Read Only Memories

[color=#00BF80]The Partially Salvaged Cyborg memory banks of Galador’s Greatest Spaceknight, Rom,
as discovered by --....(Illegible)

Neural engrams corresponding with great emotional significance connect most deeply with pyramidial neuron structures of the brain mimicked by this unit.
Consciousness thread begins, mission cycle five:[/color]



Planet Earth


This is the night where first I realized with all my being: I fight for this woman’s planet, and all she might love, for now she has my heart.



“On a shattered stretch of highway somewhere due south of Clairton, West Virginia...”
(recorded in Mantlobot directory; retrieve visual now in Buscemata onboard reader::)



War with the Dire Wraiths brings me again to a world, the latest in two hundred years. By their Dark Nebula nature, they can shift their shape into the appearance of anyone that lives upon the planet they choose to invade. There is no world they have visited they have not also sought to destroy, making habitation impossible for the majority of dominant species. All resources, by most mysterious means, become part of their energy, as though domination itself is the manifestation of their power as a species.



So was I first to offer my humanity, exchanging half of my body for an armored cyborg body that would prove virtually indestructible, and given three tools, a Translator, an Analyzer, and the focused negation of their Wraith sorcery, a Neutralizer, capable of cancelling their forms here and, leaving naught but the dust of their assumed flesh, dispatching them into the shadowy purgatory of Limbo.


Seeing the humans beside me, Steve Jackson and Brandy Clark, cling to one another for courage in this test beyond human powers, i am flooded with the image of a Calcimyris flower many times the size of a Galadorian adult. Beneath stands Rayna and I ...Rayna, my first beloved. The woman for whom I would fight for her planet, for her way of life to survive. I am Rom, and though my name means ‘first’ never shall I forget one first is to serve, and these choices generate the poetry that bespeaks each individual’s spirit. It is the day I tell her, for our love I must sacrifice myself, to carry out my planet’s desperate plan for survival: the Galadorian Space Knight, last defense against the shape-changing ravagers from the stars.


In the road lies a hybrid of human being and spaceknight, grafted by my enemies, and played for their pawn. His fears of my alien nature drove his attack, which with regret but not delay I brought to an end.
The remains of the space armor of my fellow Spaceknight Karras, known also as Firefall, lie in a circle of those posing as authority figures. Among the human discharging duties as the highway patrol come my disguised enemies, claiming hierarchy and secrecy as they recover Firefall and search for me with their Wraith-created sorcerous Hellhounds, who will sense us quickly.


I would confront them all, training my Analyzer upon them and revealing in its crimson glow who is true and who are disguised figures of subversion and tyranny, controlling the secrets of their existence.
Firefall, now the human, Archie Stryker, soon will realize that his grafting into spaceknight armor is permanent. He paired his viciousness with illusions of glory, yet regardless of his crimes before me, my only feeling for him is pity. He has gambled all for redemption, and now knows the price.
I know what it is to find one self no longer human.

There is more of Firefall...but drawn to Brandy...my secret inner self, resonant yet unseen.
Memory of woods, Brandy Clark, Steve Jackson...for their sake, we flee, rocket pods lifting us above the forest to leave the scene of a bitter and incomplete victory.

I have carried my sacrifice on to this world, that none may live in fear of Wraith tyranny across the known universe. Yet this night, the very mission that brings me to Earth reminds me of the sacrifice...when I see Brandy...the way she looks at me...I who am man in spirit and word yet truly now not human in form...
I must find them a place to rest. This structure seems like an abandoned domicile. Here then.

Let's see if replacing this will stop the whole thread
from being side-scrolling!

External sensors: minimal data

Memory cycles, updating files, assessing events following Rom's arrival from the stars. Nearly as he can, Rom dreams.


The R.E.M. of ROM Introspective analysis mode recordings from the career of Galador’s Greatest Spaceknight---and Earth’s, discovered on Galador after the last war of the spaceknights.

(One of five coming this month- a very different sort of homage!)


Mantlobot retrieved partial text file; do you wish to read it? Y
" But for Rom, sleep is only a memory from his former existence.”

“His cyborg circuitry has no need of restful oblivion. Yet, he has experienced much
that is new, strange, and different since arriving on Earth...”

“And, for absorption and analysis of all the data he has accumulated, it is best that he clear his circuits and monitor his memory banks.”

“Mists curl about him. His introspective analysis mode is not unlike the state we humans call...dreaming!”


From here Rom somehow---perhaps drawing from the ambient thoughts of the house, which is a disguised alien being---envisions the first encounter with a “being he has not seen before...” but “senses the being’s power.” That being knows the house’s secret...and that begins Rom’s awakening, complete with the realization: it is alive!


Perils that resemble nothing less than malevolent magic ensue, and Rom brings his Analyzer into the fray. The house reveals its true nature: already Rom intuits its desire to take whoever occupies the predatory abode. The Dire Wraiths, in an effort to free their fellows from Limbo, “accidentally freed me! They did not live long enough to regret their mistake!”

Banished before by the being in Rom’s dream, the house names him: Dr. Strange. How can anyone without such mystic ability now stand against the devouring domicile?
However, the house’s eldritch fire attack is answered fiercely by Neutralizer fire, which translates into arson and then, banishment.

Only once again does memory dictate preserving some cluster of information, centered around the relief of loneliness that comes from believing someone has touched one’s inner being. Love, between two souls united by an intimate current of being, comes only so rarely for one encased in spaceknight’s skin.

The young woman was a mutant named Rogue. Her kiss somehow reached the inner man in a way that the physical touch of no one could.

This cluster is so intense, the time of abandoning Clairton’s embrace to search out the Wraiths in all corners of the world. With this, his humanity recently destroyed while in the possession of the usurping knight Terminus in a maddened defense against Galactus, Rom feels the loss of his chance to again become fully human.

Thus, while his love is now known by the cast (thanks in part to an unexpected event caused by a Wraith plot gone awry), he bids Brandy adieu, to leave her again to the world she knew before his meteoric Earth fall.

Still nearby in West Virginia, Rom’s journey serves a practical component, with Clairton now handed over to the Torpedo’s care; his visor, now enabled by Rom to detect Wraithkind, finds a trouble revealed by it. There, truly, begins the story of the woman and the man called Rogue and Rom.



Though their paths began in opposition, at first Rom’s misunderstanding aids her fellows greatly. When they find themselves opponents at last, the fantasmagorific mutant offspring of man and Wraith intervenes. Upon his return from apparent destruction, he encounters Torpedo. Some may call themselves the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, but amongst all mutantkind, are any more vile than the Hybrid?

“West Virginia Reel “ (from ROM 31, courtesy retro-constructed scenes preserved in Mantlobot circuitry aboard the cyborg computes
of Galador's greatest spaceknight, Rom). ("Love on Earth", 2nd chapter of a series of 3)




It’s another Marv Wolfman creation, the Torpedo, who encounters the strange re-assembly of the Hybrid on Earth. The grey, physically corrupted horror battles Torpedo on the sight of the Old Marks Farm where he was raised for thirteen years...until the Dire Wraiths revealed his heritage to him.

The super-conveyance taking the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to Windust Prison nearly runs down some prisoners who as a chain-gang desperately shovel snow in blizzard conditions that make the flying mode of the unit less than optimal. Rom arrives to stop the unit in its tracks, leading to its condition red blast off, complete with Destiny, the Blob, Pyro and Avalanche aboard, suspended by Stark technology.
The prisoners convince Rom they work as slaves, a concept he finds abhorrent, and he breaks their chains. They use his confusion to escape while he flies after the conveyance, and soon he indignantly tears down the gates of the prison.

Inside, the Brotherhood prisoners are remanded to someone the staff believes is Dr. Kellogg. The real warden of Windust shares her captured fate; their impostors are Rogue and Mystique, who speedily free the Brotherhood. Rom unwittingly draws fire as they complete their mistaken escape. Then they run into Rom himself. At this point Pyro attacks the tower guards, ending Rom’s cooperation. Blob and Pyro fight Rom, resulting in some incidental burns to Blob. He gladly holds back help while Rom’s summoned Neutralizer leaves Pyro agonizing. He has to use his Analyzer to see if he faces super-humans or Wraiths. Rogue’s first instinct is to stop the crimson beam, and she is the first to realize upon walloping him that Rom is a machine (though she incorrectly believes him not to be a man).

Destiny foresees difficulties in escape via the air van, leading Avalanche, nursing broken arms, to overreact. His shockwaves leave him passed out from his power flow’s effect on his bones (courtesy the Incredible Hulk not long before this story) and shake up the ground beneath the Brotherhood’s feet. His immoveability perturbed, Blob falls to a Rom uppercut and Rogue obeys Mystique’s order to cut their losses and run. The resemblance of Mystique to Nightcrawler, whom Rom met while first battling the Hybrid, crosses the cyborg’s mind before he has to turn and answer to the warden and guards. By now he realizes the flaw in his assumptions and promises to attempt to undo his mistake.

Now, full circle: the remaining mutants gather before a door containing a visionary horror assailing the confused Destiny. Rogue bashes her way in unafraid, but the sickening creature on the staircase reeks with fetid odors and speaks with chilling familiarity, to the dismay of all three women.

Best superhero to ever wear mittens!

The sidescrolling aspect detracts a bit from what looks to be another interesting thread.

@Ross I understand how you feel about the mittens
on a design level, you know, they've taken out the face and the hands, the two principle points of expression.
@Chris Think I've fixed it!

Read Only Memories

[color=#00BF80]The Partially Salvaged Cyborg memory banks of Galador’s Greatest Spaceknight, Rom,
as discovered by --....(Illegible)

Neural engrams corresponding with great emotional significance connect most deeply with pyramidial neuron structures of the brain mimicked by this unit.
Consciousness thread begins, mission 32

Some memory files here are damaged. Do you wish to proceed? Y

An attack from Hybrid created considerable problems in my memory circuits. The emotional significance of this cluster centers around the closest actual human contact recorded in my 200 years as Spaceknight. Connections of memory clustered around other encounters with Hybrid allow me to associate events with the occasion in question, despite the trauma to this unit.

Retrieving...

Isolated by white, blanketing snows, a house built to showcase luxury contains, in its heart, a nightmare.



Before Rom arrives upon the scene, the Hybrid works his subtle machinations to use and subvert the women before him.



They are like no other women, each in her own way. There is one way they are each women, and that is the wicked purpose for which Hybrid begins his subjugation.



Each have fled the scene of an attempt to free the male consortium of their group. The blue-skinned woman, who could truly appear to be anyone, calls herself Mystique, leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. On this occasion, it would be correct to call them the Sisterhood. Hybrid affects her first. His ploy? He is victim of a mind-touch not of his own device, which he accuses Mystique of initiating. Here she gains the common knowledge: they have all fought the X-Men before, and consider them active enemies. The X-Men team unites and protects humans and mutants alike, with a dream of peace based on a school dedicated to tolerance, higher learning, and survival.


He laces his trap together with the pursuit of the other foe from his rebirth as a menace to all: Rom, Spaceknight. In desperation, the mutant X-Man Kitty Pryde, with her special phasing power, is able to activate Rom’s Neutralizer, atomizing the Hybrid and apparently banishing ROM to Limbo (see #18).


Already, Hybrid has read their minds, and knows Rom is coming. A vision from the second woman, Irene Adler, a.k.a Destiny, confirms this. Though she is blind, any and all of human kind is hers to see. They only need fall into the cascading tableaus of the variety of future moments, which form complex neural paths that sometimes cluster into strong, repetitive possibilities. So does the future come to Destiny, much as memories come to others: sometimes inexact, sometimes weighing consequences of things left at “what if?” by reality, but always clustering into an identifiable phenomenon open to interpretation.


Finally, the third woman, Rogue: with the stolen powers of Ms. Marvel she speedily saves Mystique from Hybrid’s initial attack “in self defense,” hammering him into the floor long enough to save the deadly woman she considers her adopted mother. Now she, at a touch, can become any person, stealing their essence and memories. Tragically, she has no control over this. At this point in her life, she discovers how powerful this can make her, having been led against the Avengers themselves. As a growing young adult with feelings, however, the full throttle adventures with her eclectic foster family do not save her from the loneliness that comes with sharing the goodness of touch. No wonder she feels shunted from the main step of life!

Hybrid shares his origin: his father, a Dire Wraith invader cut off from his fellows, blended in by romancing a human woman. The experience, however, made his something never, if ever, seen before in Wraithkind: a capacity to love and share. Somehow an acceptable, anonymous life as farmer Jacob Marks became the Wraith’s invention, and to his shock, his wife seemed to bare a human boy.

Upon reaching thirteen, however, the family falls into the clutches of visiting Dire Wraiths. Calling upon the Dark Nebula’s power, the aliens awaken arcane magic and powers for his command, festering in him as an all-consuming cancer on his humanity. His hideous, inside-out and inhuman hateful form symbolizes the complete corruption of the being now called Hybrid, a mutant, whose first act in his new life is the slaying of his parents.

Now restored molecularly by force of will alone, Hybrid’s return marks the beginning of human conquest, and he offers a partnership with the Sisterhood.

The prisoners freed accidentally before the incident at the prison now wonder up from the snows, to face the Hybrid. He tests his newly awakened power. Their fearful bodies spin frenetically, then the flesh is stripped quickly while they are still alive, until skeletons twist above the damp white and red before the imposing, ominous Hybrid.

Now a deep questioning of the evil in their midst stirs Rogue to speak. Not even Destiny has yet to glance the true purpose for which he has thus spared their lives.

But then, the apparent purpose, to oppose Rom, comes to the fore, and the pre-arranged attack begins.

Know Rom is dedicated to the preservation of life on Earth, or any planet he saves from Wraithkind. The menace of Hybrid, however, is so nauseatingly, directly sinister, that on sight, his existence can only be considered a menace until it is ended!

I’m still restoring these R.E.M. collector units from the remains of the cyborg armor of Galador's greatest spaceknight, the prize of our Wraith War era collection.
.
.I’ve been relaying this account viewed in Buscema-Scan, but bear in mind the two accounts directly above are supplementary data added later, while the following represents the witness-self observations mirroring the conscious mind of the cyborg wearer upon his personal experience. This armor was abandoned sometime ago. The manufacturer for this tech no longer even has the license to do so!

---Publius Enigma


Hope to find a recording linked to many of Rom’s thoughts: one that may contain an account of the cyborg’s ...

“Arrival”

(actually, it never came in from ebay and the seller gave me a courteous refund, but #5 recaps things nicely to then, from the top:)

I fully mean for others who want to write about issues of ROM not reviewed here to pitch in their own, regardless of whether you use the "cybernetic memory" or not. I have about half of them! But do feel free to give things your own creative spin and fill in with issues that inspire you.



Publius Enigma, a friend of the people

Luely, you're very accomodating when it comes to your threads.

Retrieved from the memory bank R.E.M. compilations of Rom, Spaceknight (as depicted in Rom #32)



I arrive at the home of Brock Jones, Clairton’s deputized super hero, the Torpedo. His recovery on the couch brings concerned family, friends, and a doctor, who listen to his demoralized account of an enemy materializing on the old Marks farm. Steve Jackson and his fiance, Brandy Clark, discuss the town’s vulnerability in wake of my apparent absence. I walk in then, reassuring all, aware of my imposing armored frame and glinting appearance---reminding me, while I am human at heart, a spaceknight stands as one apart.

I ask Brock to describe his foe, and from this and the location I begin to tell of Jimmy Marks, a youth who foreswore his humanity---“the crossbreed progeny of a human woman and a Dire Wraith.” A reporter named Mack Killburn---who’s followed the case of my existence since shortly after his co-worker was slain by the Wraiths---rescued the Torpedo after the attack. I welcome him to the fight.

Now I confess my culpability: human prisoners confused me into believing they were slaves, when in reality they had committed crimes against their fellow man. I mention the three super-powered beings also free in part due to my ignorance---but none are so deadly as Hybrid. With Torpedo injured, yet still bold nevertheless, I convince him I must face my enemy without him. Brandy asks me: must I do everything alone? I see myself in the mirror: no longer human, and no longer capable of becoming so. I tell her I accept solitude as my natural state. She seems oblivious to Steve’s feelings, his concern that he has lost her to me. But it must not be so. This eased my decision to leave Clairton in Torpedo’s safe keeping and take the fight to the Wraiths elsewhere in the world---indeed, it is necessary.

The convicts, however, fall prey to the might and cruelty of Hybrid before I arrive. What’s more, I become prey, myself, to Mystique’s ruse; as a shape-shifter, the blue-skinned woman can appear injured with ease, and seems to enjoy duplicity as her life-blood. This sets me up to be hit by Rogue, who is indeed powerful...yet I tell her: I sense no evil in her. She tries to laugh this off, continuing to fight me, ending up in my grip. She coyly jokes about contact with me---flirting, they call it---and then follows Mystique’s strategy of fake injury to lure me close enough to use a most unusual power. She declares me half-human, as revealed by the extrasensory sight of her partner Destiny, and seeks to steal my abilities through her vampiric kiss.

We are both shocked by the empathic moment between us. I feel her surprise, at my memories, my essence, my qualities: I am amazed to find the best of myself reflected in her. She partakes of my identity, and finds no powers for her mutant ability to steal. But her nature causes her to touch me personally in a way no other could, while I am clad in this cyborg planadium steel.

Her recognition of my true self reassures me, she, too, in her untouchable state (for she cannot control said powers) has a heart and courage and a longing for connection. The agony I feel, with such emotions awakened in me, enrages me, for I tell her: I can never become human again! Yet I feel her attraction, at the same time, to the man inside this armor---to the man I can never again be. While Mystique and Destiny encircle me, however, Hybrid at last makes his move.

Rogue now changes her mind about the ambush, touched, I over hear, by goodness and nobility. That spiritual comfort comes as Hybrid’s mental attack assault me, damaging memory circuits and severing my mobility.
Mantlobot observation:
Hybrid’s assault comes on many levels---physical, mental, emotional. Touched by the crossbreed’s malevolent mind, the snow whips into a blinding frenzy around ROM...as his cyborg circuitry screams under a psychic assault.

At this point, while Mystique presses the attack, Destiny at last glimpses the true fate in store, for the Sisterhood and all mutants: subjugation as breeders, mates for a new super-powered race spawned by Hybrid. They argue briefly about motives and prepare to flee. Rogue, however, defies characterization as an evil mutant, by her words and deeds. Mystique fears for her, while Destiny accepts that Hybrid must be vanquished.

The monster has me by the neck, and then slaps aside my Neutralizer, my one hope of stopping him. Rogue weighs some thoughts of her own before streaking to my side, slamming into Hybrid. She confronts him and his plans, but falls victim to his speed, and becomes sickened by his touch. At the same time, her own abilities absorb the horror’s power. She takes enough of his mind-shock power to free herself from his grip, but remains physically, violently sickened. So I go now to her side, lifting her chin in my palm to tell her: she has done enough. I have regained control of my cyborg circuitry, and now the horror shall answer to Rom.

Now Hybrid begins to toy with my emotions and thoughts as well: “You want Rogue, too!” He believes shattering the nobility of my cause will present doubts, and then, uses his shape-changing ability to become: my human self! The self lost forever, that half of my body stolen by the spaceknight Terminator, before he was destroyed, with it, by Galactus. Now his invasion of these very memory circuits brings Brandy before me, even as I prepare to neutralize him. How is it, then, Brandy Clark appears before me twice, supplicating my mercy and assuring me they are both real!

This, however, is the work of Mystique. Breaking that illusion invigorates me; I wade into Hybrid once more. This time, the Neutralizer setting will destroy Hybrid’s physical body. Its scream echoes into the snow blanketed hillside.

I turn and ask these three, who have aided me against this greatest of evils: how then do they claim to be evil? Destiny declares they are dedicated to mutantkind; it is humanity who sees them as evil, forcing their actions. My analyzer reveals they share a base humanity that should rally them to battle outside menaces as one with their planet. They should stand with their fellow man against the Dire Wraiths. Rogue keeps her silence, as Mystique accuses mankind of oppression that will keep their paths separated.

But as for Rogue and I, we cannot help but wonder: with this rare thing we have shared, with this touch granted by her powers...will we, one day, cross paths again?

I believe we would both like that. Very much.

I fully mean for others who want to write about issues of ROM not reviewed here to pitch in their own, regardless of whether you use the "cybernetic memory" or not. I have about half of them! But do feel free to give things your own creative spin and fill in with issues that inspire you.



Publius Enigma, a friend of the people

Next

featuring the art of Steve Ditko...and the last Spider-Man drawing by Ditko, the only one after 1966.

from Rom, Spaceknight #61

Sultry summer day...Virginia beach...lively, swimsuit clad crowd...but one girl notes the sudden dark and chill...the sky fills with “a black wing mass, until they seem to swallow the very light of the sun,” scattering the panicked people in double-page tableau.

“The Beginning of the End of the World”

Air craft controllers try to get a positive i.d. The Air Force sends a fighter squadron! The Wraiths, disguised now as saurian Death Wings, things of the Black Nebula that live on swallowed suns. To the tip of the thin atmosphere the “screaming column of evil” twists, whirling, turning, coalescing as a vortex.

Mantlobot, mission 61, retrieved:

All life on Earth’s day side draws to a halt. All sighted eyes stare skyward at the strange sinister shape, observed hanging now, a disk of heat-stealing darkness. The jet black supernatural star disk shoots waves into the void, to traverse space and stab a black hole in the heart of the sun! “Each individual feels a shadow fall across his or her soul. At the edge of space the wraith sorceresses scream their triumph to the distant stars!”

“But triumph quickly turns to terror, for suddenly into the very midst of the shrieking saurians soars...ROM, THE SILVER SPACEKNIGHT!”



Comments:
Mantlo’s captions and Ditko’s art set a fearsome tableau. Truly, the rhythm enrapts the reader, in this under-rated and un-reprinted rhapsody, the first of two extensive threads weaved by Mantlo and Ditko, with a host of first-rate inkers, including a fine job here from Jackson Guice.

We will continue ROM 61 ...from the memory of ROM.

But first...unreprinted Steve Ditko. Comments?

Thanks to the Earth magician Doctor Strange and that planet’s Defenders, I’ve acquired the proper technology to unlock more of the cyborg memory program storage of ROM, Galador’s finest spaceknight.

-PubliusEnigma


Amidst the cluttering, smothering dark wings of all gathered Wraithkind, I soar into shrieking saurian shadows, armed with my Neutralizer. It disconnects their existence within this world with its shrill song.

They vanish into limbo to hiss for all time, as frozen fires spill from their mouths to no affect. Whatever direction my crimson stream turns, the cloud of Wraiths disappears. Their nefarious star disk has taken all their power, and their numbers give me a certain target without limit.

Their flight sends them into their mystical disk. I pursue them, for this day, with all gathered, I can banish their numbers for all time! Down into its pulsating heart, swallowed by abject, absolute darkness, I risk loss of my self forever. What then, is this light?

How does Starshine glow within the abysmal night? How is this one departed here, to wish me peace, to shine and free me from my shadow prison? Understanding comes not, before now I see---the sun! The spell has driven a black heart into its face. A stygian stain spreads, and artificial night encloses the land.


The hole cannot be detected by earthly science, nor by S.H.I.E.L.D. esp’ers. Below, General Merriwether Locklin and Special Agent Gyrich debate and study the nature of the hole, and of the nature, indeed, of the Wraith war, up till now hidden from the eyes of men and suppressed, covered up, to bestall the panic that now cannot be denied. All Wraith power now hinges upon this final gambit---“how else does one describe...the end of the world?”

And still...within the Rangers’ infirmary camper, my beloved sleeps. Brandy Clark---who was the resurrected Starshine, until the final attack of the Hybrid, which cost her those powers. Then...who?

The soldiers nervously inquire...and I suggest we turn to the child, Cindy Adams. The eleven year old girl has become the ward of Rick Jones, who sings for her, even as cancer ravages his own body. Cindy finds solace in Rick’s music, but beneath her conscious mind lurks the dire wraith who slew her parents...only to die while within her mind, while trying to steal her identity. If only she could forget...but even if this could happen, and though Rick begs me to let her be, for Earth’s sake, I must ask her to look within for Wraith plans.

To the Wraiths---all that is beauty here is horror! They cannot escape the bird songs, the flowers...Earth herself. But shadow on the sun is only the beginning...of World Merge.

The courage of this child staggers the mind. She continues: First they created their Star Disk! That took almost all their power! They’re real weak now! But they don’t care...Once the spell’s started...it can’t be stopped! Right now the hole inthe heart of our sun is stealing the sun’s power, and using it to power a black magic beam that shoots from the other side of the sun and out into space!” Yes, this is why now the sun grows colder.

“The beam is a sorcerous shaft shot through space! A tunnel linking wraithworld’s black sun to our sun!” Stolen power flows through the tunnel to that perfect source of Wraith power. With that beam, across the stars, their spell “invites their own sun and world to travel through the black tunnel...until Wraithworld and its black sun start moving on a collision course towards Earth!”

“Only they won’t collide! They’ll Merge---our world with Wraithworld, our sun with theirs---and everybody on our planet will die as Earth becomes a paradise for the dire wraiths!”
She sobs on Rick’s shoulder, while he rebukes us. What can the Earthlings do, as we Galadorians did, defeating them 200 years before? Gyrich believes their super beings might stand in where once we sacrificed so many of ourselves as Spaceknights, with our powers. Then I hear the impossible: Earthlings have created a Neutralizer of their own! But one has succeeded in building a primitive prototype...one that could be improved and save Earth!

He refuses to turn it over to mankind. Who is he?

He is only known as Forge. In his hands...Earth’s first and only Neutralizer...used once...sworn never to be used again!

(adapted and quoted from ROM #61, 1984, by Mantlo, Ditko and Guice.

ART: Steve Ditko, Jackson Guice