“We possess not our full power here! In human guise, with no weapons, we must fight as humans do – without benefit of our Wraith sorcery! We cannot hope to defeat Rom!”
“True, Wraith! Perhaps the truest words your lying lips have ever spoken!”
“GLEEAGHH!”
In Washington, DC, the head Wraiths – Senator Carlisle, General Sutherland, S.H.I.E.L.D. Ageant Kraller, Psychologist Rachael Sweet – are again assembled, watching footage of Rom’s encounter with the National Guard. Archie Stryker, still in cuffs and flanked by Wraith cops, is still raging, still unaware that the beings Rom fought, the beings Archie is currently among, aren’t human. The group plays up Archie’s past as a Korean War vet and offers him the opportunity to help his government and right his recent criminal wrongs by destroying Rom.
In a field in West Virginia, Rom ponders his recent interactions with humans and remembers the day he first came to in his surgically grafted suit of armor, looking down at new mechanical hands with new mechanical eyes. Pushing aside his emotions, he performs a broad sweep over the land with his Analyzer, detecting Wraith activity in the distant hills.
In Clariton, Brandy Clark, still reeling over the last few days, returns to her apartment to find it’s been tossed by two men who produce government badges and say they’d like to ask her a few questions about Rom.
In Maryland, Stryker proves his honed physical abilities in an obstacle course. The Wraiths take him to a lab where they prep him to bond with the now empty blazing gold armor of a Spaceknight.
In West Virginia, Rom enters the hills to find a huge Wraith complex where an interdimensional transporter is being assembled to free their defeated comrades from Limbo. After confirming there are no humans in their midst, Rom starts mowing through dozens of Wraiths with his Neutralizer and takes out the transporter array with a hurled jeep. The resulting explosion sends a power surge into Clairton that shorts out all electrical devices, including those in the home of Brandy’s parents. Her boyfriend Steve arrives to show her home only to find out she left without him. Furious, he races to her apartment and finds it tossed and Brandy missing.
Back in the subterranean complex, Rom finishes off the last of the Wraiths, but is suddenly engulfed in a roiling, living flame. Rom recognizes the fire as a Galadorian weapon and the approaching suit of armor as that of his fellow Spaceknight Karas. But Karas is gone, killed when the Wraiths pried him out of the surgically grafted suit. Instead, it’s worn by Archie Stryker, further enraged as he marches through the piles of ash that he still believes to be the human victims of the alien menace Rom. Archie is now Firefall.
I distinctly remember the twist of Archie Stryker getting his own suit of armor and taking the fight directly to Rom, but I forgot two key issues. 1) It’s Spaceknight armor instead of a creation of the Dire Wraiths and is probably the most prominent of the armors as it’s powered by the Living Flame of Galador itself, meaning the symbolic weapon of Rom’s very world has now been turned against him. Also, I love the poignant realization that its past wearer, a friend of Rom’s, must now be dead because of what it would take to remove the grafted armor. It’s a bit of a shame that they haven’t set the character of Karas up previously in flashbacks, but that doesn’t detract from the power of the revelation. Rom is alone, alienated, and just the brief recognition of a familiar face followed by horror at the truth is enough to increase the tragedy of his calling. 2) That Stryker entered the armor this early in the series. It seems a little quick to escalate the scenario in so drastic a fashion as to pit Rom against armor and weapons of his own kind, but I don’t mind it. Issue #2 felt a little too redundant in the way it echoed the first more than built upon it, and this issue is all about kicking things to another level. Is this too high of a level, too great of a jump to easily follow on with additional twists? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see about that when we get there.
At the very least, I’m thrilled they aren’t choosing to keep dragging out Stryker’s pent up rage towards Rom, because I’m already a little tired of the scowly face he’s had in every single panel since we’ve met him. Now we get to see him in action, unleashing his hate and anger instead of being shackled back and just talking about it. I don’t know that we needed that extra layer of him being a vet from Korea, but it does give him some nice moments where he compares the horrors of Rom’s “rampage” to the field of battle, to the nightmare he’s spent years trying to run from. And I like that we’re finally getting some names for the Wraiths in charge, though it says a lot about the era from which this story was written that the men get to be police chiefs and senators and generals and agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and the women get to be operators and psychologists. Makes me wonder if we’ll see additional female Wraiths in the form of stewardesses, secretaries, and trophy wives.
I like how brief Brandy’s appearance is in this issue, using a single page to voice her doubts then hit us with strangers in her apartment as we’re left lingering on the mystery of where she’s gone. Is she in the hands of the Wraiths, or genuine feds who think something deeper is going on? Steve gets about the same amount of page time, where he continues painting himself as such a raging asshole that it boggles the mind that Brandy continues to have anything to do with him. Seriously, this is what he says as he storms out of her parents’ house:
“That headstrong little idiot! I told her to stay here – to settle her nerves after her encounter with Rom! But, no! She’s always gotta play the independent woman!”
Steve, she’s not your wife. She’s your girlfriend. And even if she were married to you (lord help her), you don’t own her, you temperamental dipshit. You don’t tell her when she can or can’t return to her own home, and bullying someone into settling their nerves isn’t exactly the best way to get them to settle. Chill the fuck out. I understand what Mantlo is going for in this scene, continuing to play up Steve’s fear of Rom and anger that Brandy won’t let her opposing viewpoint go, but this is another case where the writing can get very clumsy in the way it executes things, to the point where I want to take what’s supposed to be a complex character who’s a key element in a central relationship triangle and just keep kicking him in the nuts until he cries manseed tears.
But that’s the only glaring mark against this issue. It’s clunky, but still pretty solid, with a great furthering of Stryker’s character, the mystery of Brandy’s fate, Rom pondering his lost humanity, the huge, fantastic rampage of Rom in the Wraith compound, the idea of the Wraiths wanting to free the legions of their own kind from Limbo, the tragic history and genuine threat of the Spaceknight armor in Wraith hands, and the great little throwaway sequence of the power surge racing through Clairton, overloading every home appliance in its wake.
Oh, and they totally answered my question from the last post. It seems Rom’s analyzer has different settings. Up close, it can specifically reveal who is a Wraith. From a distance, it can do a broadband scan that points in the direction of Wraiths. The former instantly grabs the attention of Wraiths, the latter is so diffused that it doesn’t. Now it makes sense that Rom knows what directions to head for on his mission.