{"id":77,"date":"2005-06-14T18:24:35","date_gmt":"2005-06-15T01:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegerber.wpengine.com\/?p=77"},"modified":"2005-06-14T18:24:35","modified_gmt":"2005-06-15T01:24:35","slug":"the-omega-flap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/?p=77","title":{"rendered":"The Omega Flap"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry (since deleted) about Marvel’s *Omega the Unknown*<\/a> revival and how word of it reached me concomitantly with news that a major problem in my life had been resolved. I wrote that the latter news so completely overshadowed the *Omega* announcement for me that I just didn’t care what Marvel was planning to do with *Omega*. The real damage, after all, had been done 28 years earlier, when the company’s former management went out of its way to ruin the characters and the series. I wasn’t interested, I said, in how the new regime reprocessed the remains<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Which was true.<\/p>\n

For about a week.<\/p>\n

As the euphoria over the personal news subsided, so did my state of denial: *Omega* was one of only two series from my early days at Marvel that I really *did* care about in a personal way. The other, of course, was *Howard the Duck*.<\/p>\n

Like the duck, *Omega* was a completely original creation, with no roots in any extant Marvel character. Unlike Howard, who had made his first appearance in a “Man-Thing” story, *Omega the Unknown* even debuted as its own title. The series was my first long-term collaboration with Mary Skrenes<\/strong>, who is now my oldest and best friend and my collaborator on *Hard Time*. Much of *Omega*’s content was derived from personal experience, both mine and Mary’s. We drew heavily on our own childhoods for aspects of James-Michael’s story and on observation of our neighborhood — Hell’s Kitchen in New York, circa 1975 — for the setting of the book.<\/p>\n

*Omega* meant a lot to both of us. Its cancellation was painful. Learning that James-Michael’s story had been brought to a conclusion by another writer was infuriating. But at least that seemed to be the end of it. Decades went by, Marvel did nothing with the series, and both Mary and I allowed ourselves to believe they never would. I was convinced *Omega* had been forgotten, and that was fine with me.<\/p>\n

I can be such an idiot sometimes…!<\/p>\n

I should have known that *nothing* in comics is ever allowed to stay dead. Characters who get their brains blown out are routinely resurrected. No series is ever really cancelled anymore; it just lies dormant until some writer or artist successfully pitches a new “take” to the publisher. Above all, no trademark is ever permitted to slide into oblivion.<\/p>\n

I decided to express my frustration in a post to the Yahoo Howard the Duck Group<\/a>, which I thought would be a *slightly* less public venue than this blog. (Anyone can join and read a Yahoo group, of course, but joining requires a conscious expenditure of effort, which deters far more people than you might imagine.)<\/p>\n

The ensuing discussion “escaped” onto the larger Internet. I was going to write a long post about it myself, but Rich Johnston<\/strong> has saved me the trouble by summing it up very neatly in his Lying in the Gutters<\/a> column (see the section titled “Into the Unknown”) on Comic Book Resources<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Take a look at that column, and I’ll have a few personal notes to add here tomorrow.<\/p>\n

(Rich’s sidebar on the Ultraverse characters is interesting, too.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry (since deleted) about Marvel’s *Omega the Unknown* revival and how word of it reached me concomitantly with news that a major problem in my life had been resolved. I wrote that the latter news so completely overshadowed the *Omega* announcement for me that I just didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}