#Dire Wraiths

[starscreams-crown]

Ultra Magnus: I got this. Come at me, Wraiths.

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

Rom the Spaceknight's handbook profile from the Deluxe Edition of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe written by Mark Gruenwald and Peter Sanderson with art provided by Steve Ditko and Eliot R. Brown. Some re-used art by Sal Buscema and Frank Miller too.

[therobotmonster]

The Dire Wraith, Marvel's Perfect Monster

It's no secret I love ROM: Spaceknight.

I've been relatively cool on latter reboots, largely because the things they change to dodge the IP holdings of Parker Bros/Hasbro or Marvel (respectively), always lose something essential.

The largest problem is that the dire wraiths are incomparable villains, and Marvel invented all their meaningful lore. And what lore it is.

The Dire Wraiths are alien demons, creatures that come from a world orbiting a black star in the center of the Dark Nebula. They distill the paranoia of cold war pod-people infiltrators and the demon-loving satanism scare villains of the 70s (and 80s... and 90s... and...) into a single, diabolical package.

Well, two packages, actually-

The wraiths are revealed to be a highly sexually dimorphic species, both in form and social role. Male wraiths were the bulk of who we had dealt with before. They used science and stealth to their advantage.

Their base form was always a placeholder for when Parker Brothers eventually made a Dire Wraith toy for ROM to fight. They never did, so Marvel got to come up with their own finalized design.

And like comic artists are wont to do, they wanted ladies to draw. Look, the artists couldn't resist disrobing them in their first full on-page appearance. Typical.

The Dire Wraith women had been hidden in spooky robes the whole time, so this made it easy. A gender-based murderous uprising later, and we've got our new wraith phenotype.

Now that's a monster! Not some vaguely humanoid, vaguely froglike pale imp, but a starborn demon in the flesh. Froglike hands and feet with melty, loose wax-like flesh pooling about them, more adept at prowling on all fours like a predatory beast than walking like a human being, long whiplike tail, and the face! A lobster-like maw with a lengthy barbed tongue.

A barbed tongue that drips acid.

Before the ladies showed up, it wasn't explained what happened to humans the wraiths replaced. They'd get snatched, there's a replacement, you're pretty sure they're dead.

Now the truth is revealed. The tongue is used to pierce the victim's skull, allowing the wraith to devour their brain and absorb their memories and personality, reducing the whole body to foul ash.

Mind you, they don't have to do this. They can shapeshift all they want on their own. Its questionable if the males even had these barbs, and they may have been doing it like their skrull ancestors.

Yeah, the wraiths are an offshoot of the skrulls... in the same way a cenobite is an offshoot of humanity.

It's the feeding/replacing process that really makes the Dire Wraiths shine as bad guys. They take your life and everything that came with it, your memories, your shape, your identity. But it isn't some infection that changes you into one of them. There's no transition to stop, no 'real you' to reach. It's not a possession you can shake off or have exorcised.

You're dead, and some thing from space is wearing your face, doing unspeakable horror in your name, using your knowledge to do it.

And their motivation is pure malice.

The dire wraiths seek to conquer not just to acquire territory, but because they loathe other forms of life. The science wraiths were merely genocidal and ruthless, moving in secret were possible.

The sorcery wraiths embrace sadism and intimidation as primary weapons, and they love their work.

A science wraith plot is "bind a human bigot to the armor (read: corpse) of a fallen spaceknight so he can kill Rom for us and we can get back to infiltrating the world governments and SHIELD."

A sorcery wraith plot is "torture kidnapped people to death in a sewer so their blood can be infused with a ritual curse, then add that blood to the transfusion supply so demons can hatch out of the most vulnerable in the places where all the medical resources are so we can spread terror, make people afraid to seek medical attention, and kill as many doctors and nurses as possible to make reacting to our other plots more difficult."

Now, some people may say that a group of villains that are literally pure evil are boring. Sometimes this is true. But the wraiths have a couple of advantages.

The first is they're written as having an intense need to be clever. They like their enemies off-balance and afraid, so straightforward villainy is off the table. They have to show off to their fellows by being not just brutal, but diabolical.

The second is the chain of command. Moral ambiguity is for all the various dupes that wraiths set in the Spaceknights' way and individual villains looking to cause trouble, whether its the wraiths pitting the police, SHIELD, or the Jack of Hearts against Rom, the Mad Thinker looking to get a chunk of his tech, the Mole Man mucking things up, or Hybrid setting the X-Men (and later brotherhood) on Rom while plotting a mind controlled harem of X-Waifus...

The wraiths get to subsist on an unrelenting delight in the suffering of all other creatures.

And on the subject of attracting third party attention, Some of that's on the Spaceknights themselves. Because their weapons that send the Wraiths to limbo: Rom's Neutralizer, Starshine's eye-beams, Karas's living fire? The knights see the wraiths revert and get banished.

Outside observers see a metal man disintegrating their neighbors on the street. Even in defeat the Wraiths cause suffering and sow distrust.

A World that is Hell Orbiting a Star that is the Devil

But as witches, the wraiths need their devil to serve and draw power from. And that power is their home solar system: Wraithworld and the Black Sun it orbits.

Both are living things, lovecraftian horrors with will and desires of the most malevolent sort. The black sun radiates dark sorcery and vile mystical energies to sustain Wraithworld and the rest of the dark nebula, and is actually a hole to a reality that is anathema to life as we know it.

Wraithworld is hostile to all life that isn't dire wraiths, and will adjust itself to be hostile to anything that can survive it, up to and including Galactus. The big guy tried to eat both, and was soundly rebuked to the point he fled in fear for his life.

The star's entire surface is covered by an inky blackness that it turns out is hordes of deathwings, living shadow-demons that are among the most potent weapons in the wraith arsenal.

Compared to most of the marvel universe, they're more demonic than most demons, more alien than most aliens, and more horrifying than the vast majority of the monsters. The only other contenders in my book are the Warwolves (who execute a similar shtick in a more surreal and undignified fashion) and maybe the Brood on body-horror merits if they weren't overplayed.

In the end, Wraithworld may have been banished to limbo, but only a more powerful demon could keep the wraiths out of the spotlight permanently.

That demon is, of course, intellectual property.

[vertigoartgore]

1984's Marvel Age Vol.1 #23 cover by cover artist Bill Sienkiewicz (featuring his redesign of the Dire Wraiths ; Sienkiewicz also did a bunch of covers at the same period for the ROM Spaceknight series).

[deepdreamnights]

Spaceknights:

Skera the Scanner and Vola the Trapper

Scanner and Trapper got the closest to my Tokusatsu-Spaceknight dreams in relation to my Live-Action ROM Spaceknight video project.

All the SpaceKnights are at least a bit toyetic, and you can see Marvel trying to throw Parker Bros a bone that they never snatched with everyone from Firefall onward. Scanner and Trapper are two of my favorites.

Full tutorializing under the fold.

Overpainting was the most effective way to get the designs to where I wanted them, and this is going to be the main breakdown of that (later posts about other knights will likely focus on other aspects).

I used Midjourney's edit feature to do this. The first step is getting the image high-enough res to work with. MJ's edit feature can be used as a very effective image upscaler, and that's the first step.

It's also useful for removing word balloons and other obstructions that the AI will later misinterpret and getting a view of an entire character if parts are cropped off. You will need to often extract backgrounds manually, especially with comic art where AI background removal tools usually fail.

Once the image is upscaled you're going to get better results using the overpainting/retexture feature. Which you're going to have to use a lot because anytime you're using overpainting to shift a character in art style, its going to involve compositing.

No single version of Vola or Sekra had all the right parts, so photoshopped the bits I liked together before re-loading it into MJ's editor for some touchups. Sometimes you have to make a mockup and use that as a character reference or fully retexture over it.

You'll notice that I removed Vola's net. Accessories, if on the character model, will always be on the character when used with Vidu's system, and often glitch because of it. You can always put them back in with a second image reference or with a specific reference that still has them.

Once you have the reference image, you can use the character. Though if you want to use them a lot, you'll want a full model sheet with multiple views.

More to come.

[browsethestacks]

ROM

Art by Bob Layton

[thebibliomancer]

This is such a funny example of “legally we can’t say your name because the rights have lapsed”

[nerds-yearbook]

In Rom 2#, cover date January, 1980, Steve Jackson, Rachel Sweet, Kevin Kraller, Senator David Carlisle, General Nolan Sutherland, Police Chief Martin Rogers, Archie Stryker, Jonathon Clark, and Sarah Clark were introduced. They were created by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema. ("Second Coming!", Rom 2, Marvel Comic Event)

[x-mencomics]

The Uncanny X-Men #186 - Lifedeath

Storm is extremely depressed. She's just lying in bed, staring blankly. Forge cares for her, bringing her soup and tea. They're at his building in Dallas, Texas. Storm doesn't want to live anymore without her powers. She says she wishes Forge wouldn't have saved her from the river and just let her drown (see last ish). So sad! Forge watches video of Storm (not sure where the video is coming from...) and he says she is beautiful.

At Xavier's mansion, the Professor searches for Storm using Cerebro but he is unable to find her. He searches for Rogue next.

In Dallas, Storm asks if Rogue has been found. Forge says Gyrich is searching for her, but has not located her yet. Forge asks why Storm is with Rogue, a member of the Brotherhood. Storm says Rogue is no longer with the Brotherhood. They discuss an approaching storm and Storm gets upset about losing her powers. She says she used to be able to fly; Forge says now she has to walk like everyone else. He immediately regrets sounding harsh.

Storm and Forge go swimming in his pool. Storm realizes that Forge is missing one leg and one hand, and they have been replaced with metal, robotic ones that Forge built. He explains that he lost his leg and hand in Vietnam.

Back in Caldecott County, Mississippi, Dr. Cooper and another federal agent, Phil Rosen, discuss the search for Rogue. Dr. Cooper says Gyrich said he will deal with Storm. They say goodbye, and Rosen heads to his car, and then -

HUMAN!

A Dire Wraith stabs Rosen with a tentacle and melts (?) the agent's body. The Wraith transforms into a look-alike of Rosen, then calls more Wraiths out of the shadows. The Rosen-Wraith says "the female awaits." The Wraiths all go back to Dr. Cooper and try to melt her too. But then Rogue shows up! Rogue starts beating all the Wraiths up, throwing them into cars, through walls, etc. Dr. Cooper shoots holds a gun to the Rosen-Wraith's head and asks what it wants from her. It refuses to answer, and says that eventually the Wraiths will take over the earth. Dr. Cooper shoots it in the head. Rogue accidentally absorbs the Wraith's memories and abilities during the fight. She can't tell which part of herself is actually herself and which part is the Wraith.

Suddenly, Professor Xavier connects with Rogue through Cerebro. The Wraith has some psychic abilities because it's attacking the Professor mentally. Nightcrawler asks for the coordinates.

Dr. Cooper rushes back to Rosen's car and gets in. But Rogue is in the backseat, and she grabs Dr. Cooper's face, absorbing her memories. Rogue learns about Forge and his inventions, and that initially Dr. Cooper and Gyrich were trying to use Forge's neutralizer on Rogue, not Storm. Dr. Cooper is unconscious. Rogue rushes off, saying she has to talk to the Professor and get the X-Men's help.

At Forge's house, he and Storm have dinner and champagne together. There's lots of flirting and intimate discussions about their pasts. Storm reveals that her childhood home in Africa was leveled by bombs. Her and her mother were buried in the rubble, and she watched her mother die. This is why Storm is afraid of enclosed spaces. They kiss. Forge tells Storm she is beautiful. She says the same about him.

Forge's phone rings and he answers. He says he needs to take the call to his office. Storm realizes she should've called Professor Xavier immediately after the incident in Mississippi. She grabs the phone, but Forge is still on it. Storm overhears Forge's conversation. He's talking to Gyrich! Gyrich wants Storm relocated to a federal facility. Forge says he wants to take care of Storm at his home instead. Gyrich says Forge is emotionally involved and Forge agrees - he's invested in Storm because he designed the neutralizer and is responsible for her losing her powers.

Storm is outraged to learn this. She tries to leave Forge's home, but ends up on the roof of the building. Forge runs after her and says he's not the enemy. She doesn't believe him. Forge says he invented the neutralizer for Gyrich, but that he can also invent something to reverse its effects. He says he is a mutant, and his ability is inventing. Storm says that working with Gyrich will lead to the destruction of mutants. Forge tries to comfort Storm and calm her, but she punches him in the face. He falls. Storm says her feet may never leave the ground, but she will fly again. She leaves.

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

EARTH-BOUND MASSACRE IMMINENT -- THE SPACE DEMONS HAVE LANDED.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on the Dire Wraiths, space-faring demons from Wraithworld on a mission of catastrophic conquest of planet Earth, opening splash page, subsequent double splash page, and the following two pages, from "ROM" Vol. 1 #49. December, 1983. Marvel Comics.

"The wind howls in the high hollows this night, almost drowning out the hissing of the horrors that prepare to descend from the West Virginia hills. They are Dire Wraiths -- aliens -- demons from distant space driven in defeat to our shimmering planet. Their goal: conquest. Hunted here by ROM -- greatest of the spaceknights -- these sorcerous shape-shifters have determined to make their stand. And tonight, Clairton, West Virginia, ROM's adopted home -- shall share Wraithkind's revenge against the silver spaceknight!"

-- "ROM" Vol. 1 #49 (December 1983)

Story/script by Bill Mantlo

Artwork by Sal Buscema

Inks by Akin & Garvey

Colors by Ben Sean

Letters by Janice Chiang

Source: https://viewcomiconline.com/rom-49.

[sebeth]

Banished These Monsters To Limbo

[krafty1]

The Daily Panel 8/30/24

Image Credit: Marvel Comics Dire Wraiths, Marvel Comics, ROM, Sal Buscema, The Daily Panel

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

Rom has arrived! This is Rom's handbook entry from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Written and researched by Mark Gruenwald and Peter Sanderson with art piece by Sal Buscema and armour and weaponry schematics by Eliot R. Brown.

[deepdreamnights]

ROM Monsters

Wherein I breakdown my process and opine about the world of ROM and what makes a good TV adaptation.

For my Rom & Brandy video I needed the Dire Wraiths, among others. Creating something that looks like a suit or puppet was the first step. Vidu's "object reference" option means that if you've got a good pic, you can typically get it to walk around and move, but you've gotta have the pic.

As with creating any kind of specific design, a lot of editing was involved with each. For the male "science" Dire Wraith and Serpentine designs I used mainly text prompting. Hybrid and the the female "sorcery" Dire Wraith design were overpaintings of modified panel-art.

The idea that the show would have started in '81 meant that the sorcery wraith form wouldn't have been introduced yet, and the original wraith designs in early issues were intentional placeholder "transitional forms" that they used when around outsiders.

This was to give Parker Bros a chance to come up with a toy, which they never did. Translating this blobby form into the eventual male wraith form was just a matter of interpreting the "Pillsbury Doughdemon" form into something more froglike:

Which is a track a live action production would have done back in the day. Thus when John Saxon gets neutralized, he turns into a spinning pale frog-monster.

And on that subject, complex shots like the neutralization process aren't really promptable on their own. I wound up making a spinning wraith, then a swirling oil-light painting, and compositing them old-school. I contemplated faking a bluescreen halo onto him, but I didn't think the joke would land.

The female Wraiths I had initially made for Carol of the Hells/Scary Wicked Deadly Evil Christmas

The majority of their appearances in Brandy and Rom are, I will admit, anachronistically good. That design would have been a suit with a an anamatronic puppet-head for closeups/tongue-lashes, and stop-motion for wide shots.

Thankfully, Wraiths are in human form 90% of the time, and banishment scenes can be stock footage.

Serpentine...

I admit, I didn't do a whole lot to make extra accurate outside some tweaks to his horns. He was a one-off baddie, I liked the sports-bra harness more than the y-harness, he's recognizable, so it works for a 2 second shot. Didn't bother fixing his toes because he was never showing up full-screen, but I will if I use him again.

I'm kinda lukewarm on Serpentine as a concept, which is weird given I'm huge into reptiles, but here's some unused shots nonetheless.

In-show, Serpentine's would not have been a one-and-done. To make sure they got their money's worth out of the suit, he'd show up multiple times, and the suit would be redressed for various aliens in the Galador flashbacks and in "The Return of Starfire"

Last but not least, Hybrid:

"Booga-booga!, scared you!"

I conceive Hybrid as being a combination of a puppet and a head-and-shoulders mask for dialog shots. I'll get into his human form in the post about the non-Galadorian human characters.

While TV Rom would crossover like mad just like his comic counterpart did, he'd mainly be meeting other Marvel TV characters, successful and failed.

I don't see them introducing the X-Men conceptually within a ROM TV series as a backdoor pilot, so a harem of mutants in spandex isn't on the table.

Hybrid still wants to sire a master race of wraith-humans, but with a simpler, hotness-based Moonraker-style approach, with Brandy at the top of his list.

[bloodilymerry]

Bird of Prey: The Dire Wraith Wars

They think they’re in a competition with the Quintessons for galactic super villains, but they never managed to expand their empire to the degree of the Quintessons in the heyday of their empire. In fact, they seem to have a unique talent of picking targets that stymie their expansion: first Galador and more recently Elonia.

Dire Wraiths have a strong affinity for magic and have developed it into some of its most sophisticated forms, allowing them to shift between shapes and take possession of other beings. There are, however, limits to their power: as with most magic, a sufficiently determined target can resist it, if they manage to reject magic as a possibility in total. The other problem the Wraiths have encountered is that their possession spells grow less effective the more of the target’s body is mechanical. 

As a result, the Dire Wraiths are strongly prejudiced against mechanical species, viewing them as soulless abominations. 

Dire Wraiths are a matriarchal society: only female Dire Wraiths are allowed to be inducted into the highest mysteries of magic, as Wraiths believe that the feminine power of creation makes female brains more capable of reaching higher forms of understanding and leans itself towards more metaphysical thinking. The male Wraiths are instead encouraged to focus on more down-to-earth subjects such as science and engineering.

Space Knights

Beginnings: Galador

Galador was the first victim of the expansion of the Dire Wraiths, but it didn’t go down without a fight. The dire Wraith tactics at this point were unsubtle: they attempted a mass possession of the whole military, in a bid to end the war before it even started. This rush however was what lead to them being discovered and the Galadorians coming up with their counter: the cybernetic Space Knights.

These Space Knights had shed their names and assumed new ones at conversion. Those ranged between ones referring to a favourite weapon like Javelin, to ones that had a personal meaning to the knight, such as Ikon. 

Galadorian Space Knights boasted varied body-configurations and wielded different weapons: ones that they were most familiar and skilled with. As all non-cybernetized members of the military were possibly compromised, as well as parts of the civilian administration, the Space Knights engaged in tactical strikes on the Galadorian population. 

This, in turn, led the Dire Wraiths to switch to more overt tactics, and the whole conflict culminated in one final battle over and on the surface of Galador, where the three final Knights were all deployed, wielding the newest generation of weapons that were a fusion of magic with technology:

the first, Terminator had been equipped with a weapon known as Blacklight.

the second, Starshine, wielded the Living Light.

the third, Rom, was given the Neutralizer.

Their first battle would also be the last one. The combined effect of their weapons swallowed up not only a good chunk of the Dire Wraith flotilla, but also engulfed Galador. The last three Space Knights presumably perished with it.

Or did they?

Present: Elonia

It took several hundred years for the Dire Wraiths to recover from their losses on Galador, but once they did, their sights turned to another world: Elonia. Far less technologically advanced than the Galadorians and with no magical traditions to speak of, the world seemed like easy pickings.

It would prove not to be so. 

The Dire Wraiths learned from their last conflict, and rather than employing high risk, high reward mass possession, they instead started with possessing chosen targets. However, to their surprise, these targets started getting discovered, and Elonians responded to those discoveries with scorched earth tactics - the same tactics, in fact, that Galadorians had employed.

In addition to that, they’ve also started fielding Space Knights of the same body configuration as Rom, though their weapons appear to lack any magical enhancements.

Currently, neither side has gained the upper hand.

[rungapikattohikattara]

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