Issue(s): Micronauts #1, Micronauts #2, Micronauts #3, Micronauts #4, Micronauts #5, Micronauts #6, Micronauts #7, Micronauts #8, Micronauts #9, Micronauts #10, Micronauts #11, Micronauts #12
Cover Date: Jan-Oct 79
Title: "Homeworld! / Homecoming / Escape!" / "Earth" / "Death-duel at Daytona beach!" / "A hunting we will go!" / "The Prometheus pit!" / "The great escapes" / "Adventure into fear!" / "Earth wars!" / "Home is where the heart is!" / "Defeat!" / "Enigma force!" / "To the victors belongs a world!"
Credits:
Bill Mantlo - Writer
Michael Golden - Penciler
Josef Rubinstein / Bob McLeod / Al Milgrom - Inker

Review/plot:
These twelve issues represent the initial battle to dethrone Baron Karza from Homeworld. It is a fairly generic space odyssey, with some Starlin-esque mystical stuff, but it was very popular at the time due to the fact that Star Wars had increased the visibility of all space opera stories...

...and the fact that new penciler Michael Golden was considered quite good. To me, Golden's pencils look ok and remind me of British 2000 AD style art.

The Micronauts live in the Microverse, although the idea is that the Microverse is so vast that they are unlikely to ever encounter the areas explored by the Fantastic Four. The fact that astronauts in the Microverse call themselves "micronauts" is a bit silly considering that as far as they know, they are as big as they are supposed to be.

The contract with the toy company Mego stipulated that every so often the Micronauts have to travel to Earth so that the size contrast can be made...

...in this arc they spend a decent amount of time on Earth running from Karza's minions, fighting a 'giant' (or human-sized) Karza...

...and having a brief encounter with the Man-Thing.

Mantlo says in one of the reprint's introductions that he and the artists that worked on the series hated that mandate from Mego.

The battle on Earth with Karza also featured the first appearance of Captain Universe...

...who is empowered with all of the powers of the Micronauts' universe, or something (one of those Starlinesquey things i mentioned; in fact, there are two other similar collective-power instances in this same arc).

The Micronauts were a very cool and bizarre line of toys. Mantlo's mundane plots do them no justice at all.

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 5 - First Micronauts (including Bug, who will turn out to be a semi-popular character), first Captain Universe.

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Micronauts Special Edition #1, Micronauts Special Edition #2, Micronauts Special Edition #3, Micronauts Special Edition #4, Micronauts Special Edition #5

The big problem with the Micronaut toys was they had lots of teeny tiny parts that were extremely losable, and easily swallowed by toddlers.

The "Adventure into Fear" issue with the Man-Thing is the actual full title of Man-Thing's first color comic.

In FOOM#22, Mantlo stated that this book was NOT part of the Marvel Universe. Guess that changed when the sales figures came in.

In #6, the Coffins' next-door neighbor is identified as Abner Jenkins, also the name of the original Beetle. Coincidence?

In the background of several of the early issues you can see Microversian lettering, which looks exactly like Hindi. After a few issues, they printed a guide to which symbols corresponded to which characters in English, so you could go back and decode the messages in previous issues. Some were logical ("TO SURFACE"), others were nonsense ("BANANAS.")

About Abner Jenkins: Yes, it's coincidence. It's not The Beetle

I just learned an interesting factoid: While people usually use the word "bug" to describe any little creepy-crawly thing, it actually has a precise entomological definition: "bugs" are a subset of insects that have mouthparts modified for piercing and sucking. Gross.