#dire wraiths

[merrymarvelite]

Cover of the Day: Rom #19 (June, 1981) Art by Michael Golden, George Roussos, Michael Higgins

[radroller]

ROM #51 “Total War”

Written by Bill Mantlo, Illustrated by Sal Buscema ans Sal Candido

[starscreams-crown]

Ultra Magnus: I got this. Come at me, Wraiths.

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

[therobotmonster]

The Dire Wraith, Marvel's Perfect Monster

It's no secret I love ROM: Spaceknight.

I've been relatively cool on latter reboots, largely because the things they change to dodge the IP holdings of Parker Bros/Hasbro or Marvel (respectively), always lose something essential.

The largest problem is that the dire wraiths are incomparable villains, and Marvel invented all their meaningful lore. And what lore it is.

The Dire Wraiths are alien demons, creatures that come from a world orbiting a black star in the center of the Dark Nebula. They distill the paranoia of cold war pod-people infiltrators and the demon-loving satanism scare villains of the 70s (and 80s... and 90s... and...) into a single, diabolical package.

Well, two packages, actually-

The wraiths are revealed to be a highly sexually dimorphic species, both in form and social role. Male wraiths were the bulk of who we had dealt with before. They used science and stealth to their advantage.

Their base form was always a placeholder for when Parker Brothers eventually made a Dire Wraith toy for ROM to fight. They never did, so Marvel got to come up with their own finalized design.

And like comic artists are wont to do, they wanted ladies to draw. Look, the artists couldn't resist disrobing them in their first full on-page appearance. Typical.

The Dire Wraith women had been hidden in spooky robes the whole time, so this made it easy. A gender-based murderous uprising later, and we've got our new wraith phenotype.

Now that's a monster! Not some vaguely humanoid, vaguely froglike pale imp, but a starborn demon in the flesh. Froglike hands and feet with melty, loose wax-like flesh pooling about them, more adept at prowling on all fours like a predatory beast than walking like a human being, long whiplike tail, and the face! A lobster-like maw with a lengthy barbed tongue.

A barbed tongue that drips acid.

Before the ladies showed up, it wasn't explained what happened to humans the wraiths replaced. They'd get snatched, there's a replacement, you're pretty sure they're dead.

Now the truth is revealed. The tongue is used to pierce the victim's skull, allowing the wraith to devour their brain and absorb their memories and personality, reducing the whole body to foul ash.

Mind you, they don't have to do this. They can shapeshift all they want on their own. Its questionable if the males even had these barbs, and they may have been doing it like their skrull ancestors.

Yeah, the wraiths are an offshoot of the skrulls... in the same way a cenobite is an offshoot of humanity.

It's the feeding/replacing process that really makes the Dire Wraiths shine as bad guys. They take your life and everything that came with it, your memories, your shape, your identity. But it isn't some infection that changes you into one of them. There's no transition to stop, no 'real you' to reach. It's not a possession you can shake off or have exorcised.

You're dead, and some thing from space is wearing your face, doing unspeakable horror in your name, using your knowledge to do it.

And their motivation is pure malice.

The dire wraiths seek to conquer not just to acquire territory, but because they loathe other forms of life. The science wraiths were merely genocidal and ruthless, moving in secret were possible.

The sorcery wraiths embrace sadism and intimidation as primary weapons, and they love their work.

A science wraith plot is "bind a human bigot to the armor (read: corpse) of a fallen spaceknight so he can kill Rom for us and we can get back to infiltrating the world governments and SHIELD."

A sorcery wraith plot is "torture kidnapped people to death in a sewer so their blood can be infused with a ritual curse, then add that blood to the transfusion supply so demons can hatch out of the most vulnerable in the places where all the medical resources are so we can spread terror, make people afraid to seek medical attention, and kill as many doctors and nurses as possible to make reacting to our other plots more difficult."

Now, some people may say that a group of villains that are literally pure evil are boring. Sometimes this is true. But the wraiths have a couple of advantages.

The first is they're written as having an intense need to be clever. They like their enemies off-balance and afraid, so straightforward villainy is off the table. They have to show off to their fellows by being not just brutal, but diabolical.

The second is the chain of command. Moral ambiguity is for all the various dupes that wraiths set in the Spaceknights' way and individual villains looking to cause trouble, whether its the wraiths pitting the police, SHIELD, or the Jack of Hearts against Rom, the Mad Thinker looking to get a chunk of his tech, the Mole Man mucking things up, or Hybrid setting the X-Men (and later brotherhood) on Rom while plotting a mind controlled harem of X-Waifus...

The wraiths get to subsist on an unrelenting delight in the suffering of all other creatures.

And on the subject of attracting third party attention, Some of that's on the Spaceknights themselves. Because their weapons that send the Wraiths to limbo: Rom's Neutralizer, Starshine's eye-beams, Karas's living fire? The knights see the wraiths revert and get banished.

Outside observers see a metal man disintegrating their neighbors on the street. Even in defeat the Wraiths cause suffering and sow distrust.

A World that is Hell Orbiting a Star that is the Devil

But as witches, the wraiths need their devil to serve and draw power from. And that power is their home solar system: Wraithworld and the Black Sun it orbits.

Both are living things, lovecraftian horrors with will and desires of the most malevolent sort. The black sun radiates dark sorcery and vile mystical energies to sustain Wraithworld and the rest of the dark nebula, and is actually a hole to a reality that is anathema to life as we know it.

Wraithworld is hostile to all life that isn't dire wraiths, and will adjust itself to be hostile to anything that can survive it, up to and including Galactus. The big guy tried to eat both, and was soundly rebuked to the point he fled in fear for his life.

The star's entire surface is covered by an inky blackness that it turns out is hordes of deathwings, living shadow-demons that are among the most potent weapons in the wraith arsenal.

Compared to most of the marvel universe, they're more demonic than most demons, more alien than most aliens, and more horrifying than the vast majority of the monsters. The only other contenders in my book are the Warwolves (who execute a similar shtick in a more surreal and undignified fashion) and maybe the Brood on body-horror merits if they weren't overplayed.

In the end, Wraithworld may have been banished to limbo, but only a more powerful demon could keep the wraiths out of the spotlight permanently.

That demon is, of course, intellectual property.

[vertigoartgore]

1984's Marvel Age Vol.1 #23 cover by cover artist Bill Sienkiewicz (featuring his redesign of the Dire Wraiths ; Sienkiewicz also did a bunch of covers at the same period for the ROM Spaceknight series).

[deepdreamnights]

Spaceknights:

Skera the Scanner and Vola the Trapper

Scanner and Trapper got the closest to my Tokusatsu-Spaceknight dreams in relation to my Live-Action ROM Spaceknight video project.

All the SpaceKnights are at least a bit toyetic, and you can see Marvel trying to throw Parker Bros a bone that they never snatched with everyone from Firefall onward. Scanner and Trapper are two of my favorites.

Full tutorializing under the fold.

Overpainting was the most effective way to get the designs to where I wanted them, and this is going to be the main breakdown of that (later posts about other knights will likely focus on other aspects).

I used Midjourney's edit feature to do this. The first step is getting the image high-enough res to work with. MJ's edit feature can be used as a very effective image upscaler, and that's the first step.

It's also useful for removing word balloons and other obstructions that the AI will later misinterpret and getting a view of an entire character if parts are cropped off. You will need to often extract backgrounds manually, especially with comic art where AI background removal tools usually fail.

Once the image is upscaled you're going to get better results using the overpainting/retexture feature. Which you're going to have to use a lot because anytime you're using overpainting to shift a character in art style, its going to involve compositing.

No single version of Vola or Sekra had all the right parts, so photoshopped the bits I liked together before re-loading it into MJ's editor for some touchups. Sometimes you have to make a mockup and use that as a character reference or fully retexture over it.

You'll notice that I removed Vola's net. Accessories, if on the character model, will always be on the character when used with Vidu's system, and often glitch because of it. You can always put them back in with a second image reference or with a specific reference that still has them.

Once you have the reference image, you can use the character. Though if you want to use them a lot, you'll want a full model sheet with multiple views.

More to come.

[hasbr0mniverse]

Reign Of Darkness & Villainy Month!

Silver Surfer vs Dire Wraith by Alex Garner