Omega the Unknown

The late Steve Gerber was a firm believer against the idea of revamping existing comic book characters while their creators were still alive.  He felt that such an act represented an act of contempt on the part of the new creators, and initially felt this way towards writer Jonathan Lethem’s proposed revamp of Gerber’s obscure “Omega the Unknown” series.  However, after talking with Gerber and making his plans for “Omega” known, Lethem got the man to at least admit that he had misjudged the writer and his intentions for re-interpreting the character.  I mention all this because after reading Lethem’s take on “Omega the Unknown,” with co-writer Karl Rusnak and artist Farel Dalrymple, that encounter with Gerber sounds like a more interesting idea for a story than what we got with this collection.

“Omega” is the story of a kid named Titus Alexander Island who is about to leave his quiet home-schooled life to interact with the outside world at an institute for gifted children.  These plans are quickly derailed after a car accident nearly kills him and reveals that his parents are actually robots.  This thrusts him into not only the real world of hospitals, public schools and friends, but also a vast conspiracy involving a mute superhero, more robots, a nanotech invasion, an otherworldly intelligence inhabiting a statue, New York’s local superhero “The Mink,” and his own burgeoning superpowers.

Make no mistake, this is a very surreal and strange book.  Fortunately, there’s a logic to all of the book’s craziness and as weird as all of the above plot elements sound, they still manage to co-exist in relative harmony.  It’s also easy to emphasize with Titus’ struggles since they resonate on levels both universal (who hasn’t had to deal with school bullies) and metaphorical (his transition to manhood is marked by realizing his role in the struggle to stop the nanotech invasion of the city).  Everything here also works thanks to Dalyrmple’s artistic style.  He’s very much the antithesis of what you’d expect from a Marvel artist, but the off-kilter surrealism he brings to the story also goes a long way towards making it all hang together.

However, “Omega’s” biggest problem is that after I finished it, my first thoughts were “What was the point?”  This is very much a coming-of-age story for Titus, but it’s never made clear why all of the strangeness was necessary for it.  I don’t know if it was because these elements were in Gerber’s original “Omega” series and this is merely Lethem and Rusnak paying tribute, but it all comes off as being different for the sake of being different.

If nothing else, this story along with the authors’ waxing nostalgic over the original series that closes out the volume does make me interested in checking out Gerber and Mary Skrenes’ original “Omega” series.  I’m definitely curious to see what inspired Lethem to write this story and to see how much of it actually derives from the original stories.  That said, I applaud Lethem and co. for getting Marvel to publish a series as strange as this.  If they ever decide to do something like it again… I still think that telling the story of his encounter with Gerber would be an interesting place to start.