Issue(s): ROM annual #1
Cover Date: 1982
Title: "It came from beyond the stars / Night fright! / The scourge from space! / To slay a soulthief! / Rom, the healer!"
Credits:
Bill Mantlo - Script
Bill Mantlo & Mark Gruenwald - Plot
Pat Broderick - Penciler
Michael Gustovich - Inker
Al Milgrom - Editor

Review/plot:
Mark Gruenwald is credited with a Plot Assist.

This annual, with art from one of Bill Mantlo's Micronauts collaborators, introduces the alien Stardust, who has been banished from "the body" for "unmutual acts". He comes to Earth, and initially absorbs the spirits of children into his own body...

...but soon finds that the nature of Dire Wraiths makes them much more suitable for absorption, so he starts hunting them down.

ROM, meanwhile, is blamed for the comas that the children go into, so he comes in conflict with Stardust even though he's now hunting Wraiths.

ROM is able to take back the spirits of the children, leaving Stardust as he "sheds his humanoid shape and merges with the very fabric of space".

Broderick's looser style is good for depicting the cosmic Stardust...

...and it's a decent story for an annual. One thing i don't like is that the Dire Wraiths in this story have developed a jamming device that prevents ROM's analyzer from detecting them.

He destroys the device in the end and banishes these particular Wraiths. But if they could develop it once they could do so again, and that would really take from ROM the one thing that makes him more than just another super-hero when it comes to the Wraith threat. So it was risky to introduce this idea (even if ultimately Mantlo remained in control of the ROM series until its end and never went back to this).

A back-up story (Steven Grant/Greg LaRoque/Rick Magyar) shows ROM rescuing a traitorous Spaceknight named Gloriole who repents his traitorous ways before he dies.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: The MCP places this between ROM #32-33. That means that ROM was wandering about outside of Clairton between the end of ROM #31 and the beginning of #32, but that's not a problem.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Stardust looks too much like Reactron, a Supergirl villain from roughly the same time.

Was Gloriole supposed to sound like "Glory Hole"?

Wonder what Gloriole really died of? Oh Mark I am not going anywhere near that with a barge pole (since that was probably the weapon he was killed with;)

This was originally announced for the 1981 Annual lineup with Marie Severin on art.

Gloriole looks like he's holding up a condom in that last panel.

Gloriole means halo in English, and vainglory in French.