A caped figure in red and blue leaping about the city skyline, Omega the Unknown seemed to be a visual wink at the early Superman and/or Captain Marvel.
But there ended the resemblance, because Omega was clearly not intended to be a wish fulfillment figure. After all, in the 1976 series co-created by Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes and Jim Mooney, he ended up being mistakenly shot dead by Las Vegas police.
“The 10-issue series follows the adventures of (two) protagonists, who interestingly don’t directly interact often but face thematically interlinked challenges,” noted comics historian Matthew Grossman.
James-Michael Starling’s world “…is a cockroach-infested, often cruel place and his repeated struggles with the uglier sides of high school suggest that to an emotional innocent, schoolyard bullying can be as harrowing as any battle with super-villainy.
“The laconic, initially silent Omega struggles with the role of superhero he finds himself unwittingly cast in. It’s a task he barely understands and finds himself pretty lousy at, losing many battles and surviving most of the rest through sheer luck. And much to the consternation of a superhero-wise public, he’s willing to let villains walk away when they offer valid reasons for looting the public.
“Both characters seem to be representations of adolescence struggling in an adult world.”
Omega was arguably ahead of its time, anticipating the ambience of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 Watchmen.
“Gerber was Marvel Comics’ auteur of absurdity,” Grossman observed. “Superhero comics, with their repetitive plots and nonsensical underpinnings, lend themselves to the absurdist preoccupation with meaninglessness, and the disillusionment of the period, reflected in Bronze Age comics’ move away from optimistic themes, provided fertile ground for explorations of psychological malaise.”
To call Omega’s back story complicated would be an understatement. Both he and Starling turned out to be androids created by the living metal inhabitants of the planet Protaris, although Starling thought he was human. He and Omega — also called X3Z — could channel the life energies of every being on a planet.
“(T)he power was quite something: fired from the hands, the energy could vaporize just about anything a supervillain or Protar could throw at him, from a refrigerator to a car,” noted comics historian Jeff Rovin. “To top it all off, as an artificial being, Omega was also endowed with staggering physical strength and invulnerability.
“Omega was one of Marvel’s least successful, most confusing, middle ’70s ‘cosmic’ heroes,” Rovin concluded.
The thing that reads odd about Omega is that it’s a superhero story that is NOT a fantasy of wish fulfillment. Not my cup of tea, but I respect the effort.
“Gerber would’ve been right at home in DC’s Vertigo line or as an indie creator,” Mark Engblom observed. “His sensibilities were very much misaligned with what I was looking for as a young non-jaded fan. The first issue left my friends and I cold. In retrospect, it was sort of a Twin Peaks of mainstream comics.”
Charles W. Fouquette said, “It seems like a nihilistic version of Superman in a post-Watergate/Viet Nam 1970s world. … Gerber always did push the boundaries on conventional comics and we have to give credit to Marvel for giving him leeway for some of his ideas.”
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