[Guest review by Chris Schillig, who blogs at Monkey on My Back]

A recent Collected Editions post, Mature Red Hood Series Is Collections Forward, notes how the world of comics publishing has changed over the last twenty years. In the early days of this century, the announcement of an impending trade paperback before the first issue of a monthly title would have been cause for concern in the industry; now, however, it’s “not just uncontroversial, it’s good business sense.” 

A collection like Rom: The Original Marvel Years Vol. 2 is a reminder of an even earlier time, when collections of Bronze Age comics were rare, existing only in special retrospectives such as Origins of Marvel Comics. Back then, the only way for readers to “catch up” on missed installments was to dig through back-issue bins, order from third-party advertisers, or rely on creators to provide the necessary exposition mid-story.

Writer Bill Mantlo, a prolific contributor to Marvel during this era, was the master of recaps. Readers will find them in nearly every issue in this collection, reminding them how ROM sacrificed his humanity 200 years ago to cleanse his home planet, Galador, of an alien infestation of Dire Wraiths. ROM then decided to remain encased inside his cyborg shell, putting his return to human form on indefinite hold to chase Wraiths across the universe. This brought him to Clairton, West Virginia, where he became the town’s own Wraith containment system, along with a select group of well-meaning citizens and superhero B-lister Torpedo. 

In ROM: The Original Marvel Years Vol. 1, ROM had temporarily returned to Galador; rubbed elbows with the likes of the Fantastic Four, Nova, and Galactus; helped to repel a Skrull invasion of Xandar; and lost half of his humanity. Having stretched the limits of cosmic with such adventures, Mantlo and artist Sal Buscema change directions upon the Silver Spaceknight’s return to Earth and lean hard into horror. 

Artistic changes accompany this genre pivot. Ian Akin and Brian Garvey replace Joe Sinnott as inker, adding a heavier line and darker tone to Buscema’s pencils. It’s generally easy to spot Buscema’s style regardless of the embellisher. Still, fans may have a hard time discerning his work beneath Akin and Garvey here, especially on the installments where the two are listed as “finishers” over Buscema’s breakdowns. 

The title’s transition to full-fledged horror reaches its apotheosis in issue #48, when the sorcerous strain of Dire Wraith witches eradicates their scientific brethren inside a closed-for-business United Nations. This is also a sequence where the usually garrulous Mantlo allows the art to tell the story in several panels rather than filling it with caption boxes and internal monologues, a welcome change noticeable in several installments throughout this collection. 

ROM in these issues feels very much like it is following a Marvel house style pioneered by earlier Stan Lee/Jack Kirby epics and then codified by Claremont and Byrne on Uncanny X-Men. To wit, a blend of action, soap operatics, and navel gazing, with B-plots moving to A-plots with mechanistic regularity. Still, there is an overall direction to the series that keeps the characters moving forward, albeit incrementally. 

Too many of the issues in this collection, however, feature ROM’s dreary reflections about his lost humanity and how he can never love Brandy Clark, an Earth woman, the way she deserves to be loved. “It is too much to ask of Brandy,” ROM muses, Silver Surfer-like, as he soars across the night sky, “that she surrenders her heart to an inhuman cyborg. Let human cleave to human … let others know the happiness that is forever denied me.” 

In true Marvel style, Clark — who also pines for ROM, much to the chagrin of her human boyfriend (this is truly the Marvel Age of Convoluted Love Triangles) — finds a way to transfer her mind into the body of a fallen spaceknight, Starshine, giving her the capacity to love ROM on his own terms. Or so she thinks. 

The Starshine subplot had the potential to help diversify the book’s tone, giving ROM somebody to talk to while soaring the spaceways, maybe even somebody whose personality was less morose. Unfortunately, the creators choose to have ROM respond to Starshine/Brandy by doubling down on his belief that cyborgs cannot know love, supercharging an even larger dose of angst. And it’s not long before Starshine is transformed into a Wraith-killing machine, thus violating ROM’s honor code and giving both characters more reason to spout angry, faux-Shakespearean dialogue at one another. Maybe when read once a month, with some lighter, life-affirming doses of Spider-Man and Captain America in between, ROM’s ramblings wouldn’t feel so overpowering. Issue after issue, however, makes it oppressive. 

My favorite story in this entire collection is Marvel Two-In-One #99, not because the story is superior, but because it allows ROM to team with Benjamin Grimm, a.k.a. the Thing, an ebullient personality, to foil ROM’s unrelenting glumness. Having Grimm cry, “It’s clobberin' time!” as he thrashes some alien baddies is the breath of fresh air the monthly ROM desperately needed. The occasional guest-star there, such as Sub-Mariner, Doctor Strange, and Shang-Chi, all similarly serious, does little to dispel the gloom. 

It may seem I disliked this volume, but that’s not accurate. Most of the book is perfectly acceptable Marvel material from this era. Mantlo excels at dusting off underutilized concepts or dangling threads in the Marvel Universe and putting them to work in service of ROM’s quest against the Dire Wraiths. Hence, this volume serves up Metal Master, Quasimodo, and the Soviet Super-Soldiers, among others. The massive Rom: The Original Marvel Years Vol. 2, spanning ROM #30–50 plus an annual and the previously mentioned Marvel Two-in-One, is rounded out by ROM’s appearance in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and some original art reproductions by the Buscema, Akin, and Garvey team. 

If anything, reading the stories so close together does them a disservice, something their creators would never have dreamed possible in an era when each adventure and cliffhanger were separated by thirty days.