OMEGA: THE UNKNOWN

The first thing you notice about Omega the Unknown, Marvel's short-lived mid-'70s sci-fi series, is its narration. Like most Bronze Age comics, it's densely narrated, but something about this the narrative voice in this work is different; rambling, like a Beat poet. It hops from adjective to adjective, not in the grand carnival barker style of Stan Lee, but like a hepped-up poet taking joy in his words and phrases. Deliberate, but seeming not to be; that's probably the best way to describe the way writers Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes narrated their bizarro epic.

The Marvel Unlimited app is a gigantic, messy cache of awesome and terrible old comic books: a library of 13,000 or so back issues of Marvel titles, available on demand for subscribers with tablets or mobile phones. Like any good back-room longbox, it’s disorganized and riddled with gaps, but it’s also full of forgotten and overlooked jewels, as well as a few stone classics. In Marvel Unlimited Edition, Eisner-winning critic Douglas Wolk dives into the Unlimited archive to find its best, oddest and most intriguing comics. Steve Gerber died in 2008, but his work is still casting a shadow over contemporary comics -- it's a good bet that Guardians of the Galaxy and The Defenders wouldn't be what they are now without him, for instance, and the biting, off-kilter tone of his writing has found its way into the central stream of superhero comics. Here are a couple of ingenious variations on projects he co-created, as well as a posthumously published jewel.

Press Release Jonathan Lethem, the award winning novelist of Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude and the new hit novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, re-imagines one of Marvel's most offbeat heroes in Omega: The Unknown #1 (of 10)! In 1975, co-writers Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes created the mute, reluctant anti-hero Omega: The Unknown, but the series only lasted for 10 brief issues ...