Here is the latest in our year-long look at one cool comic (whether it be a self-contained work, an ongoing comic or a run on a long-running title that featured multiple creative teams on it over the years) a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here's the archive of the moments posted so far!

Today we take a difficult look (difficult because there's so much coolness to fit into one piece) at Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes and Jim Mooney's brilliantly bizarre Omega the Unknown...

Enjoy!

Omega the Unknown was a particularly strange comic book because the comic was not about a traditional superhero, but rather it was about a strange twelve-year-old boy who had a mysterious connection to an alien being who was eventually dubbed "Omega the Unknown."

Here is the introduction of them both...







Pretty cool way to kick off a comic, right?

Then we get to see James Michael Starling, the 12-year-old boy who is the main star of the comic...





Talk about a trippy opening!

James Michael ends up in a coma, and when he awakes he learns, for some reason, his nurse and her roommate are taking him in to live with them...



Then one of the creatures who attacked Omega in the beginning of the comic show up to attack James Michael...



So throughout the series, James Michael and Omega clearly have some connection, but we never learn what it is - nor do we learn why James Michael has such strange powers.

Gerber and Skrenes has James Michael enroll in public school where they explore the seedy side of public schooling...





It does not end well for most of the people involved...

Omega ends up working for a pawnbroker in New York City and gets a "real" name of "Sam"...a lot of the action comes from stuff that comes up while working for the pawnbroker. As you see here, often things don't go well here, either...







Really, a lot of things don't go well in this comic - there is a lot of sad stuff and when the book ends with #10, it ends with one of the more depressing cliffhangers you'll see in comics (it somehow gets even MORE depressing when the story was eventually resolved in the pages of the Defenders).

There were a few fill-in issues by other writers and artists (including Roger Stern), but most of the issues were by Skrenes, Gerber and Mooney.

It was a good series, very different from any comic Marvel was publishing at the time - too strange to live, really.