Omega the Unknown #1 (March 1975)

Purchase price: $1

Prior to seeing this issue in the bargain box I’d either never heard of Omega the Unknown or I had seen it and avoided it like a dog turd in the middle of my lawn.  Now that I’m a little more open minded about my comic selection and trying some of these forgotten titles of yesteryear, I was happy to pay a buck for issue #1 to see if it’s any good.  Turns out I was right the first time.  Omega the Unknown is about as good as a dog turd.

Issue #1 doesn’t have a story title, but the credits say it was conceived and written by Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes with art by Jim Mooney.  The splash page has a semi-colorful dude with incredibly long legs running to avoid blasts of some sort.  In between some heavy narration stilt man shoot some rays of his own from his hands until some cowardly alien shoots him in the back and we cut to a young boy screaming in the night.  Thankfully James-Michael’s parents are there to comfort him, or so it seems until the next page when a tractor trailer runs into their car while the three of them are in it.  After coming to, James-Michael is confronted by his mother’s severed head, which is a robot.  Of course this is terrifying so young James-Michael screams as people rush toward him.  Cut back to the costumed hero fighting aliens; he eventually escapes in a spaceship.  Now we go back to James-Michael coming out of his coma (and he knows he was in a coma) in a hospital where a doctor and nurse are trying to work with him.  James-Michael seems to open up to the nurse, so the medical staff  pursue that route to get close to him. This involves introducing him to one of the nurse’s scantily clad friends; why that is relevant, I have no idea.  While sitting in his bed dreaming about something, aliens bust into James-Michael’s room, an attack that is disrupted when the long-legged hero helps to bust it up.  When push comes to shove James-Michael shoots rays from his hands like the other guy.  That’s where the story ends.  Sound like enough to make you want to read issue #2?  I’m falling asleep just thinking about it.

This thing is a disaster from beginning to end.  James-Michael has to be the worst character name ever; it sounds awful and it’s annoying to read over and over.  Plus he never connects as being anything that even remotely resembles a believable kid.  Maybe that’s part of the overall story, but he’s so off putting I don’t care the slightest about him.  As grating as J-M (I won’t write that awful name anymore) is, the supporting characters are just as vacuous.  I’m not sure how many issues of Omega the Unknown Marvel published before putting it out of its misery, but I’m guessing not many.  Actually they could have published 100 more issues of this title and I’d never pick up another one.