Do you know how accurate the marvel.com biography of Arkady is? (At least to more recent comics)
I skimmed over it, and the first sentence was “During the late 1950's or early 1960's, Arkady Gregorivich Rossovich served in the USSR's Spetsnaz (border patrol commandos), secretly r*ping & murdering young girls whenever the opportunity presented itself.”
However, I feel like in the more recent comics I’ve seen, this wasn’t really talked about?
And, it also states “after a formal court-martial, he was drafted into the USSR's super-soldier project, undergoing various torturous enhancements, which, among other effects, turned his skin chalk-white”. But, he’s been shown to have his chalk-white skin color as a child, which would most likely imply he was born with it.
(censored the first quote because I’m a little newer to tumblr and idk how easy it is to get posts taken down compared to other social media apps)
Oh, it is dreadfully inaccurate. It's something I have done extensive research on as I have been working on trying to get Marvel to change the entry on his page (fingers crossed, prayers, whatever you can to send some luck my way would be greatly appreciated). Because that first part you quote has done so much damage to Omega Red's reputation among fans. I remember well the battles I would have on Reddit during Omega Red's time on Krakoa's X-Force team about the subject because his push to more prominence had the side effect of having people check out his wikis interested in learning more about him and being completely turned off of the character because they saw that. (at the time, even the fandom wiki had that listed, as someone with an agenda had come through and specifically targeted Omega Red's page to add it in. Working with friends, we did succeed in cleaning up the fandom wiki a bit to remove that and fill in some more details about him, although it is still outdated and needs more work done on it too).
And the thing is, he never did it. The comics don't include anything on the subject your question mentions. It's completely made up. Along with other inaccuracies that entry contains. Buckle in, this is a long one to explain.
First of all, just where did Marvel get its information? Well, you see there is this book called "The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe." Back before the internet had wide-spread use, these books were often a god-send to comic nerds, as they could purchase one book that contained the information about their favorite characters and not have to jump through a ton of comic book issues they would have to track down manually to gain the knowledge those issues contained. It was an encyclopedia, a wiki on paper (god, I sound old putting it like that).
Now these handbooks are supposed to contain accurate information about various characters, using their comic appearances as guides to put together their histories and provide other information about them, like stats on strength and intelligence (which is another part of those books that are dubious and heavily debated by fans). However, when some things are not known about a character, the writers of those books are told to just make stuff up to fill the pages up and make it look like an encyclopedia. And then Marvel used that book to create the pages on their website, not stopping at any point to check for inaccuracies, trusting that whoever put the entry together actually did their research.
Unfortunately for Omega Red, he was hit from both sides: someone who did very poor research and got numerous things wrong, and someone who just made up a bunch of stuff to fill up the page. And since that book is what Marvel used when they booted up their website and added those entries, that is what fans have been forced to see every time they open that page.
Onto the inaccuracies. You have rightfully noted the oddity that is the start of Omega Red's entry, as it doesn't match up with anything that Marvel's comics have shown us readers in recent years. That's because the Handbook that Marvel uses for its website as a source is more than 20 years old, only going up to about where you see the final entry on the bottom of his page which... only goes up to his death at the end of Wolverine Origins. Which happened way back in 2009. The page is woefully outdated. Among other issues.
As I have been working on a rewrite of his wiki to actually include his history that has been revealed since Wolverine Origins, the more and more I have dug into the page itself, and the more I have found wrong with what they put down. And it all comes down to how the unknown person who put together his entry in that book didn't get a lot right. And, again, just made up stuff so that Omega Red's page didn't look like this:
Place of birth: unknown
Because it is not until the past 10 years, starting with the Weapon X Series that we actually started to get Omega Red's history about his earliest years beyond: serial killer. So his biography -- if you just looked at his comic appearances up to Wolverine Origins -- would have looked incredibly empty on background information. And it still does -- there's still so much we don't know about Arkady's past -- but because they made stuff up for the book that has no basis in the comics at all and aren't referenced in any of the material, it looks like we know more than what we actually do. And because Omega Red isn't as popular of a character and a villain, no one actually catches the mistakes and pushes to change it.
The first line of his history that you gave is the first example of this phenomena, but I'm pedantic, so let's go deeper., If you go back to the page on Marvel's website, look at what they have written down as his place of birth. You will see Novorossiysk, USSR listed, which -- if you have read all of Omega Red's comic book appearances like I have -- you will quickly realize is a place that is never once mentioned in the comics, let alone in relation to Omega Red. The writers made it up because they felt they needed to give him a place of birth and for some reason picked that city. We know now from the comics that have come out that Arkady is from the Kemervo Oblast of Siberia, but, again, we're dealing with a heavily outdated source.
Here's another part that they get wrong on the Marvel page:
"Eventually Wolverine hid the C-Synth in the grave of Janice Hollenbeck, a double agent slain by Omega Red."
Now, this particular inaccuracy is egregious, and a real sign that the person who was in charge of putting Omega Red's page together didn't actually read or understand the comics he was looking at. Because even at the time of the writing of the Marvel Handbook, we were twice shown what happened on the day of the Team X raid. On page, we saw Sabretooth murder Janice Hollenbeck both in the original flashbacks to the day in X-Men (1991) #6, and in Wolverine Origins (2006) #8. Omega Red wasn't even in the same room as Team X when Janice was murdered and yet Marvel's Handbook entry pins him with a crime that he didn't even do. Sabretooth did it, but gets off scott-free while Arkady is saddled with the repercussions of it (ie: fans think he did something he didn't actually do). It's really not fair.
Continuing on, the entry also contains a misunderstanding of the past between Omega Red and Banshee, putting that event much later into his biography history when it was actually said to have occurred before Omega Red was turned into a cyborg -- so pre-Team X raid. He didn't "partially reverted to his pre-mutated appearance," he hadn't been altered yet.
As they say the devil is in the details, and it's things like that which paint an inaccurate image of Omega Red among the Marvel fanbase. And because it's on the official Marvel page, fans take it as gospel truth without ever once considering if the source they are pointing to may be wrong. That is a huge issue and an example of why it is important to go back to the original source material to dig for the truth. The comics reveal more, are more up to date, and are more accessible than ever before, unlike the Marvel Handbook which has become an obsolete thing that has turned into an albatross around Omega Red's neck.
Hopefully it's something that we can have changed. It's a lot of work to go through the comics and add in more than 20 years of missing information (especially since Omega Red has more appearances in the past 10 years than he had in his first 20), but that's the kind of thing that has to be done at some point in order for the entries online to actually reflect the truth that is in the pages of the Marvel Comics. Again, fingers crossed that it can actually be done, as this is something that has been a years-long effort by a lot of us Omega Red fans to correct history on. If it is successful, I promise you guys will be the first to know because that will be a day of celebration for us Omega Red fans to have Arkady's name cleared of these falsehoods.
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