Saturday, September 17, 2022

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 156: OOM THE MIGHTY

(All-Star Comics 003, 1940)


Oom the Mighty is, by his own description, a sort of low-rent Gozer the Gozerian: a murderous entity of the ancient past who has returned to kill again. Only instead of whole civilizations boiling in his belly or what have you, Oom kills a handful of people every full moon - still bad, but not quite as much cosmic terror.

The original appearance of Oom (involving a dimension-hopping battle with the Spectre) maybe kind of implied that he was a spirit that was possessing a bronze grotesque, but later appearances - Oom, like Nyola before him, was Roy Thomased into the Monster Society of Evil in the pages of All-Star Squadron - treat the body as his own, thus introducing the question of why the city of Cliffland New Jersey was festooning their buildings with prehistoric statuary. Whichever is the case, possibly the most interesting thing about Oom is the fact that sometime in the last 30ish years he seems to have made the leap from Justice Society/ Spectre villain to Marvel Family foe, presumably via the Monster Society link.

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 665: THE WIND GOD

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