25 August 2010

Info from the creators on unused Rom revival proposal

Benny R. Powell was doing a bit of ego surfing and came across my page on his and Jim Calafiore's unused Rom revival proposal. He then contacted me offering previously unseen design drawings by Califiore. (Although one of them was actually sold on eBay last year.) I managed to get him to answer a few questions about the proposal. You can now see the improved page with a brief interview of Powell and Calafiore's Rom redesigns at Rom, Spaceknight Revisited.

5 comments:

  1. i don't know man. maybe it's just as well they don't get the licensing rights to ROM try to revamp the character. i can just see already how they would try to "pimp his armor" with some kinda new look. i think whatever they might end up putting together wouldn't hardly at all be the ROM we remember. back in 2003 IMAGE tried to bring The Micronauts backs. the art was good but conceptually speaking it was pretty lame.

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  2. I didn't read Image's Micronauts (nor, for that matter, Marvel's, although I've recently bought some cheap back issues to rectify that), but I imagine they had the same problem anyone besides Marvel trying to do Rom would have: Marvel owns too much of the familiar story and characters. In the Micronauts case, you have Bug, Commander Rann, and Marionette still going as the Microns because Marvel owns them. But since they can't use Baron Karza, Biotron, Acroyear, and the rest, how do you do a Micronauts series -- even under a different name -- that will please fans? At least with G.I. Joe and the Transformers, all the main characters belong to Hasbro.

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  3. Image was using all the Mego Micronauts as well characters they had just made on their own. But it still sucked. The Micronauts were at their best issues 1 - 12 thanks to Bill Mantlo's writing and the amazing art of Mike Golden. Plus at that point the story and look of the series strongly reflected many aspects of the toy line which i really liked as a kid. Mike Golden stayed on as the cover artist after that but the series went down hill otherwise in terms of story and interior art. Speaking of art,i came up with something for my latest blog entry about a ROM/Micronauts cross over in which i used a water color painting i did 13 years ago with some ROM clip art to "merge" the two franchises.

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  4. by the way Lee, I made a post that will test your knowledgeiskoid of the ROM anthology with a trivia question based on a sketch i did tonight. I guessing either you or Siskoid will figure it out.

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  5. once again Lee you have proven you are the oracle of all things ROM. thanks for leaving a comment on my blog. i left a follow up comment for everyone. have a nice Labor Day weekend.

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