Rom the Space Knight

 Story time. 

When I was a kid my favorite superhero wasn't Superman, or Spider-Man, or Thor, like a normal person. No, my favorite superhero was Rom, the Space Knight! 

A tie-in to a Japanese robot toy, Rom was a way better comic than it needed to be, written by the tragic Bill Mantlo (who also wrote my other favorite comic, Micronauts, which as it happens was the other big Japanese toy/Marvel collab - but that's another story). Rom was a story of genuine heroism and sacrifice, and of stalwart determination against all odds. 

Because it was a toy tie-in, Marvel didn't own the rights to Rom, and so the chances I'd ever see him in a movie or game are slim. But ever since Marvel Crisis Protocol first came out in 2020, I've been bugging all of the Marvel fan-sculptor studios to do a sculpt for him, and after years of begging one of them took pity on me. So here he is! 

That thing in his hand is a Neutralizer, an energy weapon that he uses to banish the evil, shapeshifting Wraiths to their home dimension. Unfortunately, to humans, when a Wraith is human form, it looks a lot like a big robot shooting a regular human with a human-disintegrating ray gun. Oops. Let's just say that ol' Rom had some 'splainin' to do, but if you wanna find out what happens, you're gonna have to read his book yourselves. 

Anyway, I used a helpful MCP website to do a card for him, so I can use him as a Beta Ray Bill proxy. It's not a perfect replication of his powers, but it'll do for now. 

I can't wait to get him on the tabletop to zap some aliens!