Marvel Comics: Omega Red Explained | Comics Explained

make sure you guys hit the subscribe button if you guys are enjoying the content that we're throwing up and uh make sure you guys hit the like button if you enjoy the video and yeah let's begin why hello rob koi how are you guys doing today you know there is a rumor circulating around out there that omega red is going to appear in falcon and the winter soldier and i really hope that's true i really hope it's a true rumor nothing's confirmed at the moment but i really hope it's true and the reason why is because if it is then god it ties into everything right like the red room captain america all that kind of stuff i'll explain why over the course of this video i hear comics explain i'm always focused on turning you guys into a comic book expert in 30 minutes or less and in this video we are going to do that so omega red first appeared in marvel comics with x-men volume 2 issue number four in january of 1992 and he was created by john byrne and jim lee but omega red is a perfect example of one of these characters who was a great character that showed up at the wrong time and the reason why is because this was kind of a transition point in marvel comics right so those of you guys who are familiar with this era in marvel who have been reading for a long time or who have been part of this channel for a long time bear with me here for a second because i'm going to run over this for people who are totally unfamiliar with all this stuff so x-men volume 2 is is probably the single highest selling comic in the history of comic books right x-men volume 2 issue number one because it had come off the heels of chris claremont's 17-year run on the character but the issue that you had was that claremont had basically gone into x-men vol 2 and then almost immediately left he went over to dc comics to write something called the sovereign seven which sucked but x-men was hugely popular because of the 17-year run of chris claremont you've probably heard of stories like the phoenix saga the dark phoenix saga days of future past that was all chris claremont right and so he had built this team up so huge that when it was relaunched in 1991 it was enormous right everybody loved the idea of it and so omega red was brought in by the time chris claremont had left john vernon of course had taken over and omega red was brought in to be kind of a continuation of this sort of high-octane fast-paced method of storytelling and that was the big thing in the 90s right the 80s were more i wouldn't really say like darker and grittier they were to a degree because of stories like the dark knight returns by frank miller which kind of brought in the idea of like a darker method of storytelling but the reality is that story was kind of it wasn't really landmark in that way because if you go back and you read like chris claremont's x-men run or you go back and you read uh things like you know the night when stacey died by jerry conway then you already knew that comics were going in that direction right so i always kind of feel like that's a false attribute to give to the dark knight returns it's basically shoveling a whole bunch of praise onto a comic for like changing the dynamic of comics in a way that it hadn't really done but the idea behind omega red being introduced was one of these things where it tied into something called the russian kgb and department x but in his original introduction much like wolverine at the time we didn't really know a whole lot about his character right all that was told to us while we were shown was that you essentially had a guy by the name of matsuo who was the leader of a group called the hand now the hand of marvel comics kind of an aside here the hand and marvel comics are like a mystical ninja organization you saw them if you watch like the daredevil netflix series or or like the defenders or something like that the idea was that at some point in feudal japan you had multiple tribes or multiple groups who had basically defected away from what was considered to be the imperial kingdom of japan and took off to the mountains to to do their own thing right just study like ninjitsu and all that kind of stuff then you had a guy by the name of kaganobu yoshioka who basically banded them all together and then they started worshipping a being called the beast who gave them like all their mystical abilities to resurrect the dead and different things along those lines by this point a guy named matsuo is basically running the show he basically ends up traveling to discover the container of omega red and then alongside like professor cornelius and a few other people basically wake him up and then show him a picture of wolverine now the reality of this is they had done that for the purpose of analyzing omega red to see whether or not his like quote unquote fabled stamina as great as it was supposed to be if he was really a person they could use for their own ants and so what they did is they orchestrated a situation whereby they told him where wolverine was located and because the history of the two of them shared which had not been revealed to that point omega red traveled to the xavier institute alongside a whole bunch of members of the hand and they basically fought all the x-men and then kidnapped wolverine and took him to berlin and what this did is it led to a 17-hour fight between omega red and wolverine himself now omega red's inherent mutant ability is what's called death spores basically he can just kind of emit these pheromones that will in effect kill you but because of wolverine's healing factor they didn't kill him but it did allow omega red to get the upper hand on wolverine and that's where a lot of the backstory began to come into play that because of the nature of wolverine's history when he fought as part of team x which as we've talked about before was a 1960s cold war era black ops team uh one of the tasks that they had was to one free a woman who went by the name of janus janice hollenbeck who is basically like a double agent but at the same time to also capture something called the carbonadium synthesizer and once they did that because they had captured that synthesizer that's the reason why omega red is constantly after them because that went into what was in effect the origin of omega red now of course the fight kind of continued on and he and wolverine fought himself you know fought each other a little bit longer in the story and then that was it right it was a two-part story in x-men vol 2 issues 5-6 technically with his debut in x-men volume 2 issue number four but before we get into that origin a little bit of information here that you need to know if you want to be an expert on omega red the the fact that i say he was a great character who appeared at the wrong time goes into the comic boss of the 1990s and we don't necessarily need to go super in depth into that we've made a video talking about that before and i'll link it down in the description but in effect what you had here was a situation where people were going out and buying like the first appearance of characters or the relaunch of comics like x-men volume 2 issue number one with the expectation that it would increase in value almost exponentially but the more of something you have the less that thing ends up being worth and so where you had marvel comics that was printing out like 12 different covers for the first issue of a number one and everybody was buying it then suddenly those comics were worth a lot less right so basically comic book fans and collectors ended up almost killing the comic book market and so around the time that omega red debuted that's when everything started to go belly up right because where jim lee's art was iconic with the x-men with x-men volume 2. he took off in 1993 to go form image comics alongside like mark silvestri and a whole bunch of other guys and so the result of this is that uh marvel ended up in this position in the mid-1990s where they were like okay we're only going to publish characters that are exceedingly important everything else we're going to contract out to other companies right that's where jimmy palmiati and joe casada's event publications came from right if you don't know what that means not a great big huge deal the important thing to understand here is that as far as omega red goes his origin was never covered in the actual x-men comics instead it was covered in what we're called outlier comics or comics that would appear kind of out there or comics that would come much much later on right now an example of an outlier comic comes in the form of what's called maverick right now maverick was part of team x and he was a character who had a little bit of popularity he was by no means big enough to hold his own title and we know that because marvel tried it a couple times right you had a you had the original maverick comic published in 1997 and then you had a second follow-up that came with that was 12 issues long but he was never really popular enough to hold his own series that was a point in marvel when they were just grasping at straws and just publishing anything that was almost in relation to wolverine or close enough to wolverine because wolverine was just so incredibly popular in marvel comics uh but between the generation x run in 1993 so essentially generation x issues 10 and 11 the maverick solo series in 1997 and weapon x vol 3 issue number 20 in 2018 the origin of omega red comes together in this idea that at some point in russia's past there was a guy by the name of arcadie rosovich and arcadie was born with the mutant ability of again death sports the ability to basically emanate these pheromones that would kill you and so what we found is that because of this mutant ability that he had he kind of became obsessed with death and he would basically engage in these pretty heinous acts that involved like homeless people or like kids or different things like that but he ended up joining the russian army and became part of spetsnaz and continued his kind of enjoyment of of essentially killing people but this all came to a head when he was transferred to the antarctic and the reason why is because with this being a much smaller community the fact that people went missing was something that was eventually noticed and so the way it's told from kestrel in the old mavericks series is that ultimately when it was discovered that he was engaging in these heinous acts he was executed by his superiors at the time like they literally put him in a cell they put a gun to the back of his head and they shot him in the head and supposedly killed him the reality was he ended up saving ended up surviving because of his mutant powers right is his basically his healing factor and so when that took place what you ended up getting was him being taken or at least the idea was he was supposed to be taken by the russian government and used in their super soldier program we'll talk about the significance of that here in a minute because that's how it ties into captain america ultimately at the time at least at this point in the 1960s and 1970s magneto had not quite become magneto yet but he had separated from charles xavier right so this is kind of the follow-up to their first encounter when they met in egypt and they realized they both had powers but their ideologies were so different that they couldn't consolidate and so they just kind of went their own way and so where magneto had continued to use the name eric lyncher and just traveled across the world he ultimately ended up coming across or at least uh encountering sean cassidy who would later go on to become banshee but who at the time was an interpol agent and then the idea was to essentially assign him and try and have him track down uh omega red ultimately sean cassidy was successful in doing that and handed handed omega red over to the authorities but omega red was then taken by the kgb now here's the reason why that matters so why the clock back to like the 1940s right steve rogers is injected with the super soldier serum by abraham erskine he becomes captain america abraham erskine dies almost immediately steve rogers was believed to have been killed but he was really just frozen in a block of ice what this meant was that the united states had no real way of continuing the super soldier program and so one thing to understand here is that when it comes to the super soldier program as it exists in marvel comics when it was originally introduced it was just the federal government trying to create super soldiers to fight the axis powers over the years marvel has expanded on that particularly with grant morrison's new x-men and what that story told us is that captain america as far as the federal government was publicly concerned uh captain america was just the first in a series of super soldiers that would essentially bolster the united states military and allow the united states to take on credible threats like the axis powers to gain the upper hand in world war ii and whatever threats may come after that unknown to even the federal government itself uh the captain america project rebirth situation was basically a was was the first stage in a series of weapons that were created by weapons plus and weapons plus overarching goal was essentially a precursor to project wide awake containing control the mutant threat and so the federal government didn't actually know what was going on with weapons plus they were duped just like everybody else the reality was captain america was designed to be the first in a series of super soldiers that could take on the mutant threats that existed out there that was covered in grant morrison's new x-men and so what we ended up finding out or at least what we kind of had to presume there was that assuming steve rogers didn't actually freeze in a block of ice and had returned home successful that world war ii was a field test and presumably much like the russians did with bucky barnes that the united states government or at least weapons plus would wipe his mind and plant false memories and send him out there as the first in a series of super soldiers designed to take on mutants as we know none of that happened and so because there was no way to duplicate the super soldier serum you just went forward with weapons plus having like weapons 2 and weapon 3 weapon 4 so on and so forth all the way up to weapon x or wolverine now the actions of the united states in regards to captain america did not go unnoticed and so what the what the russian government did by way of their kgb is they created what was called department x and department x was was essentially its own weapons plus program creating super soldiers some of these things may be familiar some of them may not but two of the biggest things to come out of the russian kgb during the cold war was project winter soldier which we know from bucky barnes and the red room which created like black widow like all the black widows that existed out there as essentially assassins for omega red himself what ended up happening is that once he was handed over to the authorities by sean cassidy and then taken by the kgb the kgb began implanting these different cybernetic implants inside of him as well as bonding him to carbonadium now carbonadium was basically a poor man's version of adamantium that when iron maclaine created adamantium because it was so incredibly expensive to make and because russians did not readily have the formula they created the closest thing they could which turned out to be carbonadium now the carbonadium tendrils that were installed inside of a mega red really kind of allowed him to just sort of attack people to ensnare them right to have you know an extension of its power that could be used by virtue of these these tentacles but the important thing is that when that happened he went forward officially as omega red and was essentially supposed to be like their own super soldier right something akin to like wolverine or captain america from the united states and north america but all of this was basically book ended into his first appearance and his desire to attain the carbonation synthesizer because with the carbonadium tendrils being attached to his body it was slowly poisoning him right like the adamantium inside of wolverine's body the difference is that the healing factor of omega red was not necessarily on the same level as as wolverines in marvel comics but at the same time carbonadium was also far more poisonous and radioactive than adamantium was and so the result was that even with his healing factor despite it being somewhat limited he wasn't able to overcome it and has always kind of been a thing with omega red that even when his healing factor was bolstered later on that he still couldn't overcome the carbonation and poisoning going on in his body and so he was always on the hunt for the carbonadium synthesizer which he could use to effectively stabilize quote unquote his body and keep the carbonadium from poisoning him but the other big takeaway from here is that where this kind of origin despite it taking place over different comics was ultimately designed to kind of lead into his first appearance that with this initial showing in x-men volume 2 that the story wrapped up pretty quickly in comparison to what you think it would be that it was basically just kind of field testing and seeing like what is omega red capable of if he really is over able to take over wolverine who is by all standards of measurement considered to be the deadliest person in the world because of his healing factor because of his berserker rage because of all of his military and martial arts training and so on and so forth uh if he can take out wolverine then that gives us an upper hand right not necessarily in taking on the x-men but in using omega red for a multitude of like assassination attempts or toppling governments or whatever nefarious intentions the hand had for him uh with him being able to display the fact that he could take out wolverine that was considered to be a great thing right the problem with this is that again he was still on the hunt for the carbonation synthesizer which ultimately wolverine ended up giving to to his former teammate maverick and they just kind of went forward from there the problem with omega red is that following this there wasn't a whole lot of great stuff going on with this character that by the time this story arc finished marvel was starting to go belly up right marvel was literally starting to go broke and had it not been for like avia rod and ike perlmutter and those guys essentially bailing marvel out and then eventually the launch of marvel studios that marvel would have gone bankrupt right and so the results of this is that you didn't see a whole lot doing with omega red you saw some stuff and you saw some cool things but it was marvel kind of circulating him around to existing stories for the purpose of seeing whether or not he could actually build up any great stories on his own now one of the first and most notable examples of this came in iron man issue number 297 by len kaminsky and this was marvel's attempt to like move omega red just completely away from like the x-men mythos and just have him face off against somebody who had nothing to do with the x-men now the reality was with iron man he was not quite at the level of popularity he would have with like civil war and then eventually the marvel cinematic universe so he was one of these characters where he was only hugely popular within comic book fans themselves but that was enough for marvel comics to take a shot at it and so the way this played out is you had what was called modam who was basically a woman by the name of olinka baronkova and she was essentially the female version of modoc if you don't really know who that is it's not a great big huge deal it was designed to kind of introduce some small elements of of the past of omega red and saying that like him and alinka had history together honestly nothing really big ever came out of this there wasn't really a whole lot going there and so the next attempt that marvel made came in cable in the cable solo series as it was written in the 1990s now the intention of doing this was to still kind of keep omega red away from the x-men but close enough that he could still kind of maintain that popularity that was built in x-men volume 2. and so with fabian necessa writing cable at the time cable was huge in the 1990s right he was hugely popular because his mystery is what drove the intrigue right all we knew was that he was basically the child of cyclops and the clone of jean grey a woman named madeleine pryor from the future now much later on in the late 1990s marvel would flesh that out with the adventures of jean grey and cyclops or the adventures of cyclops in phoenix is technically what it's called but at the time cable was hugely intriguing but he was also kind of a reflection of comics at the time which was super high octane fast pace so that's why you saw him teaming up with like gw bridge and people like that he had like a ton of little pouches and things like that he was colossal in size you know it was it was a really cool element of comics at that point in time and so him facing off against cable again kind of continuing to try to find this this carbanium synthesizer proved to be hugely popular among fans and so this kind of resurgence happened with this character where the story went on for a number of issues it started in cable issue number nine and then ran all the way up to cable issue number 11 with a few other appearances following that and that was enough for marvel to kind of continue on and say okay let's see if we can't like tie him back into the x-men see if we can't bring him a little bit closer and so what you saw going into the early 2000s was a couple of different stories the first was called the logan files and the second was called the hunt for sabretooth now the logan files took place or at least this part of the logan files took place what was called x-men liberators now x-men liberators was just a mini-series that was launched in 1998 that went into 1999 and just focused on colossus and nightcrawler which kind of you know kind of a family reunion then it was away from marvel in the really the latter half of the comic bust going into the early 2000s to try to see if it wasn't really possible to focus on a story that involved other characters beyond the core x-men group and it was moderately successful right i mean it wasn't by any means huge right it wasn't like this huge blockbuster comic or anything like that you ended up having omega red facing off against uh colossus and nightcrawler the whole idea behind this was for omega red to basically fight alongside lady deathstrike in you know taking on wolverine and his closest friends and so on and so forth but the exchange that was offered here is that if omega red agreed to help sabertooth that he would basically get information belonging to weapon x right all these different mutants that were out there which would kind of continue the campaign of of omega red like one taking out you know people he considered to be enemies but two continuing to hunt for the carbonadium synthesizer the results of this is that this comic went directly into the hunt for sabertooth storyline that was covered in the weapon x vol 2 series starting with issue number three or at least starting with issue number one going into issue number three and then four five and six and the whole point here was that with sabertooth effectively betraying uh omega red and lady deathstrike he essentially took off this brought back the character of agent zero who was in reality maverick and then just kind of led to you know the two of them getting into a fight and then omega red facing off against a few other people here and there and different things along those lines but again you know the the long and short of this is that following his original appearance going into the late 1990s and the early 2000s there wasn't much doing with the character of omega red now any attempt that marvel really had in trying to bring this whole thing back basically came to a head with a house of imp and the reason for this is again kind of tying back into our discussion about jimmy palmiotti and anjokasada event publications that with joe casada kind of leaving event publications alongside jimmy palmiotti and officially being inducted as the editor-in-chief of marvel comics the stance was the comic boss is what almost killed marvel in terms of all the different mutant characters they had writing too many books all that kind of stuff and so he wanted to make things a lot simpler right bring things back to the way that they used to be make things a lot smaller create some more familiarity and then just kind of rebuild from the ground up and so particularly with regards to house of m this is the story that saw 98 of the mutant population losing their powers and only 198 mutants were allowed to kind of quote unquote remain and existed at the xavier institute you did see omega red pop up here again kind of on the hunt for the carbonation synthesizer the belief being that it had been handed over to black widow who had basically hid it in brussels of course this led to him facing off against black widow and then ultra ultimately wolverine and then eventually being captured by shield agents and handed over to shield themselves but that's kind of how that went right i mean following that you did have uh another appearance that came in uncanny x-men issue number 499 where he faced off against colossus and nightcrawler again that he was basically taken by the red room and kind of brought into their their whole thing and then you know you essentially had him in effect killed uh in the daniel way x-men origin storyline that basically kind of contained both past and present stories but again it was away from all the kind of writer's character out right by that point marvel kind of looked at omega red and said okay there's really not much going on with this character there's really not much interest here he's considered to be old hat we're trying to re you know kind of relaunch and recreate everything so shuffle this guy off to the cornfields oh mega red's no longer part of the picture we'll bring him back if we need to and it stayed that way for a number of years but eventually he was brought back in x-men gold vol 2 as part of all new all-different marvel with the all-new all different marvel relaunch now the return of omega red in this particular story was not well received not so much because it was omega red but because of how it was done that marvel had created an organization called sickle which was basically just like russia's version of shield now unlike the existence of shield which exists to kind of safeguard earth from various threats that kind of existed on earth itself to kind of tap into various intelligence organizations that sickle was very much an anti-mutant organization that ran something called the straining corrective labor camp which basically just used mutants or imprisoned mutants as a form of labor or just kind of kept them locked down as a way to sort of keep them from becoming a credible threat to russia itself right so think of like a mini genocide inside of russia uh the result was that sicko being led by the by vasily who was the brother of the estranged brother basically the long-lost brother of omega red at the time but nobody really liked it and this happened for a couple different reasons one because the story was not very well written but two because the idea of comics being more adult oriented and being as violent as they used to be in the 1990s had basically been removed and the characters were a lot more toned down that omega red was not nearly as as intense as he was in the past instead he was just kind of like you know i'm a mega rat and i do some things you know and that's basically it and fans weren't really receptive to that right that they basically saw omega red as being part and parcel to the 1990s and this perception of his character stayed right it just kind of stayed that way and that's why you never really saw omega red despite showing up in like the weapon x-force despite showing up in like age of x-men different things like that and even running now to the modern day and showing up in the wolverine vol 7 series that people just don't really see him the way they used to that in a lot of ways omega red is just kind of considered to be one of the characters that marvel had that was really really awesome that they kind of screwed up as time went on now whether it'll stay that way we don't really know i mean marvel is a lot more toned down than it used to be but they're not nearly as hyper violent as they used to be a lot of that's just because of the change in society as a whole the comics especially because of the marvel cinematic universe are becoming a lot more family friendly as opposed to like you know like this is omega red and he's just like killing people you know all that kind of stuff and like you know a murderous guy and things like things along those lines it's not really the case anymore so those that era is long since gone the biggest question that a lot of people like myself have is you know with the idea of him being the way that he was will that ever come back the answer that question is probably no right so omega red is not really an interesting character anymore but he is a character that used to be wildly interesting back in the 1990s but with that being said guys we're gonna bring this video to an end if you are new here to comments explain make sure you guys hit the sub button to become part of the rob core if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you drop a like and i will catch you all later peace [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Comics Explained

Views: 278,951

Keywords: comics explained, comicsexplained, marvel explained, fluidic beats, comics, comic books, marvel, dc, infinity gauntlet, world breaker hulk, crisis on infinite earths, comic explained, infinity war, the batman who laughs, doomsday clock, Omega Red, X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, New X-Men, Iron Man, Wolverine, Weapon X, S.I.C.K.L.E., Weapons Plus, Maverick, Cable, Captain America, Super Soldier Program, Super Solider Serum

Id: txAHlXl2apI

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021