In 1992, Marvel Comics writer Bill Mantlo was severely injured in a hit-and-run accident, and he’s required full-time care ever since. Three years ago, the Portland, Oregon comic book store Floating World Comics raised money to improve Mantlo’s quality of life by putting together a show of mainstream and indie cartoonists’s drawings of ROM, Spaceknight–the comic book, based on an unsuccessful toy, that Mantlo wrote from 1979 to 1986.
This week, they’re doing it again: a second “Spacenite” event is happening this Thursday, December 2, with artwork that will be auctioned to benefit Mantlo. We spoke with Floating World’s Jason Leivian about “Spacenite” and the enduring appeal of ROM.
TECHLAND: ROM has become something of a cult item, over twenty years after the series ended. What made it connect so deeply with you?
JASON LEIVIAN: ROM #60 was the first comic my Dad ever bought me, and I will always remember that. I wonder what made that particular comic jump off the racks? It has to be ROM’s design. I thought he was so cool-looking–a shiny silver robot with metal muscles, and yeah, something about the geometry of his boxy head with glowing red eyes. This would’ve been around 1986. So most kids had seen Star Wars by that point and I think we were all into robots in the ’80s because of that and Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, stuff like that.
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I read that issue so many times. It was horrific. Wraiths were drilling their tongues into people’s skulls and leaving them as dried-up husks. There was a little girl in that issue and she sees her parents get killed while she’s hiding from the Wraiths. Rick Jones has cancer. There’s lots of crying. It’s pretty intense. I also find it interesting that the first comic I ever read was drawn by Steve Ditko. I didn’t really like his art as a kid. I was more into John Byrne. I couldn’t believe people could draw so well.
So next time we go to the supermarket I get the next issue. Except I think I’ve already missed one somehow. I started reading the series right around ROM’s final battle on earth. Meaning he had been fighting the Dire Wraiths on Earth since issue one. And this battle reaches its epic conclusion in issue 66 which guest- starts almost every character in the Marvel universe. I must’ve thought ROM was the biggest deal in Marvel.
Since I missed an issue, I started looking up comic shops in the Yellow Pages. ROM was also the first series where I collected every single issue. I did it in sort of a weird way though. I worked backwards from 60. Every week or so I would get a new back issue. I remember looking at the covers of the first 10 or 20 issues so much, and they looked so good. I really couldn’t wait to see what happened in them. A lot of them had word balloons, so I’d get a glimpse of the story. On the cover of issue 7 someone is saying “I’m sorry, Brandy! There’s nothing I can do! ROM is dead!” It was torture slowly working my way back to those pivotal issues.
Marvel’s famously unable to reprint any of the original ROM series (or use any of the characters and concepts that belong to Hasbro), even though bits of the stories have ended up as Marvel continuity. Which issues of the original series are particularly worth digging up?
One of my favorites was this 2 or 3 part story from issues 42-44. A scientist tells ROM he can get his humanity back, but it’s a trick. The covers for these issues were really cool too. ROM’s new human body starts deteriorating and melting away kinda like a zombie. It was really gross. His flesh has almost completely rotted away by the time his girlfriend, Starshine, finds him. I think the bad guy has stolen ROM’s armor at this point, like he’s living in it. But somehow it all gets resolved and ROM becomes ROM again.
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I think the fact that ROM had these sci-fi horror elements is another reason this story stands out from other ’80s superhero comics. The beginning of the series is totally Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Dire Wraiths steal human forms and impersonate the people they’ve killed. Like a secret invasion, but only ROM has the technology to spot the aliens in hiding. When he zaps them with his neutralizer he’s sending the Wraiths to limbo, but to everyone else it just looks like he’s murdering people with a laser ray. So the police and military think ROM is the bad guy. If you start at the beginning and read to about issue 15 or so, that’s a pretty good arc that introduces all the important supporting characters and subplots.
I remember liking issue 69 because that was the first time I had seen Ego the Living Planet. I thought that was a cool character.
Also there was a weird run between issues 35 and 40 that dealt with King Arthur, underwater ghosts, a Shang-Chi/mummy crossover, and a Pied Piper-type villain. I remember them all being pretty creepy and scary.
It’s worth noting that Bill Mantlo created everything about ROM’s world: the backstory of the Wraiths and the other Spaceknights on Galador, Brandy/Starshine as ROM’s love interest. All he was given was an action figure that had one character in its entire line. From that, he told a story that ran 75 issues plus 4 annuals. That series really covered a lot of ground and went a lot of places.
How was the money from the previous “Spacenite” show used to improve Bill Mantlo’s quality of life?
I work with Bill Mantlo’s brother, Mike, who is also his caregiver. Bill is a ward of the state, living in a special care facility. The state sustains him there and gives him an annual allowance of something like $1000-$2000 a year. But Bill can’t have any possessions of his own. Anything beyond that, his brother and family must provide. So the money we contribute can get him things like changes of clothes, food that isn’t hospital food, things like that. I wish there was something hopeful I could say about his situation, but from my phone conversations with Mike I can tell it’s a pretty heartbreaking story.
Mike did tell me that Bill is aware that we’ve been doing these tribute shows, and Mike said he really got a kick out of seeing the artwork. It’s been fun connecting with Bill’s peers like Al Milgrom, Herb Trimpe and Walt Simonson. They all had very kind messages to share with Bill.
This week’s event is the “second and final” ROM tribute show–why is it the last one?
Mainly, I’m going to stop doing the shows so I can finally publish the tribute book that I’ve been planning for the ROM artwork. This second show was supposed to double as a book release, but I kept pushing the date back in order to give artists more time. Finally I decided, let’s just do the show, that’ll be the deadline, and then I’ll do the book 6 months later without having to rush it all at the same time. That basically worked out. Once I finally set the date of the show in stone, the artists knew it was real deadline time and they got their art in.
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The initial idea was just to do a book of ROM fan art. The art exhibits sort of grew out of that. So that’s what I get to focus on after this show, putting the book together. I found out that Chris Ryall from IDW is also a ROM fan and he’s going to put me in touch with other writers and other ROM fans, so there’ll be some written content for the book too: testimonials and dedications from others that have had their lives changed by Bill Mantlo’s work. Also, you can probably guess there’s some tricky legal stuff. Diamond has said they wouldn’t carry the book without written permission from Hasbro. I contacted Hasbro; they didn’t give permission, but they didn’t cease-and-desist me either. Maybe that was their way of saying “go ahead, we know it’s for a good cause.” It’s been a little frustrating to contact Marvel or Hero Initiative, but then they can’t really comment or get involved because of legal nonsense. I think Chris is gonna help me navigate these legal labyrinths to see if Diamond will carry the tribute book. I also want to give big thanks to Brian Vaughan, Brian Bendis and Rick Remender, other Mantlo/ROM fans that helped spread the word about the show and put me in touch with artists. There’s lots more people to thank, but I guess I’ll save that for the book.
It’s going to be so awesome to get the book back from the printers and then send a copy to Bill and Mike. It’s my way of saying thanks to Bill for getting me into comics as a kid. Along the way, I’ve met so many other fans with the exact same story–artists from South America, Croatia, France, who loved ROM when they were younger.
Who’s going to be contributing pieces to this show? Are there any that have particularly surprised you?
We got some amazing contributions from comics artists like Mike Allred, Jeffrey Brown, Tan Eng Huat, Bryan Talbot, Farel Dalrymple, Zack Soto, Michael Deforge, Matt Timson, and Benjamin Marra. I’ve still got my fingers crossed for some late submissions from J.H. Williams and Rafael Grampa. (Hey, Batwoman fans, you can suffer some more delays for a J.H. Williams ROM, yeah?) Still waiting to hear back from Frank Miller (pleeeease? you can have the cover!). Frank did the covers to ROM #1 and #3, by the way.
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But I think the real surprises are from the illustrators and designers that aren’t from the world of comics. Veronique Meignaud did a really beautiful surreal illustration of ROM sort of deteriorating and fighting with some plant life. There were a couple others by Ian Lynam and Patrick Gildersleeves that also surrounded ROM with plantlife and fauna. I wonder why that is? Yuta Onada did a killer iconic ROM that we used for some of the promo posters. Ben O’Brien did a very celebratory image based around some sort of ROM parade, as if Spacenite was a global event that brought out the balloons and ticker tape.
One surprise was when I contacted Jhonen Vasquez to see if he’d like to do a ROM. He passed the invite along to Jon Schnepp and Chris Prynoski from Titmouse, the creators of Metalocalypse. Turns out they’re both huge ROM fans, and they wrote back saying they’d love to be in the show. Chris just emailed me a pic of his Dire Wraith painting, and it totally made my morning.
I also really enjoyed when artists would include other Spaceknights or the Dire Wraiths. There wasn’t as much of that as I expected. But there were at least two Galactuses. Simon Gane did a beautiful poster in our 2007 show. It’s ROM in his human form embracing Brandy on the planet Galador. It’s the happy ending from issue 75, the last issue. Dude did his research.
It was fun contacting these illustrators who didn’t really know the comics. But they were attracted to the cause, and the more they studied about ROM the more they got into it. There are a lot of interpretations that take ROM’s basic form and combine it with human heart/cyborg machinery themes and Bill Mantlo’s tragic story.
What do you think is Bill Mantlo’s legacy in comics?
As I’ve learned over the past few years doing these events, Bill will be remembered as a kind and funny guy who wrote almost every single title published by Marvel Comics. There’s a lot of fans of his Hulk and Alpha Flight runs, but if you ask most people they will say he’s most famous for ROM, Micronauts and Cloak and Dagger.