(People just kept mentioning them and mentioning them over and over again, and I kept thinking, “man when I get to #29 they are going to accuse me of pandering or plagiarism or something like that.”)
The Dire Wraiths hate you. It’s not personal. They hate everybody. But it also is personal because if they knew you, they’d hate you just because you’re you. The Dire Wraiths are not very nice people.
But they don’t hate you blindly. They have reasons for hating you. You’re a human, and humans – along with ROM – are of course the reason the Dire Wraiths went from being one of the most feared races in the galaxy to a collection of suicidal prisoners in Limbo. Most of the Dire Wraith population is dead because of humans (and ROM). The Dire Wraiths don’t want to conquer the humans; they want to exterminate them and make them suffer. And they want to do it before they go to Galador, because the Dire Wraiths want to keep enough humans alive as hostages that the Galadorians won’t try to pre-emptively annihilate them.
And here’s the thing: the Dire Wraiths are much, much smarter than their Skrull cousins. They know how to pull off an actual secret invasion. They’ve done it before, you see. And unlike the Skrulls they don’t need to take out and replace superhumans. The Dire Wraiths know that messing with superheroes in any amount just tips them off. The Dire Wraiths are once again just doing what they do best – they’ve infiltrated a small town in middle America that’s nothing special – except for a few key elements it happens to be near. Chief among these are a high-tech research facility specializing in solar energy transformation technologies and a weatherbeaten steppe with inherent mystical properties…
…because the Dire Wraiths, this time, are led by a prodigy Dire Wraith, verily the Dr. Doom of Dire Wraiths in that, unlike the rest of his species, she possessed both incredible skill with Dire Wraith super-science and Dire Wraith sorcery.
“But wait,” some continuity nerd out there says, “the Dire Wraiths lost their magic abilities when ROM transported Wraithworld into Limbo.” And this is true. However, this fugitive Dire Wraith, one of the scant few dozen to escape ROM’s massive neutralizer attack on Wraithworld and only a child at the time, applied her scientific mind to the Wraiths’ lack of magical power source and came up with a very simple solution: hire out.
Someone – something – has given the Dire Wraiths magic again. And frankly, it’s more powerful by far than the podunk, pedestrian sorcery they worked before; now, Dire Wraith sorcery is powerful enough that when they use it, someone like Dr. Strange notices. (It is, after all, his job.) And they’ve got a direct line to whomever’s providing them with mojo; the magics they wield are so powerful that they are literally burning out their own bodies when they use them. But they’ve got enough magic now that they can pull Wraiths out of Limbo, and more Wraiths join their numbers every day, and they don’t care how many of them die –
– because if they can convert Earth’s sun into the new dark sun of the Wraiths, with science and sorcery, they win. Even if every Dire Wraith was immediately afterwards killed (which would be entirely possible because nobody likes the Dire Wraiths), they would forever have left their mark once more on the universe.
All of this begs two major questions. Firstly – who’s powering the Wraiths? For my money, I’d guess that it’s someone who somehow gains power from their magic-fueled deaths, which means it’s probably someone really bad. Cthon? Mephisto? Satannish? (You just know that whatever the answer is, it’s not going to be good.)
And second – given that Marvel Comics can’t show ROM in his armor, how is ROM going to get involved in this, anyway? Because you totally know he will.
Top comment: Like Naked Snake and Naked Jehuty before him, Naked Rom shall be a powerful, yet wholly unstable force to be reckoned with. — Doctor Hal
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Obligatory “Rom was awesome” post.
Because he was.
Who’s ROM
Quixim: A Spaceknight. (That’s all I got. I’m not real sure myself.)
ROM, Spaceknight. Originally a toy, whose licensed comic appearances proved to have more lasting popularity.
who’s powering the Wraiths? For my money, I’d guess that it’s someone who somehow gains power from their magic-fueled deaths, which means it’s probably someone really bad. Cthon? Mephisto? Satannish?
The obvious candidate is Nyarlathotep. At least, with the setup you outlined for the old Crawling Chaos in Reason #22, it sounds like this would be right up his alley.
Mephisto has the same problem you identified with Dormammu – he’s a joke and a doormat and everyone knows when he shows up, he’s going to get beaten (or he’s a plot device to mess with things, not a real threat). Chthon’s a decent possibility, though I’d imagine if it were him he’d be getting more than raw power from the Wraith’s deaths. Another possibility is Set, though it lacks his signature “snake motif” (which is actually a good thing, in my mind – Elder Gods really shouldn’t let themselves get so tied down to human symbolism like that).
The Dire Wraiths are totally deserving of a comeback. I mean, here’s a race of creatures that gladly calls itself the Dire bleepin’ Wraiths, for crying out loud. They’re serious business.
Poor old ROM. In an ideal world of properly settled accounts, we’d have Essential ROM reprints on the shelves and he’d be leading the Guardians of the Galaxy…
That’s really just another compelling reason to “fix” him like MGK did with Dormammu. But after the whole Spider Man nonsense, I wouldn’t blame any comic book write for leaving Mephisto in the trash can of bad ideas.
I vote that Craig’s idea is co-opted for this. And that the new Dire Wraith invasion is stopped by a Defenders/Guardians of the Galaxy team-up…
Also if future-lawyer boy figures out a way to bring ROM back from copyright limbo he deserves to write for the Big Two, exclusive of how bad-ass his ideas are…
Ok, here’s my question: Given that the events of Annihilation: Conquest got started by a group of Phalanx infected Spaceknights where does that leave Rom? Granted, it’s not like the Knights are always together at the same time, but Annihilation stated that there weren’t a lot of Spaceknights left. Where has he been? Why didn’t he show up during Annihilation? You can’t tell me Marvel couldn’t come up with a way to get around the copyright issue. Even his Wiki proves that Marvel’s done it a couple of times.
How does one lose their ability to ask eldritch, arcane demigods for favors? Is Limbo a magical dead zone like Herbert’s Taco Hut?
Aww, they’re kinda cute and squawky-looking. Has anybody ever tried defeating them by playing dress up with them?
Well, if said eldritch gods get shot to hell by ROM, they aren’t gonna be able to do much.
And, once again, analogies work wonders.
Lets compare dark magic to mob ties. If you know, say, Jimmy the weasel and Johnny tight lips Mcgee, you can get some stuff done. You wind up in the clink, you’re still going to be able to have strings pulled in your favor.
If, however, both Jimmy and Johnny get a new pair of cement overshoes, then you can’t ask either of them for favors any more.
It’s like that, only with the mobsters replaced with dark gods and evil planets, and the cement shoes replaced with Spaceknights.
How would you work the science/magic Wraith genius? The science and magic Wraiths were two seperate species, kind of.
The patriarchial, science-based Dire Wraiths were kinda cute, in a sort of evil Michelin Man way. You could play dress-up with those.
The matriarchial, magic-based Wraiths were pretty frickin’ horrible-looking. Also, they didn’t just duplicate you like the Skrulls or puffy Wraiths: no–THEY DRILLED INTO YOUR BRAIN AND SUCKED OUT ALL YOUR MEMORIES before duping you!
Could someone give me a brief once-over on the copyright issue(s) Rom is suffering from? How could we not use the image, but still use the character?
ROM, The Greatest of the Spacewizards! He traded his humanity, again, for powerful mystic armor. It’s totally different from being a cyborg; you can tell because it looks only slightly different!
He gets +2 to Detect Wraith (Dire), can Translate three times a day, and wields a Vorpal Neutralizer.
Barring corrections by those with better legal knowledge than I, I think it’s more a matter of trademark than copyright, and that Marvel no longer has license to use the likeness of the Rom Spaceknight armor, but could still use the human-ified Rom or possibly give him a new set of armor that looks different enough from the toy that it would circumvent the issue.
Now if they could only do that with Charcoal from Exiles.
Crap.. I meant Thunderbolts
Zenrage: I think you’ve inadvertently found the solution to your problem.
Like Naked Snake and Naked Jehuty before him, Naked Rom shall be a powerful, yet wholly unstable force to be reckoned with.
There is no evil that dress-up can’t fix, sciencey adorable Dire Wraiths or magicy icky Dire Wraiths. A nice pink boa and bedazzled stilettos fix EVERYTHING.
Cookie McCool: I am positive this is the kind of thing written of in the Necronomicon.
Ok, ew, I just looked up pictures, and it hurts me deeply to admit maybe there are some things glitter CAN’T fix. (For some reason, I was picturing something lich-ier, if you know what I mean?)
Yup.
They’re the most terrifying thing Walt Simonson could come up with, then they added a tongue that drills into your brain.
You know, standard toy tie in stuff.
Yeah, the original Dire Wraiths were what you’d imagine the cranky grandfather of the Pillsbury Doughboy to be. I’m not sure what sort of description you could give for the later ones, but it would have to involve a substantial perusal of the Japanese demon-meets-schoolgirl animated genre.
Hell if ROM can kick back in South Park’s Imaginationland, I see no reason why he can’t be hanging out with the Guardians…
And yay for finding an entire race empowered by dark magicks for Strange to contend with.
The FF gets Skrulls…
Strange gets the Dire Wraiths.
I see you’re done with the foreplay.
Interesting.
It seems to me that an alternate Dr. Strange or other mystical baddie is manipulating this whole thing from the dark, waiting for his turn after throwing baddie and baddie at this world’s Dr. Strange.
No, but the sorcerous Dire Wraiths never had to bother doing such things before – they were able to power all their spells by using the energy from the dark sun of their world, a unique magical energy source. Once it was gone, they didn’t know what to do to cast spells any more – one of the downsides of having a fairly unique advantage.
Although the battle is all but lost, I do feel compelled to note what “beg the question” actually means.
For Imaginationland, marvinmartian, they actually changed most characters enough to avoid being sued. Theoretically they were already defensible as parody, but them’s the breaks.
marvinthemartian – your Skrull reference is more appropriate than you might realize; Dire Wraiths *are* sorcerously-distorted Skrulls.
Skrull:Dire Wraith : : Human:Vampire