This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at licensed I.P. Rom the Spaceknight’s crossovers with Marvel Comics characters.
NOTE: Rom: Spaceknight was a popular toy item decades ago and – as they did with the Micronauts – Marvel Comics licensed the rights to do comic book stories about the figure. Marvel’s Rom was a Spaceknight from the far-off planet Galador.
The Spaceknights of Galador were humanoids genetically grafted to their high-tech armor. They traveled the universe to fight the vile alien race the Dire Wraiths, who used advanced science, black magic and their own shape-shifting abilities to conquer planets and prey on their inhabitants. Marvel eventually made the shape-shifting Dire Wraiths an offshoot of their own company’s Skrulls.
Dire Wraiths had already infiltrated powerful organizations around the world by impersonating humans after doing away with them. This series featured a lot of story elements that Marvel would subsequently reuse in assorted Skrull invasion tales.
ROM Vol 1 #5 (April 1980)
Title: A House is Not a Home
Villains: The House of Shadows, Hellhounds of the Dark Nebula
Synopsis: Dr. Strange sensed that his long-ago foe the House of Shadows had returned to Earth. The house was really a sentient entity from another dimension. It preyed upon Earthlings who entered it due to its “haunted house” reputation until Strange defeated it and exiled it.
In West Virginia, Rom and two of his human allies, Brandy Clark and Steve Jackson, are pursued by Hellhounds (humanoid creatures from the Dark Nebula) sicced on them by the Dire Wraiths. They seek shelter in the House of Shadows, but Dr. Strange’s mystic warning helps Rom send the house back into exile before it can kill him and the others. Continue reading
PART FOUR – We pick up this time with Trader Horn’s reflection on how the British and German firms in Africa dominated the European trade in ivory and rubber, while France was a distant third. There were whispers that the French (whom Horn referred to far more insultingly than he ever referred to the indigenous Africans) were strategizing about using their Colonial Governments to limit the success of Great Britain and the German Empire wherever they could. 
These two works were written by Lucian, the Greek philosopher and satirist who lived in the 2nd century A.D. Lucian was noted not just for his philosophical observations but also for two works that defied definition by his contemporaries but would easily fall into the category of science fiction today. Both works are from roughly 150 A.D. and feature trips to the moon by pseudo-scientific means. 
He discovered that the moon (on which he could breathe just like on Earth) was populated by the souls of the deceased (roughly twelve hundred years before Dante’s Paradiso). From the moon Menippus made the astonishing observation that the Earth was round and not flat, in a wry addition to the then-ongoing philosophical debate about the subject. 
THE MANCHU EAGLE MURDER CAPER MYSTERY (1973, 1975) – This film was made in 1973 but not released until 1975. Where to begin with this bizarre detective “comedy” that starred Gabriel Dell long after his days with the Dead-End Kids/ Bowery Boys/ Little Tough Guys. For starters, fans of that series of films that ran from the 1930s onward will enjoy the fact that Dell gets to share a few scenes with his fellow veteran of those movies – Huntz Hall. 
Previously I examined Joel Chandler Harris’ 1902 story Flingin’ Jim And His Fool-Killer, set in Georgia in October of 1872, plus Ridgway Hill’s Facts for the Fool-Killer, set in and around Buffalo, NY in 1909. 
(Oh, and never forget that anti-Trump fascists acted like forcing Trump to release years of his tax returns was so important, yet the returns revealed he had done nothing wrong. Our corrupt elected officials then declined to have any other politicians reveal several years of their tax returns. It has only – and ever – been about “getting” the outsider Trump.) 
Here is my usual post-completion collection of chapter links, in this case for The Villon Legend. 
INSTANT CLASSIC – The INDIANA FEVER (2-8) welcomed the CHICAGO SKY (3-4) yesterday for what turned out to be a terrific game. 
