Rom the Spaceknight – King-Sized Annual #1
“I’ve stripped you of your armor, spaceknight… now I’ll take your life!” thus sayeth the unnamed villain on the cover. To learn his identity, all the curious reader had to do was buy Rom the Spaceknight's King-Sized Annual #1! The story is by Bill Mantlo, which is business as usual when it comes to Rom, but in a good way. Mantlo made Rom the comic it was, and Rom was awesome. The interior art by Broderick and Gustovich is much better than the cover art, which is the reverse of how things usually go with annual issues. Not that Al Milgrom did a bad job.Milgrom was the house cover artist for a reason and I have previously defended him in an earlier review.
If you've read any of my reviews of Marvel's annuals before, you already know this one features the introduction of a new apparently one-off villain which we will probably never see again. This time the menace is the sinister scourge called Stardust. Lucky for Rom, he isn't up against Fletcher Hank's Stardust the Space-Wizard. That is a fight even Rom could not easily win.
This Stardust is a kind of energy being, exiled from a collective called the Body for being “unmutual”. That whole sentence gives me flashbacks to early Star Trek and Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. Briefly feeding on the life-forces of several small-town kids, Stardust assumes a more human-like shape. His appetite also increases. Next, he completely devours the life forces of some Dire Wraith’s, Rom’s ancient enemies. This doesn’t make Stardust evil, just more evil.
In his quest to reclaim the kids’ stolen life forces Rom comes into conflict with Stardust. One of the wraiths even begs the spaceknight to banish him to limbo (generally held to be a punishment worse than death) rather than allow Stardust to feed on him. That's how you are supposed to know Stardust is a real nasty piece of work. There is also the usual case of mistaken identity where the townsfolk think Rom is a killer robot rather than the good guy.
The back-up story features a rogue spaceknight, the unfortunately named Gloriole. Held to be second only to the Prime Director of Galador in intelligence, Gloriole wishes to learn the secrets of sorcery in order to turn the Wraith magic back on its creators. Rom stands in the way of his plans, so he must go.
This was a good annual for a toy tie-in comic that was consistently better than it had any right to be. The next two annuals (with #2 being my personal favorite) just kept getting better. Rescued this from the Retro Reboot dollar box!