Mr. Lucien’s equipment; however, neither of them rats out Nick, as J-M affirms only that he’d noticed that the flasks had gotten mixed up and dutifully told the teacher so. Luckily, Lucien is already known to be something of an asshole (or, in the principal’s words, has “earned a certain reputation for obstinancy“), and so the boys are simply sent on to their next class period…
Not only is El Gato able to halt the super-strong Omega in his tracks with a mere palm pressed against his chest, but one punch to the jaw sends the caped man sprawling onto the pavement…
OK, so maybe El Gato is a little more formidable than he looks… in any event, our story continues into the next bimonthly issue, #5, which arrived on stands in August, 1976 sporting a striking, poster-style cover from Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia. Meanwhile, Jim Mooney resumes inking duties on the book’s interiors, where we find the narrative picking up not with the super-doings of our two costumed players, but with the decidedly more mundane — though no less distressing — reality of James-Michael Starling and his classmates:
We’ve previously noted the similarities between John Nedley and another character created by Steve Gerber, Giant-Size Man-Thing #4‘s Edmond Winshed; unfortunately, the parallels between the two young men continue here, though we can still hope things don’t end as fatally for John as they did for Edmond in “The Kid’s Night Out!”.
Meanwhile, Omega has surreptitiously pursued the limo carrying El Gato, staying out of sight by leaping from rooftop to rooftop and so forth. When the vehicle arrives at its destination in the brujo’s Lower East Side neighborhood, the caped man watches from above as Teresa emerges and dazedly announces that she is to become El Gato’s bride; then, after the couple enter the brownstone to prepare for what the prospective groom ominously calls “the Ritual of Purification”, Omega sneaks in through an upstairs window and goes exploring. He soon comes upon what appears to be El Gato’s study, complete with arcane tomes and demonic-looking sculptures, as well as something less tangible…
Omega attempts to blow the beast-spirits off of him with his palm-energy-bursts, but something goes wrong: “The omega-shaped burns appear inverted… The energy is turned within, upon himself. A blast that could shatter a stone wall blows his body apart instead.” Yeah, it looks like Omega’s dead, y’all.
Again the scene changes, as James-Michael gets picked up from school by Amber, one of the two women with whom he’s currently living. She drags him with her to the Daily Bugle, where she intends to have it out with publisher J. Jonah Jameson over his non-payment for the photos she sold him of the Omega-Hulk fight chronicled back in issue #2…
That’s a fun little walk-on our storytellers just gave Peter Parker — and a quite subtle one, seeing as how the script never even calls him by that name, let alone pegs him as his costumed alter ego. But who among Marvel’s readers in 1976 wouldn’t recognize their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, even anonymous and in his civvies?
James-Michael and Amber’s next stop is Rose and Bob’s Candy Store on Ninth Avenue, where they each enjoy an egg cream while he tells her about his distressing day at school…
(As we’ve discussed in a previous post, the mysterious “Richard” will eventually turn out to be Ruth’s old boyfriend, Richard Rory — a character who, like Ruth Hart herself, was originally created by Steve Gerber for the late, lamented Man-Thing series.)
Avoiding Amber’s questions about his “flashes”, Jame-Michael asks her if she thinks Dr. Thomas Barrow — the physician who originally placed him in Ruth’s care — can arrange for him and Dian to visit John in the hospital, and she agrees he probably can. At this point, the story returns to Omega, who — surprise! — hasn’t been blown to smithereens, after all. Rather, we find him waking up on the pavement in front of Gramps’ pawn shop, with no idea how he got there, or how long he’s been unconscious — at least, not until he goes inside to check in with his understandably concerned friend…
Our scene now changes to Midtown Hospital, where John Nedley has just been brought down from ICU, and Dr. Barrow has indeed been able to secure permission for James-Michael and Dian to visit him. (If John’s parents are anywhere around, we never see them.) John’s doctor is a little concerned that the sight is going to be too much for their young eyes, to which Barrow responds: “He’s their friend, Abe. They want to know. They have to see.”
The elderly women who’ve been attending on El Gato’s “bride” attempt to flee, but he magically makes them halt in their tracks, then transforms them into clawed, fanged “demon-hags” who attack Omega. Or so it seems, until our hero notices that the women’s non-transformed bodies remain frozen in place, even as their spirit-selves’ claws prove real enough to rake his flesh. But the power of faith works both ways; since Omega is now willing to accept the reality of El Gato’s magic on its own terms, he can be more effective against it than he was in their previous encounter. And so, when he strikes the demon-hags hard enough, they discorporate, their human bodies simultaneously lapsing into unconsciousness. In the end, El Gato is forced to face Omega alone; still, he remains confident, since, as he says, his foe is “limited to a single bodily figuration for fighting –”
El Gato might not have had anywhere near the magical moxie of better-established Marvel magicians like Baron Mordo; still, his reality-altering powers were impressive enough that he arguably coulda been a contender, had he ever had ambitions beyond the little neighborhood whose residents’ belief in him was evidently the source of his power. But Teresa Mendez’s branding will prove to be his permanent undoing, as he’s never made another appearance since, as best as I can tell.
As for this issue’s shock ending concerning Nick, one is tempted to point the finger of blame at Thomas “Tank” Tyson — whom we first met on page 2 of this issue and know absolutely nothing about, save that James-Michael “heard” him say “revenge” in the cafeteria, right before his sudden departure — if only because we’ve been offered no other suspects. But, in the end, your guess is as good as mine not only as to whether Tank beat up Nick, but also as to whether Nick will ever recover from his injuries… since we’ll never see or hear about either one of them again, outside of a dream sequence in the next issue.
And speaking of the next issue…
With issue #6, Jim Mooney once again surrenders the inkwell, this time to Mike Esposito. And while I’d never ask you to believe that I bought Omega the Unknown for the artwork, I feel obliged to note that it takes a turn for the worse here, in my humble opinion. While Pablo Marcos in issue #4 replaced what I think of as Mooney’s “soft focus” finishes with his own slightly rougher textures, Esposito replaces them here with… not much of anything, really, beyond the bare minimum of ink to allow Mooney’s pencils to be legible on newsprint. To my eye, the results have a sketchy, almost incomplete look; as always, your mileage may vary.
Also worthy of note before we move past the opening splash page and its credits box, this is the first (also, as things will turn out, the last) time that Mary Skrenes’ name has come before Steve Gerber’s. Presumably, that’s an indication she did the lion’s share of writing for this one… something that’s not hard to believe, considering how tied up Gerber must have been with Howard the Duck-related goings-on in this last month of the mallard’s Presidential campaign.
Well, seeing as how I already told you that the next and last time we’d see the “primitives” Nick and Tank would be in a dream sequence, I guess the only question remaining is who is doing the dreaming… though I don’t think you’ll be very surprised, especially if you recall the parallel sequence that opened Omega the Unknown #1…
Throwing on his clothes, James-Michael steps out alone to wander the dark streets of Hell’s Kitchen in the middle of the night. Um, I thought this kid was supposed to be smart?
Not long after this, “Sam” and his companions exit Rudy’s, and we follow the trio as the two men escort Mamie to her building’s doorstep…
As Dennis drops Amber off and heads for home, a narrative caption lets us know that their evening together was (from her perspective, at least) “pleasant, but unexceptional“, and that she’s already hoping that Dennis doesn’t fall in love with her. In other words, J-M’s evident jealousy is in fact misplaced, in addition to being age-inappropriate (not that his developing a crush on Amber is the least bit hard to understand,).
Of course, as soon as Amber enters the apartment, she discovers that her young roommate has gone missing. Leaving the anxious and guilty-feeling Ruth to hold the fort at home, she heads back out into the night to look for “the punk”…
I believe it’s fair to assume that Kurt Klemmer’s mother Ethel, and Mamie’s friend of the same name, both killed by a mugger, are one and the same person. Whether Kurt’s subsequent singling out of Mamie for a violent death was intentional, or simply a grimly ironic coincidence, is a question the story leaves open.
In any event, while Klemmer is indisputably a dangerous murderer, he’s just as clearly not any sort of supervillain; he’s “merely” a very mentally ill, very strong man in overalls, who carries a big wrench. Which, honestly, makes this issue’s cover by John Romita and Dave Cockrum, with its energy-trailing tool and copy implying that this guy calls himself “the Wrench” something of a bait-and-switch… as well as an excellent example of the constant tension in this series between urban realism and superhero genre tropes.
Elsewhere, James-Michael has wandered into an all-night pinball arcade, where he demonstrates unexpected facility and/or luck, winning a free game. This doesn’t sit at all well with some of the other customers…
OK, so we need to amend my earlier description of Kurt Klemmer; make that “carries a big wrench and a loaded handgun”…
And with that rather grim quasi-cliffhanger, we’ll take our leave of Omega the Unknown for another six months — just like Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes themselves did, half a century ago. Yes, that’s right — as hard as it may be to believe, this very personal project would be scripted, and presumably plotted, by two other writers over the next couple of issues. We’ll be taking a look at the circumstances surrounding the series’ creators’ unexpected sabbatical — as well as what was going on inside the books during their absence, naturally — when we chronicle their first issue back on the job, Omega the Unknown #9, next April. I hope to see you then.
I must have known they stepped down because I read credit boxes. Didn’t remember.
I like El Gato’s lack of scope. Lots of petty thugs and bullies in the real world control one small patch of turf; it’s not surprising some villains settle for less. And he’s the kind of weird the creative team does well.
The mix of brutal urban grit and oddball superhero action works fine for me, though I can see why it didn’t create a smash hit then, and why a lot of my fellow commenters aren’t into it now.
I presume the vaguely animalistic creature in Ruth’s memory is our old buddy Man-Thing.
I’m afraid I have to confirm what Fraser says about his fellow commenters, as I’m not particularly into this at all. Didn’t follow the title back then and don’t feel like I missed much. The writing is better than a lot of the formulaic stuff that started to come through about this time, but it still feels a bit… aimless. If this is #6 of a bimonthly title, we are a year into the story and don’t really know very much more about the protagonists than we did at the beginning, and there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly likable about either Omega or James-Michael (or the rest of the cast for that matter). There’s no real sense of progression or build-up.
The artwork is just… there. I know Jim Mooney has his fans, and I sometimes like his work as an inker where the mood of the story suits his style, but this just feels a bit unexciting, whether he inks himself or someone less suitable does it. It tells the story but not much else (I’d have thought this was exactly the sort of thing that Jim Shooter would soon proclaim was the ideal).
I think a cool name like ‘El Gato’ was wasted on this character. It was a nice idea, like Fraser says, to have him concerned only with dominating his own little neighbourhood, but his powers were a bit vague and I thought he could easily be mistaken for the Fantastic Four’s Miracle Man, apart from his colour scheme.
Not convinced that Skrenes/Gerber intended to name Kurt Klemmer ‘the Wrench’, despite the cover and story title. His introductory scene suggests that ‘the Handyman’ was more likely. I also feel like the name ‘Kurt Klemmer’ is ringing a bell – anyone know any possible real-life inspirations for the guy?
Amber’s date Dennis didn’t look at all age-appropriate, and I can’t get out of my head the idea that he looked like James Doohan from around the time of Star Trek: The Motion (less) Picture.
Dude could plausibly be in his thirties, Amber’s in her 20s, I don’t think there’s really an age issue.
Yeah, guess he could be (although I never dressed that ‘old’ in my thirties, thank you). I think it’s the hindsight of seeing Scotty when I look at him – Jimmy Doohan was in his mid-fifties when this comic came out 🙂
Could be worse, she might have found out he’s a Canadian impersonating a Scot all this time.
Answering my own question, Kurt Klemmer was probably inspired by the Co-ed Killer Edmund Kemper, who in 1973, after his other crimes, killed his mother and then her best friend.
Thanks for sharing that, Mike!
Omega the Unknown could have become a classic. I think.
Imagine if this title had launched a few years later as a 12-issue limited series where Gerber and Skrenes enigmatic lead characters had to reach some kind of resolution within those dozen issues. Further imagine an artist who could have better captured the nuances of Starling’s urban world with the more fanciful one of the guy in the tights. I suspect that could have been quite the remarkable series.
I think. I also recall more than one Steve Gerber storyline in that era that failed to stick the landing. We only have he and Mary Skrenes statements about the final conclusion which neither shared.
As it is, this was my final issue of Omega as a kid. Which was a shame because I wanted to like this series. As it was, a good number of the scenes in Alan’s comprehensive and well-written review were ones that I distinctly recall all these years later. Both good – such as the awful realities of violence in inner city schools. And not so good – dreadful villains like El Gato combined with a hero who’s scope of powers made zippo sense.
Regarding Jim Mooney’s art, I think of him like I did George Tuska at the time. While clearly different artists with different strengths and weaknesses, they were both storytellers who would deliver what was called for by the plot. Unfortunately, they were also artists with a style that seemed to be quickly aging in light up dynamic new artists like George Perez, John Byrne and Dave Cockrum (who’s cover did indeed catch my eye!).
At the end of the day, I don’t believe either of the next two issues found their way to the spinner racks in my timber town and when Gerber and Skrenes returned, I’d pretty much dropped my comic book collecting.
What I don’t plan on dropping anytime soon is checking my email on Wednesday and Saturday mornings to see what delightful review awaits me and a hot pot of coffee!
While I can’t say I loved Mooney’s art I found it acceptable. Tuska, not so much.
Of course, unlike many fans a good story with adequate art will get me to shell out money much more than great art with an adequate story.
Tuska & Trimpe were two artists whose styles I could go along with on Iron Man & Hulk, respectively, as they were the main artists on those series when I started collecting comics regularly so I more or less got used to them on those titles. On the other hand, I cringed whenever I got a comic with their art on most other titles, including at least one issue of Iron Man drawn by Trimpe. Mooney struck me as a sort of middle-range artist – certainly not one with a style most fans would go ga ga over but still usually compelling and often imbued with moody atmosphere, particularly when enhanced with suitable inking. I found it very suitable for his runs on Man-Thing and OtU.
Trimpe on Hulk works for me. I agree not so much other stuff.
Tuska always looks off to me, though I can’t pinpoint what it is.
I have to confess that while I believe what I wrote, I put Tuska’s name into it with the thought of generating some discussion. Yes, I know I’m not a good person. 😉
As for Trimpe on Iron Man, I believe this review offers my thoughts on that topic. Review: Iron Man #39
Add me to the list of uninterested readers, then and now (although I always appreciate your research and analysis!).
Maybe if there had been a different artist I might have picked this up, since I was a huge fan of Gerber’s Defenders. But Jim Mooney may have been my least favorite artist during my Bronze Age years of reading. Whenever he would ink Sal Buscema’s pencils it looked like he used a paint roller- the lines were so thick and the shadows on faces looked terrible. I realize that not everyone is as talented as Klaus Janson, but it was quite a step down, indeed.
His pencils on MTU were tolerable but nothing special. I’m aware that he was popular for his work on Super Girl, but with dynamic work from artists like Perez, Byrne, Miller and the brothers Buscema, I never really felt the need to pick up any book that he was working on, unless it was already on my weekly pull list.
OtU #4 was the first of the series I purchased off the racks so long ago. Have no recall if I even saw the previous 3 issues, but I do recall that seeing all those cats on the cover tugged at my curiosity enough to add that to my comics haul that particular day, and I had enough cash on hand for it. The weird occasionally overlapping proceeds of the title protagonist and the high school kid intrigued me enough to keep me coming back while it all lasted and I still wish that by some means Gerber & Skrenes had been able to provide “the rest of the story” as originally intended (alluding to the often fanciful “Rest of the Story” broadcasts of Paul Harvey that I regularly heard while riding home on the bus during my own high school years).
Anyhow, from a half-century perspective, revisiting these tales of the harrowing plight of Omega and James-Michael in Hell’s Kitchen New York brought to my mind the hellscape that was the Whitechapel district of London in the late 1800s as depicted in From Hell by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell. Moore & Campbell, of course, had the opportunity to be more blunt in depicting the genuine horrors in their telling, but Gerber, Skrenes & Mooney certainly made clear that J-M & Omega were not living in a particularly pleasant neighborhood. Actually, the high school was more like Potrero Hill Junior High School, San Francisco, that I attended from October 1974 to June 1976, than Lemoore High School, that I began the following fall 50 years ago, Lemoore being a relatively small town with a very big Naval Air Station to which my dad had been transferred that year. Not that I was ever seriously bullied in PHJHS, but someone I knew had been seriously injured in shop class when someone who wasn’t a student went into the class and bashed him with a tool (and that’s about all I know of the event, other than that the victim survived but had to wear bandages around his head for the next several months; he and his family had been my family’s next door neighbors when we were living in Long Beach, CA, Navy housing in the early ’70s). Back to the story at hand, it’s intriguing that Dian, Amber and Ruth were written as fairly strong-willed characters, probably due to Skrene’s involvement as co-writer, who are sort of nonchalant about the difficulties of getting through the days. On the other hand, Ned’s encounter with the bullies in the bathroom starts a sequence of ever-mounting dread to the narrative. Not of anything supernatural, but of entirely all-too-real psychotic humans and what they can do to others. And the titular star of the series, Omega, comes off as nearly ineffectual as a superhero, taken down by the entirely mundane emotional and mental wreck that is “the Wrench” — on the cover, he comes off as a knock-off of the Wrecker, who as I’d read much later, had been endowed with powers that enabled him to nearly kill Thor during the Lee-Kirby era. In the actual story, turns out he has no more power than, say, Hoss Cartwright, and makes do with an ordinary wrench to turn people’s lives upside down. Despite Omega’s vague resemblance to Superman, he turns out to be even more of a hard-luck hero than Spider-Man in his high school years.
In retrospect, given how unusual the series was at the time and recalling several other 1970s series that didn’t even reach a 6th issue before being derailed by the biggest threat of all — Cancellation! – it’s a bit of a wonder that Omega the Unknown lasted as long as it did. It was a Vertigo-type series over a decade before there was a Vertigo. Very strange that Gerber & Skrenes didn’t write anything for the next two issues. I suspect it wasn’t simply that Gerber was too focused on Howard the Duck at the time but something else behind the scenes. Maybe someone else has more details about what was really going on but appears to be another of many mysteries associated with Omega the Unknown.
Very strange, unconventional stuff in these issues. Omega the Unknown would almost certainly have worked better as a creator-owned series, or if it had come out a decade and a half later as a Vertigo series at DC. It just did not fit into the whole mainstream Marvel universe. It’s unfortunate that Steve Gerber & Mary Skrenes did not have either of those two options available to them.
Regarding the artwork, I agree that Pablo Marcos is a good inker who provided some interesting texture to Jim Mooney’s pencils. I was fortunate enough to meet Marcos at a store signing earlier this year and get a few Bronze Age comic books autographed by him. He’s an accomplished artist in his own right.
On the other hand, like others, I’ve never been especially enamored by Mike Esposito’s inking. I guess he was okay over Ross Andru (they were the art team on Wonder Woman for something like two decades, I believe, and there work there was fine) but Esposito’s inks over most other artists typically leave me unimpressed.
Only about a nine years — 1958 after Harry Peters left to 1967 when Irv Novick took over (Mike Sekowsky then launched his legendary reboot a year later). Definitely the superhero stuff by them I like best; Ross Andru on Flash was painful to see.
Jim Mooney was the ideal artist for many Steve Gerber comics precisely because he brought a Silver Age Supergirl straightness to the proceedings. Storytelling-wise his work has the clarity of Sal Buscema, but Mooney is also capable of a real emotional range.
Gerber needed a sympathetic editor who could help him wrangle these first drafts into the absurdist comics they wanted to be. There’s still great riffs and serious moments in all his 70s work.
Well, Archie Goodwin was definitely a great editor, but this was during his short stint as Marvel’s editor-in-chief when he was probably doing all that he could to keep the company from crashing & burning, and unfortunately I seriously doubt he had the time to devote to helping Gerber & Skrenes make Omega the Unknown into a more successful series.
Alas! Goodwin was one of the greats but Gerber probably needed some strong medicine from someone like Gordon Lish.
What we got from Gerber, and what I got, at that age, was plenty.
Omega the Unknown seems like two different, ongoing comics stories with only the most tenuous (and not terribly intriguing) connection between them.
Chemistry teacher Mr. Lucien in no. 5 bears a (probably unintentional) resemblance to David Niven at the time: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Niven#/media/File:David_Niven_4_Allan_Warren.jpg
Some aspects of this title haven’t aged well, but most of it still works for me. As others have commented, El Gato’s lack of ambition (settling for a small piece of the pie) is a welcome change from the usual conquer-the-world aspirations of Marvel villains.
My favorite part of OMEGA continues to be the high school scenes, which disturbed the snot out of me as a kid and resonate yet today, when I teach that level.
Despite my general meh feeling about Mooney, Omega clicked and clicked hard for me. It could have been my own at times horrific childhood added to Gerber being a writing god to me. Few things I hate in my long history reading comics more than that horrible wrap up in Defenders. The reimagining done years later was also a great book but it didn’t stick with me like the original. And oddly enough, recently I even figured out a way to return James Michael and Omega to comics…