Micronauts #38-59 By Mantlo, Kane, Guice & Others For Marvel Comics

Micronauts #38-59 (February 1982 – August 1984)

Written by Bill Mantlo (#38-58), Peter B. Gillis (#59)

Penciled/Breakdowns by John Garcia (#38), Gil Kane (#38, 40-45), Steve Ditko (#39), Luke McDonnell (#46), Mike Vosburg (#47), Butch Guice (#48-58), Kelley Jones (#59)

Inked/Finished by Danny Bulandi (#38-52), Gil Kane (#38), Carl Potts (#44), Al Milgrom (#44), Butch Guice (#53), Kelley Jones (#54-58), Sam Grainger (#56-57), Bruce Patterson (#59)

Coloured by Bob Sharen (#38-59), Christie Scheele (#38), Don Warfield (#41)

Spoilers (from thirty-eight to forty years ago)

The Micronauts was always a cult book.  I don’t think it sold all that well, so it was an easy choice to test the waters as a direct market-only book, like Moon Knight and Ka-Zar.  With issue thirty-eight, the page count and price increased, and with time, the book got nicer paper and a freer editorial hand.  Bill Mantlo was able to make his stories somewhat more mature (for the early 80s), and when Butch Guice came onboard as artist, this title really took off.

I can distinctly remember the last issues by Mantlo and Guice as being among the most exciting I read as a child, and I’m very excited to dive into these issues and see if they’re as good as I remember.

When we last saw the team, they were returning to Homeworld after yet another short trip to Earth.  They were coming to address the problem of Force Commander, King Argon, who had taken over Homeworld, reopened the Body Banks, and was indiscriminately transforming citizens into Dog Soldiers or modified assassins to hunt the Micronauts (giving us Huntarr, who grew to be a favourite character of mine).

Let’s track who turned up in the title:

The Micronauts

• Marionette (Princess Mari; #38-59)
• Acroyear (#38-59)
• Bug (#38-59)
• Commander Arcturus Rann (#38-59)
• Microtron (#38-48)
• Devil (#38-50, 58)
• Nanotron (#38-48)
• Biotron II/Bioship (#48-57)
• Pharoid (#49-50)
• Fireflyte (#50-58)
• Huntarr (#55-59)
• Biotron III (#58-59)
• Microtron II (#58-59)

Villains

• Baron Karza (#38, 49-58)
• Prince Shaitan (Acroyear; #38)
• Force Commander (Argon; #39-41, 43-46, 48-49)
• Huntarr (Iann-23; #39, 47-48)
• Duchess Belladonna (#39-41, 43-45)
• Chief Scientist Degrayde (#40, 43, 46-50, 52-53, 55-57)
• Antrons (#40)
• Doctor Doom (Victor Von Doom, in miniature body of Vincent Vaughn; #41)
• Doctor Nemesis (#42-43)
• Computrex (#43-44)
• Professor Phillip Prometheus (#43-44)
• Arcade (#45)
• The Soul Survivors (#46-49)
• Ampzilla (Death Squad; #47-50)
• Battleaxe (Death Squad; #47-50)
• Lobros (Death Squad; #47-50)
• Centauria (Death Squad; #47-50)
• The G-Men (#53-54)
• Captain D’ark (#57)

Guest Stars

• Mister Fantastic (Reed Richards, Fantastic Four; #40)
• Invisible Girl (Sue Richards, Fantastic Four; #40)
• Human Torch (Johnny Storm, Fantastic Four; #40)
• The Thing (Ben Grimm, Fantastic Four; #40)
• Franklin Richards (Fantastic Four; #40)
• The Puppet Master (Phillip Masters; #41)
• The Wasp (Janet Van Dyne, Avengers; #42-43)
• Captain America (Steve Rogers, Avengers; #43)
• Thor (Avengers; #43)
• Iron Man (Tony Stark, Avengers; #43)

Supporting Characters

• Lady Sepsis Rann (#38)
• Lord Dallan Rann (#38)
• Slug (#39, 41, 43-50)
• Pharoid (Prince of Aegyptia; #39, 41, 44, 46-48)
• Cilicia (#39, 51-53, 59)
• Margrace (Desert Demon; #43-45, 50)
• Duchess Belladonna (#46-50)
• Time Traveler (#49, 52, 56, 58)
• Huntarr (#49-54)
• Aquon (Lord of Oceania; #52)
• Lady Coral (#52, 55, 58)
• Jocko (#53-54)
• Skull (#53-54)
• Schnozz (#53-54)
• Little D (#53-54, 57)
• Murder-1 (#54)
• Treefern (#56)
• Ojeeg (#57)

Let’s take a look at what happened in these books, with some commentary as we go:

• The first direct market issue was split between two stories.  I guess the Micronauts didn’t head back to Homeworld at the end of issue thirty-seven, because the first story, drawn by John Garcia with Danny Bulandi inks, opens with Bug being attacked by a hawk after he tries to look through its nest.  Commander Rann draws the hawk away, and Marionette and Acroyear rush to help Bug, who thought that the eggs in the nest would hatch insects.  Acroyear wants to help Rann, whose flight is being monitored by Devil, Microtron, and Nanotron on the Endeavor.  Rann doesn’t want to hurt the bird, and makes a daring maneuver through a chainlink fence to evade it.  Acroyear is impressed by his flying, so later, after everyone returns to the Endeavor, Rann talks about how he earned the rank of Space Glider, the name that is sometimes used to refer to him (because that’s the name of the toy he’s based on, I believe).  He talks about his youth, one thousand years before (remember, he spent a millennium in suspended animation), when Chief Scientist Karza was training him and other cadets to use glider wings.  First, they had to prove their worth using glider-vanes, which are basically what we call wingsuits today.  Karza, Rann, and the other cadets flew through the air, and Karza, who already had designs on conquering Homeworld, slit one of Rann’s vanes with a knife in mid-air, causing him to fall.  He also forbade the others from helping him.  Rann managed to capture a pocket of air in the ripped suit, like it’s a parachute, and use it to maneuver his way over Karza.  He landed on his teacher, which meant that he had no choice but to take him safely to the ground.  After landing, Rann wondered if Karza had tried to kill him.  Later still, Rann left a party being held in his honour, and upon retiring to his room, realized that a half-dozen attackers were climbing the outside of the tower his room was in, looking to kill him.  He got his repaired wing-vanes, and glided outside towards the assassins.  He grabbed a lasersonic pistol from one, and used it to shoot many of them.  One of the men jumped on him, but he was able to shake him off.  When he landed, he was joined by his father and Karza, and told them that the men were plotting to help someone overthrow his parents, Dallan and Sepsis.  Dallan ordered Karza to promote Rann to Micronaut training, and Rann now realizes that this is why Karza decided to send him into space for so long, to get him off the planet.  
• The second story was drawn by the legendary Gil Kane.  As the Micronauts hung out outside the Endeavor, Devil asked where they all met.  Bug tells the story of how he and Acroyear first met, before the Micronauts were formed.  He was imprisoned on Kaliklak for stealing fruit from the Colonial Governor’s garden, and it looked like he was going to be left in prison until he died.  Bug managed to pick the lock of his cell and grab his rocket-lance from the Dog Soldier guards, and used it to escape.  He fled to the airstrip and stole an orbiter, even though he didn’t know how to fly.  He managed to pilot it out of the hangar, but then ended up in orbit (this was his first time off planet), where the orbiter died on him.  He saw a massive Acroyear Raider in space, and decided to abandon his orbiter to fly towards it (I’m not sure why his helmet would have an air-tight faceplate when he never left his planet before) using his rocket-lance as propulsion.  He crawled across the hull of the ship until he found a window, and inside, saw Acroyear stuck to a glowing disc, with Prince Shaitan gloating in front of him.  After Shaitan left, Bug decided to help out, and blew the window open, causing decompression that sucked most of the other Acroyears into space.  He freed Acroyear, and dragged him into a part of the ship that still had atmosphere, where he discovered he was still alive.  A large force of Acroyears came towards them, and Bug decided to stick around and help his new friend fight them.  When the battle was over, Acroyear pledged his friendship.  Bug decided not to go back to Kaliklak, instead choosing to stick with his friend (I feel like this somewhat contradicts some of the information we learned in issue 13 about how Wartstaff helped connive with the colonial governor to send Bug to the Body Banks on Homeworld).  The issue ends with everyone joking about Bug’s endless appetite.

• Issue thirty-eight explains the shift to the direct market.  Al Milgrom wrote about how the book was selling out at specialty shops, but was getting returned in large numbers from newsstands, and instead of just canceling it, Marvel decided to experiment with leaning into the direct market, with a larger page count and no ads.  The issue does have two house ads – one explaining the same shift for Moon Knight in a letter to readers by Denny O’Neil, and the other being a comic page featuring Ka-Zar.  It’s curious to me that not long after this, DC would make its two best-selling titles, New Teen Titans and Legion of Super-Heroes direct market only, a very different approach.
• Issue thirty-nine featured art by Steve Ditko, but it appears that Danny Bulandi finished it pretty heavily, as it lacks the standard stiffness I associate with Ditko’s art.  In a very self-aware scene, a pair of young people head to a comics store in New York.  The young man is wondering what happened to the Micronauts series, but the woman explains to him that it’s only available in specialty shops now.  The store proprietor (who is probably based on someone I don’t recognize) holds up a copy of issue one, which starts to glow.  The Endeavor comes flying out of the comic, as the Micronauts’ attempt to warp to the Microverse has failed, and they’ve coincidentally ended up here.  The ship careens around the store, causing some chaos, and Bug, riding atop the vessel, destroys some toys of Force Commander and Baron Karza, thinking they’re the real deal.  Fighting to regain control of the ship, Rann pilots it out the door, just as (I presume) Bill Mantlo walks in, offering to sign copies of the new Micronauts.  Rann lands the ship in a nearby construction site, and while Devil works to repair the ship with Microtron (they do spend a lot of time repairing this thousand year old ship), the rest decide to take a break.  Rann and Mari slip off together, and Acroyear sits and ruminates on how alone he is without his people, before Bug reminds him that he’s never actually alone.  Rann broods about what’s happened on Homeworld, and he and Mari discuss why people follow Argon, landing on the main reason being fear of the Body Banks.  Mari disavows her brother.  Devil, working on the Endeavor, exposes the stardrive fuel to the air, which helps deteriorate it; Microtron is not sure they’ll have enough to breach the Spacewall again.  Back on Homeworld, the engineered assassin Huntarr begs Argon to kill him for his failure, but Argon instead sends him for more experiments, hoping he’ll become a better hunter.  He next goes to see the Duchess Belladonna, one of Karza’s old retinue.  The old woman wants to be young again, and still wants to take over the body of Slug, the revolutionary.  We see that Slug and Pharoid are being held prisoner, and that Argon no longer has feelings for his former lover.  Next he goes to meet with Cilicia, who is now leading the Acroyears, and whom he had brought to Homeworld.  They talk, and when she learns that he knows where Acroyear is, her desire for revenge on him outweighs her distrust of Argon.  He tells her that he’s on Earth.  The Micronauts are standing around outside the Endeavor, still parked in the construction lot, when an Acroyear battle-cruiser starts firing on them (I keep thinking about how big Earth is, and how easily the Micronauts get found by people crossing over from a sub-atomic universe).  Acroyear realizes that they face the Acroyear Elite, and after a double-page pullout showing all the main characters in this book, they all start fighting.  Our heroes use their surroundings (Devil starts throwing rivets at some of the flying Acroyears) to help them, and the battle goes relatively well.  Even the two roboids get into things.  Acroyear tries to get through to his people, but they keep fighting.  Mari loses her glider-wings, but manages to use her gymnastics skills to keep from falling to her death.  The construction workers arrive at the site and find these tiny people fighting all over the place.  Mari speaks to one of them, convincing him to side with her (he uses a sledgehammer to take out an Acroyear).  The other workers join in, using a jackhammer to shake some Acroyears off a girder, and under Bug’s direction, burying some with a bulldozer.  The Acroyears still in their battle cruiser fire null torpedoes at the Endeavor, which damages their stardrive.  Rann figures that Argon is trying to strand them on Earth, leaving them with only the Acroyear ship as an option.  The Micronauts try to take it, but it launches, with only Acroyear and Bug holding on to its side.  They realize they won’t be able to board the ship before it warps, so Acroyear cuts it open, damaging its power-core.  They jump off, and Rann catches Bug, while Acroyear easily survives the fall to the ground.  It begins to rain as the Micronauts return to the once-again damaged Endeavor, which gets swept away by the heavy rain, and ends up in the gutter.

• Rann and Mari fight to keep sewer rats away from the Endeavor, while Acroyear and Devil try to drag the ship through the sewer, against the current.  They discuss how the vessel is stranded on Earth, and badly crippled, while they work to protect it.  Mari stops a rat from attacking Bug, who is on top of the ship, but he appears to fall into the water.  Devil dives in to save him, but it turns out he’s standing on a floating can.  Rann talks about why they need to return to Homeworld, and while the rest of the team deliberates on what to do, Bug climbs out of the sewer.  He thinks about the friends they’ve made on Earth who have visited Homeworld, and wonders if any of them can help him.  Acroyear and Microtron notice that Bug has gone to the street and go after him.  Bug figures out what a public payphone is, and asks a woman using one to show him how it works.  She runs off, so Bug speaks to the operator, trying to track down the Fantastic Four.  He can’t figure out how to put money into the phone, and then gets annoyed and blasts it, but during that time, Microtron interfaced with the phone company’s computers (in the days that dial-up was in its infancy), and realizes they are across the street from the Baxter Building.  The Micronauts use the Astrostation, their short-range vessel, to approach the Baxter Building, not noticing that Mister Fantastic, Invisible Girl, and Human Torch are all leaving for a night on the town.  We see that The Thing is babysitting young Franklin Richards, who is playing in his room with his Micronauts toys (I feel like the metacognitive approach to this series is getting played out).  The Astrostation, which has been modified by Devil to fly higher than previously, makes it to the FF’s floors at the top of the Baxter Building, and Bug gets zapped by the forcescreen around the building.  Franklin notices this, and recognizing the Micronauts, lets them into his room.  They explain that they need to use the FF’s reducta-craft.  Franklin doesn’t want to wake the napping Thing, so they go to the submolecular studies lab, and realize that someone has tripped the alarm.  The lab is full of Antrons, but not the naturally occurring ones – these are citizens of Homeworld who Argon transformed.  They are there to destroy the Micronaut’s root to the Microverse by eating the reducta-craft.  The Micronauts prepare for battle.  Back on Homeworld, Argon presides over a new batch of recruits being put through the delousing process in the Body Banks.  He’s with Duchess Belladonna, who wants a youthful body, and his Chief Scientist, Degrayde (I guess he made it back from Earth and has given up his Battleaxe identity).  When Degrayde angers Argon, the King fires his hand at him, and the others realize that Argon has begun to modify his own body, making himself more like Baron Karza.  Argon rants about destroying the Micronauts.  Our heroes wade into their battle with the hundreds of Antrons.  Mari notices that Bug and Acroyear are fighting side by side again, like they used to.  Bug enjoys the fight, while Acroyear mourns that it’s necessary.  Franklin uses a fire extinguisher on some Antrons, the noise of which wakes up Ben.  Rann feels his telepathy returning to him, as he targets the Queen Antron and takes her out.  The Thing arrives and wraps up dozens of Antrons in a rug.  The fight soon ends, and Rann explains what’s happened on Homeworld.  Ben can tell that the reducta-craft is useless now, and suggests that his enemy, Dr. Doom, was experimenting with making things small.  He gives them directions, and the team piles into the Astrostation, planning to return to the Endeavor and then head upstate to find Doom.
• The Statement of Ownership for 1981 reports an average press run of 302 000, with average newsstand returns of 166 000.
• The Micronauts returned to the sewers, to find that a heavy downpour was causing them to overflow, and putting their vessel and home in danger of sinking.  While most of them stay in the Astrostation or on their glider-wings, Bug and Microtron go into the sinking ship to retrieve as much food as possible.  Bug escapes as the ship starts to fill with water, and then goes back in for Microtron, who ultimately has to save him.  Once they are all on the Astrostation, they head to street level (where it’s no longer raining and everyone is dry), setting course to the coordinates Ben Grimm gave them to find Doctor Doom’s castle, upstate.  On Homeworld, the Lady Slug joins Argon in his throne room, but the Force Commander soon realizes that it’s Duchess Belladonna – she’s swapped bodies with Slug.  She comes on to Argon, who finds her advances amusing.  He claims to have moved beyond physical desire, and removing his helmet, reveals that he’s now only sentient energy inside his armor.  Still, he likes the idea of marrying Belladonna as a blow to the rebellion, but she seems a little less interested in him now.  In the Pleasure Pits, the dungeons in the Body Banks, we see that Slug now inhabits Belladonna’s wizened body, and that Pharoid is pretty indignant at being held prisoner.  Slug swears to take Argon out.  The Micronauts arrive at Doom’s castle.  As they were traveling, they discussed the Prometheus Pit, explaining to Devil how Professor Prometheus used it to access the Microverse.  They have a hard time getting through the door to Doom’s castle, but when they search it, they find it abandoned.  Microtron scans a life sign, and Rann hears a cry for help, proof that his telepathy is returning.  They find their way to a basement room where, climbing onto a large table, they discover a town scaled to their size, like a large model railway set.  Leaving Microtron and Nanotron on the rim of the table, they enter the town on foot, and come across a peasant who is scared of them, but also more afraid of someone else.  They learn the history of this town, Liddleville (which was told in an issue of Fantastic Four), and how a man named Vincent Vaughn was taking over the town.  Vaughn ended up being Doctor Doom (this reminds me of MF DOOM’s Viktor Vaughn albums).  He captured the mayor of the town, Phillip Masters, whom we know as the Puppet Master.  Rann hears the telepathic cry again, and the team heads towards a Micronaut’s-sized castle being constructed in the town.  Outside it are crucified townsfolk, who are all machines.  The castle’s defenses attack, and the team gets them, only for Acroyear to be brought down by Doom.  He gasses the team, and when they wake up, they are in a cell with Masters.  He explains that he created Liddleville as a haven for his daughter and the Fantastic Four, wanting to put their minds in his tiny synthe-clones of them, but the good-looking Doom clone made a suit of armor and took over.  The Micronauts, realizing that none of this is going to get them home, feel the need to help the synthe-clone people anyway.  Some robots come to take Mari away from the others, but the team fights them, escapes, and goes looking for Doom.  When they find him, playing his organ (the musical instrument, don’t be dirty), he uses its sounds to hurt everyone but Acroyear, whose armor is sound resistant. They have a sword fight.  Devil jumps in to help, and Doom sets him on fire.  Bug helps Devil, but ends up setting the curtains on fire.  Doom is defeated by Acroyear, but he’s more upset to see that the painting of his good looking face is melting in the flames.  Suddenly, Doom can’t move, because Puppet Master has arrived and has control of his body.  Masters tells the Micronauts to leave things to him, so they depart.  Doom, still frozen, is upset when his synthe-clone face starts melting (the flames don’t affect Masters), and this issue ends very strangely.  Honestly, it’s like they increased the page count but didn’t really have a plan for it.

• Issue forty-two opens with an extended check in on the team as they hang out somewhere grassy.  Devil, whose appearance has become more lithe and more like Beast, is concerned that he’s becoming wilder and angrier the longer he’s on Earth, a fact he’s currently hiding from his teammates.  He hunts a pair of birds, but when he hears their song, it reminds him of Fireflyte, and he calms down.  Rann and Mari fly together, but Mari feels guilty enjoying their romance while Homeworld suffers.  Microtron and Nanotron spend time together, and Microtron shares his ongoing sadness at Biotron’s loss.  They talk about Acroyear, who broods in the Astrostation, thinking of Cilicia and his people.  Bug also wanders around, and thinks about Jasmine, his dead lover.  He gets an image in his mind of a human Earth woman that he feels is connected to the insect world.  He notices that he’s on the grounds of a large house, and thinks that she is there.  We see that the house is the site of a lavish party, being held by Janet Van Dyne, the Wasp.  A man sneaks into the party, looking for Janet, and when he discovers where she is, shrinks down to insect size.  He’s Doctor Nemesis, a one-off villain who fought Ant-Man and Wasp years before, and has been nursing his plans for revenge ever since.  He gets into a room that Hank Pym had been using as a lab, and where he’s left an adamantium armor prototype.  The Micronauts gather at the Astrostation, and talk about using the Prometheus Pit to return to the Microverse.  Bug gets another mental flash from Wasp, and believes she’s in danger.  He takes off to help, and the others join in.  They arrive at the party just as Janet is tossed through a window.  Doctor Nemesis reveals himself, wearing Pym’s armor, and ranting.  He fires shrinking blasts from his gauntlets, and Jan’s clothes shrink to nothing.  She’s fine, except naked, and she keeps dodging his blasts.  Bug rushes to help Jan, blasting at Nemesis with his rocket-lance.  His blast can’t hurt the adamantium, so Bug brings Jan to his friends, and Mari helps wrap her in a cocktail napkin.  Nemesis starts shrinking random items, and the guests flee.  Jan wants to attack, which surprises the others, and she flies over to help her guests escape.  The Micronauts move into action, but their lasersonic pistols have no effect.  Nemesis fires back at them, but they evade.  Devil throws a bowl of caviar at him, and Microtron shoots him with the Astrostation’s rocket-cannon, which is ineffective.  Mari wants to go help Microtron, but Rann tries to stop her.  She goes ahead anyway, and is hit by Nemesis’s blast, which shrinks her out of sight.  She’d wondered if this was a way to get back to the Microverse (I still don’t understand how that entire tiny universe can be accessed from anywhere).  Rann is frozen with indecision at the thought of having lost her, and the others get annoyed with him.  Jan changes into a costume and goes after Nemesis.  Bug jumps in and blocks a shot meant for her, and he shrinks away.  Rann realizes he needs to act and gets close to Nemesis, shattering his face shield with a solid punch.  Acroyear attacks the villain next.  When Nemesis tries to blast Acroyear, he maneuvers the man’s hand so he ends up shooting himself.  Both Nemesis and Acroyear disappear, but the adamantium suit is left behind.  Microtron can’t find proof that the shrinking ray was part of the armor (which I think contradicts something I just read), and Rann, having lost three of his teammates, shakes his fists and yells.
• Marionette, Acroyear, and Bug shrink after being hit by Doctor Nemesis’s ray, and as they do, they approach Homeworld.  Nemesis is with them, but he is shrinking faster than them, and blinks out of existence.  Mari has a theory that residents of the Microverse have a way of attuning to it (I think this is meant to explain how they always end up back in the Microverse when they shrink anywhere on Earth), and they end up in First Zone, where a Dog Soldier parade is taking place.  At first, our heroes are invisible, but then they appear among the crowd.  They spot Argon and Slug watching the parade from a balcony, and Mari questions how the rebel leader could still be with her brother still.  We see that Slug, who is actually Duchess Belladonna, is scared of Argon.  We get a recap of how she swapped bodies with Slug.  Argon is pleased that the people saw them together, which suggests that the rebellion supports him.  Degrayde tells him that he’s spotted the three Micronauts in the crowd.  A drone approaches them, and they blast it.  Dog Soldiers move towards them, and Acroyear lifts and topples a Mobile Command Tower.  He wants to keep fighting, but Mari thinks they should retreat.  A rebel calls them into a manhole, and they head to the lower levels.  Argon appears on the street in centaur form, and is furious that the Micronauts have disappeared.  They are led to Sanctuary, the rebel base, where a temple to Dallan and Sepsis has been built.  Margrace, Prince Pharoid’s friend, waits for them and brings them up to speed on what’s happened on Homeworld.  When Mari explains that Rann and the others are still on Earth, she takes on the role of leader of the rebellion.  On Earth, the Wasp has taken Rann, Devil, Microtron, and Nanotron to Avengers Mansion, where they meet with Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man.  They explain their recent adventures, and ask for help getting to the Microverse.  Thor tries using his hammer to open a portal, but fails.  Iron Man doesn’t think that his ‘boss’ can help.  At the least, the Avengers agree to fly them to Florida so they can go to the ruins of HELL (Human Engineering Life Laboratories) and check out the Prometheus Pit.  Once they get close, they pilot the Astrostation through the ruins.  Devil jumps out to explore on his own, and Rann goes after him, leaving the roboids to follow.  Devil admits to himself that he struck out on his own because he was feeling his rage growing.  He finds the Pit, but also finds a rotting body in a tank, and the smell of it drives him kind of mad.  He yells, and Rann tracks the sound, maneuvering through corridors of computer equipment.  Lasers start to fire at him, and he’s surprised to see who is attacking him.  The roboids move through HELL< and find themselves under attack as well.  The Astrostation crashes, and Microtron realizes who their enemy is.  Rann finds Devil, and wonders about the body in the tank.  We see that their enemy is Computrex, the living computer that they thought they’d destroyed before.  Somehow, he’s moved into HELL and taken it over.  He drains the fluid from the dead body’s tank, and it starts to move towards Rann and Devil, its smell getting even more powerful.  Computrex reveals that Professor Prometheus, who is dead, lives on through his mechanical parts.  Prometheus says he wants to kill the Micronauts.

• The shambling, rotten Prometheus lurches towards Rann and Devil.  He catches Rann in his robot fist and starts to crush him.  Devil is still mad and howling, and the roboids are stuck on a spinning magnetic wheel, and unable to help.  Devil remembers Fireflyte and her singing, and it helps him restore his mind.  He jumps on Prometheus’s head and starts clawing at his rotting flesh, causing him pain.  He throws Devil towards Computrex, who blasts him with a flamethrower (because every sentient computer bank has a flame thrower).  Burning, Devil falls into the Prometheus Pit.  Computrex mocks Rann, and then explains how after their last encounter, he became an energy form that floated around until it found its way to HELL, and inhabited the computers there.  He was able to sense the electronic parts of Prometheus, who was still lying dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft in a department store I guess, and was able to remote pilot him back to Florida.  Computrex’s goal is to use the knowledge of the Microverse he gained from Rann’s mind to go there and take over the Body Banks.  He has Rann put into a device that will probe his mind.  Nanotron and Microtron don’t know how to help.  On Homeworld, Marionette, Acroyear, and Bug move among the poor of the Subzone below First Level.  They make their way to the Temple of Light, where a priest preaches to people that they should spend their life credits in a form of slot machine, to try to win immortality.  Mari explains this is how Karza drew people to the Body Banks, and decides to remove her cloak and speak to the people.  She encourages them to join the rebellion, and the priest calls for Dog Soldiers.  He tries to tell the people that Slug is with Force Commander, so therefore there is nothing wrong with his rule.  When the Dog Soldiers arrive, the Micronauts start to fight back, easily wading through dozens of them.  This causes the crowd to join in, and the fight gets even bigger.  Mari is reinforced by the arrival of Margrace and some other Desert Demons on their ostras.  The Dog Soldiers retreat, and Margrace and Mari talk about the impact Belladonna-in-Slug’s body marrying Argon will have on the rebellion.  In the royal palace, Belladonna tries to get Argon to drink poison, but now that he’s made of living energy, it doesn’t affect him.  He threatens to put her back in her original body, and insists that their wedding goes ahead.  Meanwhile, Slug, in Belladonna’s aged body, pretends to be dead so she can kill her cell’s guard.  She escapes and speaks to Pharoid, whom she leaves behind in his cell (apparently they are in love now).  Back in the ruins of HELL, Rann is about to be mind-probed.  He notices that something is happening near the edge of the Prometheus Pit – Devil, burned a dark blue (he looks even more like Beast now) emerges from the Pit and attacks Prometheus, again raking his skull with his claws, and causing him a lot of pain.  Prometheus staggers towards Computrex’s main screen, shattering it.  This disrupts Rann’s bonds, and he is able to fly free.  He pulls Microtron and Nanotron off the spinning wheel.  Devil, pretty much completely mad, keeps cutting away at Prometheus’s head (and biting it, which is gross).  Afraid he’s going to trash more machinery, Computrex blasts Prometheus with a laser, and the roboids manage to trip him so he falls into the Pit.  Rann hears a splash, and realizes that the Pit ends in flooding, not the Microverse, and surmises that it put out the flames on Devil.  He also realizes that the Pit will not lead them home.  Devil enters Computrex’s systems and starts pulling them apart.  Rann, realizing that the living computer is going to explode, pulls Devil out.  Computrex, fearing the end is near, hits the Micronauts with some sort of energy, trying to turn them into energy-forms like he was.  They all become waves of light, and then Computrex explodes, destroying what’s left of HELL.
• I’ve always thought that Arcade was one of the worst villains in the Marvel Universe.  He’s in this issue, which is the first to employ a wrap-around cover.  He has plan to use his new light transfer ray thing to turn the X-Men into beings of light and make them fight their way through some 1980s video game consoles he has installed in his sea-platform base.  His light beam is fired towards the Xavier School, but along the way, it is intercepted by the beam of light that Computrex fired the Micronauts into, and so Rann, Devil, Microtron, and Nanotron are sucked into Arcade’s systems, surprising him.  He’s figured out that these are not the X-Men but decides to let his new killing machine take out these total strangers.  The art is coloured in such a way as to make us think we are inside the games.  Rann is fighting against some shielded spaceships.  Microtron is getting bombed by airplanes, while Nanotron has a bunch of race cars chasing her.  Devil is hiding from some space invaders, trying to control his animalistic rage.  On Homeworld, Acroyear and Bug lead a group of rebel Lowlies in an attack on the Body Banks.  They cut their way in through an unknown tunnel and work to rescue the people captured throughout the facility.  They are spotted by some Dog Soldiers, who attack them, killing many of the rebels.  Margrace leads the captives away, while Bug and Acroyear use the confusion to slip away so they can go free Prince Pharoid.  At the same time, Marionette is slipping into the royal palace, her childhood home.  She plans on tracking down Argon and killing him, but is distracted when she sees the Force Commander watching as Slug and Belladonna fight.  It looks like Slug, who is in Belladonna’s body, is about to kill the younger form, so Mari shoots her gun out of her hand, not realizing that it’s her friend she’s turning on.  Argon is amused, and explains about the body switch.  He also shows off his new form, which is pink energy, and attacks her.  They begin to fight, each using a long and short sword (Argon’s are made from his own body energy).  As they fight, they argue, and Slug gets her weapon, preparing to kill the woman who stole her body.  Argon stops her, and when Mari is distracted, he stabs her with his energy sword and throws her out the window.  Slug shoots at him, but can’t hurt him.  He decides he’s going to make Slug serve as handmaiden during his wedding to Belladonna.  Back on Earth, the art has switched to normal.  Rann struggles to overcome the vessels firing on him, but sees an opening in one’s shield, and dives for it.  Nanotron goes on the offensive and smashes many of the cars that are chasing her.  Devil also goes on the attack, and mauls one of the alien ‘space invaders’ before being attacked by a large ship.  Microtron fights the ships firing on him, but at the same time, starts to realize how to reverse the effects of Arcade’s ray.  He is able to restore the Micronauts to flesh, which activates Rann’s telepathy.  They burst out of Arcade’s screens, and attack him.  He’s surprised by their relative size, and triggers an escape plan that has his chair tilt back and fire rockets.  As he flies away from his off-shore platform, it starts to fall apart, and then explodes, spelling trouble for the stranded Micronauts.

• I didn’t remember that Luke McDonnell drew issue forty-six.  I’m a fan of his art.  Rann flies above the platform, which is falling apart, trying to figure out how to save his last three Micronauts, and worrying that Devil has completely lost it and become feral.  He spots an island in the distance but isn’t sure how he can get everyone there.  He thinks Devil is calming down, but when he flies close to him, he jumps up and grabs him, and then tries to choke Rann.  Microtron tries to help and gets tossed across the sinking platform.  Nanotron distracts Devil so Rann can punch him.  Microtron tries playing the recording he made of Fireflyte singing, and that immediately snaps Devil back to his regular self.  They decide that they’re going to make their way to the island with Microtron using his spinning arm as a helicopter rotor and flying Nanotron, while Rann will take Devil on his back.  On Homeworld, Mari falls from the window that Argon tossed her out of, and as she falls, she recaps what’s happened since she returned to the Microverse.  She comes to just before hitting the ground, and activates her glider-wings.  She still hits some trees, and her wings break but she is able to make it to the ground and escape the palace grounds.  Argon talks to Degrayde about what’s happened and gets angry when he learns that Belladonna and Slug have escaped together.  Degrayde notices how much Argon is acting like Baron Karza now, which might be foreshadowing?  Belladonna makes it clear to Slug that she’s made mistakes, and that she regrets her ambition.  Slug shares the story of how, as a child in the Body Banks, Karza selected her mother for his pleasure and killed her father, and then referred to her, barely a toddler, as a slug.  The two start to scheme.  Bug and Acroyear make their way separately through the Body Bank, and come together in the Pleasure Pits where they find Prince Pharoid being tortured.  They free him, although he wants them to go look for Slug instead.  As they prepare to leave, they are stopped by at least four figures in the shadows.  Rann and his diminished crew continue to fly towards the island, but Nanotron isn’t able to hold on to Microtron any longer, and falls into the ocean.  He immediately dives in after her, which means that Devil can no longer hear Fireflyte’s song, which has been keeping him calm.  He rakes Rann’s chest, so the Commander drops him in the ocean.  Hoping he’s recovered his senses, he flies towards him, only to be attacked again.  They both end up in the water, and as Devil swims towards him, Rann feels he has no choice but to fire at him with his lasersonic.  With his glider-wing damaged, Rann doesn’t have the strength to swim for long, and gets caught in the undertow.  He thinks of all the people in his life as he sinks.  Later, we see that he’s washed up on the shore.  He’s approached by some misshapen nude orange humanoid creatures about his size.  They pick him up and carry him over a hill, where we see a number of derelict warplanes and military boats strewn across a jungle.  They carry him past long-dead Earth bodies, and into the skeleton of a pilot or sailor.  Inside, they place him on an altar that has a familiar looking coffin-like device on it.  He sleeps in this coffin, and when he wakes up, he’s confused, thinking he’s back on his voyage with Biotron.  He realizes that these creatures are watching him, and when they speak, he realizes that they think he’s Time Traveler, the messenger of the Enigma Force that he bonded with and kind of created.  He realizes he’s been sleeping in a hibernation couch like the one from the Endeavor, his ship, and gets even more confused as the creatures start to bow to him.
• Mike Vosburg drew issue forty-seven, and the issue’s consistency with the ones before it shows how much work Danny Bulandi was doing on this book.  Microtron and Nanotron continue to sink, and Microtron has to use his rocket cannons to kill a shark.  They end up on the bottom of the ocean, where they discover a very large version of Biotron.  Commander Rann is confused as the small inhabitants of the island carry him on their shoulders to a pile of skulls.  He stands on top with their leader, and is posed to stand like the Time Traveler always did.  The being, who refers to their people as the Soul Survivors, recounts how they came to be on Earth.  He explains that they were once humanoid, and a thousand years before (it would make more sense if it was a number like 800 years before, but I know why comics writers do this), were visited by Rann and Biotron on their trip across the Microverse.  Being pretty primitive, they thought that the roboid and Rann’s holographic projection were gods, and began to worship them.  After they left, the people spent generations developing, and eventually built a great starship in Biotron’s shape.  They launched into space, but ended up going through the Spacewall, and along the way, transforming into the odd-looking creatures they are now.  Their ship crashed upon its emergence on Earth, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.  Few of the people survived, but they found their way to the island.  They learned that other craft tend to crash there, and when they touched a pilot who survived his crash, they absorbed his life energy.  Rann is horrified to learn that they are psionic vampires, and doesn’t like their hope that he can lead them home to the Microverse.  He doesn’t see that Devil is stalking them.  On Homeworld, Bug and Acroyear are confronted by Death Squad (Battleaxe, Ampzilla, Lobros, and Centauria) as they try to rescue Pharoid.  Our heroes put Pharoid down and enter the battle, with Acroyear insisting that the two of them are enough to defeat these foes.  Pharoid, weak and injured, wants to help and locates his star scepter.  He crawls to it but is disappointed to learn that it’s drained of power.  Some Dog Soldiers arrive, led by Chief Scientist Degrayde (which is weird considering he was the one wearing the Battleaxe armor before).  Acroyear fights the Dog Soldiers, but Lobros gets his tonguetentacles down Bug’s throat (yes, that does sound all kinds of wrong), and when Centauria insists Acroyear yield to save his friend’s life, he backs down.  The Dog Soldiers lead them all away.  A few minutes later, Slug and Belladonna arrive on the scene and find the abandoned star scepter.  Slug knows what it is and figures it will help her to convince some Body Banks workers to restore their minds to their proper bodies.  Elsewhere, Marionette attacks a priest of the light to steal his robes.  She makes her way into the Temple of Light, fuming at how her brother has perpetuated the means of control Karza once used on their people.  She enters the building where the weather is controlled on Homeworld, taking out two guards.  She’s surprise to find Huntarr waiting to fight her (he looks a lot like the Soul Survivors).  On Earth, Devil attacks the Soul Survivors, rushing through them and killing them.  Rann feels guilty that he left Devil to drown, and tries to stop him, but he’s too savage.  He knocks Devil into a pile of bones, and the Soul Survivors surround Rann.  They join hands and start to chant.  Their chant reminds Devil of Fireflyte and he immediately calms down, and apologizes.  The lead Soul Survivor touches him on the chest, causing him a lot of pain.  Rann knocks out the leader with a bone, and while the Soul Survivors mass to attack him, the Biotron ship arrives on the scene, firing on the Survivors.  The ones that aren’t killed run off, and Rann is shocked to see the starship shaped like his dead friend.

• The Biotron-shaped starship chases off the Soul Survivors, and then lowers a landing pad.  A drone platform comes out to help Rann bring Devil inside the ship, promising to help him.  The ship, which seems much bigger on the inside than on the out, is remarkable, and seems to be alive with organic elements.  The platform announces that Devil is dying.  Rann talks to his friend, who is lucid now.  Devil tells him not to feel bad, and that he’ll be happy to join Fireflyte in death.  The drone takes him to the sick bay, and Rann explores the ship.  He finds his way to the bridge, which is filled with a large brain-like organism.  Rann notices that Microtron and Nanotron lie lifeless near the brain.  It speaks to Rann, announcing that the ship belongs to him.  On Homeworld, Acroyear breaks free of his captors, attacking Ampzilla and using him to blast Battleaxe and then throwing him into Centauria.  The Dog Soldiers pile on him, until Degrayde catches his attention, pointing out that Lobros has stuck his tongues down the throats of Bug and Pharoid, and is prepared to kill them.  Once again, Acroyear has no choice but to stand down. Degrayde has some Dog Soldiers use pyrotorches to melt his armor off of him, leaving him in just his underwear.  The Soldiers lead them to the Pleasure Pits, where the inhabitants know them by their reputation and give them space.  Nearby in the arena, Force Commander talks to Degrayde about his plans for his wedding the next day, and asks if they’ve found Slug and Belladonna.  We see the two women use Pharoid’s de-powered star scepter to get to Degrayde’s lab, where they insist that they have their minds swapped again.  Argon speaks about Mari’s whereabouts, and then comments that he wants the weather to be perfect on his wedding day.  In the weather chamber, Mari faces off against Huntarr.  He makes it clear that he won’t let Mari mess with the weather controls, while she tries to appeal to his humanity, if there’s any left in his monstrous form.  They fight, and she tries to convince him to switch sides, while also maneuvering him so he ends up trashing the controls.  Once he realizes what he’s done, Mari gives him another chance to join the rebellion.  Rann is unhappy to see the two roboids appearing lifeless.  The ship starts to narrate its story for him, showing how the people that became the Soul Survivors built him to look like Biotron, and then flew through the Spacewall.  While they mutated and moved to the island, the ship stood on the ocean floor, waiting for commands and upgrading itself to better resemble Biotron.  It explains that Microtron and Nanotron found it and entered, and when they understood that it needed purpose, they convinced it to go to the Microverse to fight Argon.  Microtron suggested that the ship take his memories of Biotron, a process that required his sacrifice.  Nanotron didn’t want to be on her own, so she joined, and somehow their organic parts became the basis for the ship’s brain (which is more than twice their combined size).  Now Rann understands that his friends sacrificed to help him return home, but is still skeptical of the ship’s claims that it could become Biotron.  It wants to create a telepathic connection with Rann, who contains all of Biotron’s memories in his subconscious.  Rann is reluctant, but realizes he doesn’t have the right to refuse this with Homeworld in the balance.  He sits in a chair and has his mind probed.  We see Rann’s memories of the thousand years he and Biotron explored together, and everything that has happened since he returned.  This process ages Rann, and he visibly becomes older and bearded in the process.  At the same time, the ship creates the vehicles the team used to have.  When Rann wakes up, he can tell that the ship really is Biotron now.  He has him navigate his way to the Microverse, shrinking through the Spacewall.  In the life support area, we see that one Soul Survivor has gotten on the ship, and is approaching the comatose (or just sleeping) Devil.
• Even though we saw Rann and Biotron, who is also now referred to as Bioship, head home last issue, at the start of issue forty-nine, they are back on Earth and starting the process to shrink to the Microverse.  Rann reflects on his time on Earth, and as the Bioship shrinks, it finds itself passing through interior worlds that exist between Earth and the Microverse.  Some of these worlds are living, and see Bioship as an infection.  He has no choice but to protect himself, as the threats become larger.  The last Soul Survivor approaches Devil, who is asleep or in a coma.  Bioship approaches the Spacewall, discovering worlds within it.  As the ship presses through, we see odd lifeforms, and Rann receives more information than he can process.  They find themselves drawn to the heart of the living Spacewall, where they find the Time Travelers waiting for them.  Rann materializes, naked, outside the ship, where Time Traveler tells him that he won’t provide him with the Enigma Force in his fight against Argon, telling him to find the Enigma Force within himself instead.  Bioship has made it into the Microverse, and heads towards Homeworld.  On Homeworld, Argon’s wedding is about to take place.  He’s happy that the weather is nice, and Belladonna, in Slug’s body still, is at his side, but remains defiant.  She has no choice but to play along, as they present themselves to the crowd gathered at the arena.  We see that Marionette is in the crowd with the disguised Huntarr.  Slug, in Belladonna’s body, is near Argon, and we learn from her thoughts that the two women were captured in the Body Banks before they were able to swap bodies again.  Argon orders the wedding games to begin, and Acroyear, Bug, and Pharoid are brought out.  The first two have their weapons, and Argon tosses Pharoid his Star Scepter.  A massive spider scorpion, constructed in the Body Banks, emerges to fight them.  Argon is impressed, and sets aside concerns that the weather is getting bad.  Our heroes fight the spider, and Pharoid expends the small charge his scepter had absorbed from the sun.  Death Squad watches the games.  Belladonna wants Argon to end the games, and he freaks out when he realizes that it’s raining, realizing that Mari must have gotten to the weather controls.  Mari reveals herself and shoots Lobros from behind.  She and Huntarr start fighting the rest of Death Squad while the others fight the spider scorpion.  Seeing that Huntarr is with the Micronauts gives the crowd reason to turn on Argon, and they start to riot.  Dog Soldiers in floating vessels open fire on the crowd.  Force Commander is unhappy to hear them calling for his death, and Belladonna uses this chance to show everyone what he really is.  She pulls off his helmet, revealing the energy creature he’s become.  Argon’s face appears, and he insists that he’s not been responsible for his actions.  He rips apart his armor, and we see that Baron Karza has been growing inside of him, and has been controlling him.  Karza revels in this surprise, but the Micronauts don’t have long to take it in before seeing the arrival of Bioship.  Karza realizes this means that Rann has returned, and he prepares for their final battle.

• Karza boasts about having returned, and the crowd of rioters in the arena don’t know what to think.  They are surprised by the arrival of the Bioship.  The Micronauts are also reeling, and Karza is curious about Rann showing up.  He sends his astral projection to probe Rann’s mind, and they do telepathic battle, with Rann repelling him, but along the way still revealing that the Enigma Force is not with him.  The emboldens Karza.  Commander Rann wants to join his teammates, and puts on his glider-wings and helmet.  First he checks on Devil, and finds the corpse of the last Soul Survivor on the ground.  Devil explains that the Survivor fed on him, but that the energy of his soul killed him.  Devil knows he’s dying, and reveals that he should have known that he was undergoing a period of chrysalis when he started to lose control of his rage.  He dies, and a new Fireflyte emerges from his chest. She explains that the Devils of Tropica and the Fireflytes have this life cycle, and then she suggests they go join the battle.  Marionette rallies the Micronauts to get past the Death Squad to try to rescue Slug from Karza (who is holding both her and Belladonna by their necks).  Karza chokes Slug, who is still in Belladonna’s body, and then throws her corpse into the arena.  Belladonna doesn’t fare any better, as she’s shot against a wall by his detachable hand and also dies.  This enrages Prince Pharoid, who rushes towards Karza, ready to use his star scepter, only to be shot dead by Karza’s chest cannons.  Rann and Fireflyte arrive as Death Squad gets into it with the Micronauts.  Acroyear, still just in his briefs, fights against Ampzilla, while Mari jumps on Centauria’s back and snaps her spine.  Bug gets caught by Lobros’s tongue, again, but uses Centauria’s sword to cut it off, and then starts hacking at his shell, killing him.  Rann and Battleaxe fight, while Fireflyte flits around him, singing her song.  This shreds Battleaxe’s armor, and Rann just shoots him.  Acroyear runs Ampzilla through with his sword, and the team prepares to go after Karza, but are surrounded by Dog Soldiers.  It’s at this moment that Margrace arrives, leading a large group of rebel forces.  He sees that Pharoid is dead, and shares with Rann that he thinks the battle might go poorly.  Biotron provides air cover.  The Micronauts rush towards Karza, who boasts that he cannot be killed.  Acroyear starts to fight him hand-to-hand, but Karza shoots him with his eye beams. Bug rushes over to help, but is caught by Karza’s hand, which starts to choke him.  Mari tries to pull it off, but is electrocuted by it.  This leaves just Rann and Karza (Huntarr doesn’t seem to do anything in this issue, even though he’s with the team the whole way).  Their fight is brief, as Karza knocks Rann to the ground.  He’s about to deliver his killing blow when Fireflyte’s song distracts him.  He turns towards Margrace and the other rebels, and starts shooting at them with his chest cannons and hand blasts.  He realizes he’s distracted, but when he turns back to the Micronauts, he finds Fireflyte singing a teleportation song that removes the team from the arena.  Once they are aboard Bioship, he warps away, leaving Karza to shout about his victory.
• We are now firmly into what I remember as the best part of this whole series.  The Bioshop flies through space, pursued by almost a dozen fighter-crafts.  Rann wants to flee, while the others think they should turn around and continue the fight.  Mari is undeterred, even as Rann recaps all that they’ve lost (Slug, Pharoid, and strangely, Belladonna, as well as most of the resistance).  Fireflyte’s argument is that their fight is with Karza, not his Dog Soldiers, and that should be their focus.  Mari learns that Devil is dead (but weirdly doesn’t ask about Nanotron or Microtron, her life-long companion).  The Bioship takes some more hits, and it starts to bleed from the damage.  Rann allows Mari to have authority over the ship, and retreats to his chambers, with her calling him a coward as he leaves.  Mari asks the ship to provide them with spacesuits, and they receive skin-tight outfits that match their general colouring (but not Huntarr, as he can survive in space).  They emerge from the ship and start to engage the fighters.  Acroyear cuts one apart with his energy-sword, while Mari uses a regular sword to cut open the cockpit of another.  Huntarr is well-suited to this work, flying through many ships.  Bug is impressed by him, and tells Acroyear while they keep fighting.  Acroyear takes a shot to the torso, and Bug flies to help him out. He uses his rocket-lance to destroy one ship, and while waiting for it to return, picks up Acroyear’s energy-sword and uses it against some Dog Soldiers who have come out of a ship to fight them.  The sword causes him a lot of pain, as only Acroyears can wield it.  The two friends fight back to back, while the Bioship decides it’s time to get involved directly.  He asks for Rann’s permission, but the Commander is meditating with Fireflyte and doesn’t respond.  Bioship moves in and destroys the rest of the ships, and the Micronauts return onboard.  We can tell that Mari is very upset with Rann, and after looking in on him, heads to the bridge with Huntarr where she asks the ship to probe Homeworld and find out what’s happening there.  We see that Baron Karza sent the Dog Soldiers to wipe out everyone at Sanctuary, the rebel base, and to use captured rebels as material for the Body Banks.  Others are buried in mass graves (it hasn’t been that long since they left, so Karza is acting pretty quickly).  Mari is very upset.  The others join her and they agree they should warn the other worlds that Karza is back.  Bioship informs them that they’re flying towards a massive flotilla of ships – it’s Acroyear’s people.  Cilicia is on the bridge of the mothership, and recognizes Biotron’s appearance.  She assumes the Micronauts are aboard the ship and orders it captured.  The Acroyears fire harpoons wrap Bioship in cables that he can’t break free of.  A massive boarding party approaches, and while the Micronauts prepare to fight, Acroyear makes it clear he won’t stand against his own people.  He is prepared to submit to their judgment.  The armored aliens cut through the Bioship’s hull and start to fight the Micronauts, while Acroyear stands perfectly still.  After a few minutes, he orders everyone to stop fighting.  He reminds them that he is still their king until he’s been deposed, and asks to be held to Acroyear law.  The Micronauts are ‘beamed’ over to the mothership. Rann and Fireflyte avoid the boarding party, thanks to Fireflyte’s song making them invisible.  Acroyear is brought before dozens of his people in an arena where he is confronted by Cilicia, his beloved.

• Issue fifty-two opens in Oceania, as Baron Karza and Chief Scientist Degrayde stand on a floating platform that contains a massive solar lens.  Aquon and his people prepare to stand against Karza, but he turns the solar lens on the sea, boiling it and the beings that live in it.  His weapon dries the entire water molecule, leaving an exposed seabed.  They fly back to First Zone, not noticing that Lady Coral, the last being who can breathe air on the molecule, is still alive and vows to get revenge.  As Karza and Degrayde return home, the chief scientist reminds him that he’ll need lots of people to fill the Body Banks so he can create more Dog Soldiers.  Karza feels that his prior mercies towards his enemies are what left him vulnerable.  In space, Bioship stays trussed up by the Acroyear fleet.  On the mothership, Acroyear is covered with paint to purify him for his coming fight with Cilcia.  Mari doesn’t think the Micronauts should stand by and watch, but Bug says there’s nothing they can do.  Acroyear tries to speak to Cilicia of their love, but she rejects him as a traitor, and says that he’s weak from being with the Micronauts.  She swings her sword at him, drawing first blood.  Acroyear explains that he wants to lead his people towards peace, and that the Worldmind agreed with him, but to do that, he’d have to kill Cilicia. They start to fight for real.  On Bioship, Rann continues to meditate, with Fireflyte singing to him.  His astral self is able to travel to the Enigma Force, where he finds the Time Travelers in the Temple of Time again.  He pleads his case to get their help against Baron Karza, but they feel that they are no longer going to get involved in humanity.  They use a metaphor of a deadly flower to explain how they are beyond good and evil.  They offer Rann a place among them as their creator, but he rejects them, returning to his body.  He tells Fireflyte they should try to contact them again, and again begins to meditate, which disappoints Biotron.  The fight between the two Acroyears continues, but Acroyear won’t hurt Cilicia.  Bug wants to join in, and the guards threaten him.  Cilicia uses this as proof that the Micronauts lack honour, which Acroyear disputes.  He reminds her that she fought with them, and claims that peace makes him stronger.  He explains that since they ‘bonded’, they are basically married.  She’s not happy that he revealed that to everyone.  He grabs her in a big bear hug, and with his strength, cracks her armor open around the belly.  A light issues from the cracks, shocking everyone.  This means that she’s pregnant!  An elder stops the fight, claiming that Cilicia should not kill the father of her child.  All of the Acroyear yell out ‘Kingbirth’, and the elder claims that they will wait for the child to be born and grow to maturity before they judge Acroyear, as is their custom.  Cilicia is to be protected now, and the Acroyears all start leaving the arena.  Cilicia feels cursed.  Acroyear knows he can force her to stay with him, but he won’t do that.  He tries to speak to her, but she turns her back to him.  The elder tells him to leave, and Cilicia says she never wants to see him again.  Acroyear explains to Bug that neither he nor Cilicia are able to rule their people now – it is only their child who can do that after being born.  This means that the Acroyears will not engage in the fight against Karza either, and Acroyear once again feels very alone and sad.
• The Statement of Ownership for 1982 reports an average press run of 230 000, with average newsstand returns of 98 000.  I guess this covers the last months before the book was direct only?
• Still on the Acroyear vessel (which is referred to as Spartakian, for the first time), new armor is welded onto Acroyear (I’m not sure how they get their armor on and off) while it is still very hot.  The elder removes the traitor brand from his forehead by melting it off, which looks very painful.  Acroyear puts his helmet on, and reiterates that he is no longer king, partly because he won’t force Cilicia to stand by him.  The Micronauts return to Bioship, which is freed from his bonds.  Mari leads the others directly to Arcturus’s room, but Biotron won’t lift the privaseal around his door.  She pulls out her lasersonic pistol and blows a hole in the door.  Light pours forth, and they hear Fireflyte’s song.  She explains that Rann is trying to contact the Time Travelers.  Huntarr decides to use force to get Rann to talk to them, but Fireflyte blocks the burst of energy that comes from his antennae, and Biotron seals the door, while Rann remains oblivious.  Later, Mari worries about what’s happening on Homeworld.  We see that Karza and Degrayde are talking about a rebel who resists becoming a Dog Soldier.  They talk about killing him or sending him to Prisonworld.  Mari gathers the Micronauts, and Huntarr makes a point of saying that he’s not part of the team.  He suggests they look for allies, and Mari agrees, deciding that Prisonworld is the right place to start rebuilding the rebellion.  When they arrive, they are surprised to find the whole place looks familiar – we can tell that it’s all based on the stereotypical portrayal of Prohibition era America.  The team is surprised by how the world looks, and then some aliens approach in cars and start firing machine guns at them.  Acroyear cuts one of the cars to bits, and the fight is on.  Mari fights a guy named Jocko.  A few of them shoot at Huntarr, who cannot be hurt by bullets.  As he fights them, he talks about his lost humanity, which Bug doesn’t see as all that necessary.  Acroyear and Mari take down more of the gangsters’ vehicles, and then they decide to set them up.  Three of the gangsters, Jocko, Skull, and Schnozz, fall into the trap they set, and get taken prisoner.  Some Dog Soldiers arrive and start shooting at them all, so the Micronauts take them out.  This makes Skull realize that the Micronauts are not working for the government, like he thought, so he decides to take them to meet Little D, the leader of their mob.  They go to their base, which looks like an old speakeasy, and meet Little D, who is pretty small.  He explains that Prisonworld, which used to be a dumping ground from criminals and political prisoners, was abandoned the first time Karza was killed.  The people lacked personalities after Karza’s experiments, so they modeled the world on the gangster films from Earth they found.  Now Karza is back and taking control of Prisonworld again.  Mari explains that the Micronauts are the only ones standing up to Karza, and suggests they work together.  He agrees, and Jocko takes them to get new outfits so they don’t stand out.  We see the team dressed as gangsters, with Mari in full moll-mode.  Later, they lead an attack on a Body Bank outlet, with the goal of freeing prisoners from Little D’s mob.  They find that everyone there has been experimented on, so Mari suggests they end their misery.  There are explosions outside, and Little D worries that the G-Men have come.  The mobsters run, and the Micronauts find themselves facing the G-Men, a quartet of mutated humans.  Little D is still with our heroes, but doesn’t like their odds.

• Issue fifty-four, which features Kelley Jones inking Butch Guice, looks and feels like it was written and drawn by Keith Giffen in a number of places.  The Dog Soldiers on Prisonworld arrive with the G-Men to fight the Micronauts.  One of them creates an illusion, so Mari thinks she is fighting Baron Karza (who has a lightsaber?).  Huntarr fights another G-Man, recognizing his similarity to the creature.  Bug and Little D fight a third G-Man, and knock him down some steps, only to be caught in a Dog Soldier inertia net.  The final G-Man manages to knock Acroyear down while he struggles with a net.  Mari throws her sword at the G-Man that is messing with her mind, killing it, before being knocked out by a Dog Soldier.  Huntarr, victorious against his foe, is also captured.  The Micronauts and Little D are taken to the detention center, where their capture is broadcast across the Microverse.  Little D explains that on Prisonworld, they’re already considered guilty, so they are there for sentencing only.  Mari is worried, and annoyed that Rann is not even aware of their plight.  Acroyear decides to fight the guards, but they threaten to kill Mari if he doesn’t stop, so he stands down.  They are placed in a large detention cell with a number of other gangsters that all hate Little D.  Mari tries to inspire them to join in the fight against Karza, but her words only reach one sentient, a big bruiser who calls himself Murder-1 after his charges.  A huge brawl breaks out, and after listening for a while, the guards check on the cell and find the Micronauts and their new friends the only ones standing.  When they are brought into court, the three-headed robot judge sentences the Micronauts to death.  We see that Karza has been watching these proceedings from Homeworld.  When Mari yells back at Karza, the judge decides to execute her first.  She’s dragged to an electric chair, while Dog Soldiers hold the others back with a force screen.  Murder-1 goes nuts, and starts trashing the whole courtroom.  Mari gets free, as do the other Micronauts, and they take out the Dog Soldiers.  We see that Murder-1 is dying from his wounds, and Mari tells him how important he is before continuing the fight.  They head into the detention blocks to free the other prisoners, and we see that they managed to retrieve their gear along the way.  Little D gives a speech and now the other convicts unite alongside him to free Prisonworld.
• On Bioship, Mari gets out of bed, clearly naked except for a sheet wrapped around her, and talks about she wants to put an end to Baron Karza, and how the fact that the Micronauts are only opposition weighs on her.  We see that she’s talking to Bug, who she has clearly just had sex with (this bothered me as a kid, given her devotion to Rann, but I think I’m more bothered by the fact that Bug, an Insectivorid, has nipples).  Mari makes it clear that she came to Bug for comfort, and Bug urges her to be more understanding of why Rann is not fighting harder, given the fact that he’s one thousand years old.  He tells Mari she’s a good leader, pointing to their success on Prisonworld as proof.  They put their usual gear back on, and head to the bridge.  Along the way, they see that Rann is still in meditation with Fireflyte.  Rann’s astral self returns to the Temple of Time, but notices another supplicant there, also trying to speak to the Time Travelers.  It’s Karza, and the two men begin to fight.  When Karza realizes that the Time Travelers have rejected Rann’s pleas for help, he doesn’t see the need to continue fighting, and disappears.  Mari sends Bug to get Acroyear.  He finds his friend practicing with his energy-sword and a remote that projects holographic enemies for him to fight.  The drone creates images of Shaitan and Cilicia, and Acroyear refuses to fight them, even though they could potentially harm him.  Bug jumps in to shoot the drone, and Bug encourages his friend to use the fight against Karza to help win his people back.  Once the three Micronauts are on the bridge, they talk about making Huntarr an official member of the team.  They agree, but discover that Huntarr has left.  We see him rocketing through space under his own power.  He slams through the ships blockading Homeworld, and crashes into the water on First Zone.  He swims through a duct, entering the Lower Zone sewers and heading to his original home, back when he was still a human.  He enters his house, and remembers how he had stolen some life credits and went to barter them, but was caught by Dog Soldiers and taken to the Body Banks.  He discovers that his mother, Seelia-23, is still alive, but she’s become ugly due to the deprivations of being alone.  His sister was taken to be a breeder in the Body Banks.  When Huntarr is not looking, his mother stabs herself, unable to bear the shame of what she’s become.  Huntarr, in a rage, blows up the building they’re in.  This act is witnessed by Lady Coral, who wants to recruit Huntarr to her cause, but decides to leave him alone.  Huntarr makes his way out of the lower levels, fighting some Dog Soldiers along the way, until he emerges near the Body Banks, and slips into a group of people being taken inside.  Baron Karza and his Chief Scientist, Degrayde, watch over the crowd, and Karza senses that someone inside it is unbroken (I guess he’s becoming more and more of a Jedi now).  He and Degrayde talk about his plans to approach a level of godhood, which Degrayde thinks will give him the chance to work on his own personal gain.  Inside the Body Banks, Huntarr sneaks away from the condemned, and makes his way towards the command center.  He’s able to interface with the computer, and locate his sister in the nursery, where he finds dozens of naked babies, future Dog Soldiers, being watched over by midwives that he quickly kills.  He finds a massive incubator, which holds women.  He starts to rip the machine apart, and finds his sister, Janna-23.  She is worn out, and a little crazed.  She and the other women start picking up the babies.  Huntarr tries to get her to leave with him, but instead, all of the women jump to their deaths (because of course the nursery is at the top of a large atrium).  Huntarr launches himself through the roof.  Later, he’s back on Bioship, and tells the others of what happened.  Mari offers him an official place in their chosen family, and he accepts.

• Bioship is basically just flying around, and asks the team where they should go next.  The Micronauts don’t have many places left where they can go safely, but Bug suggests they head to his homeworld, Kaliklak, where the new queen is set to be born very soon (the previous queen, Esmera, was killed in the second fight with Karza).  They arrive, and find the planet being “rained” on by pods coming from a moon-sized massive spore.  As Bioship flies through the rain, the pods penetrate his hull, and give birth to battle-beetles, which are basically what they sound like.  The Micronauts fight the ugly insects.  A pair make it into Commander Rann’s quarters, but Fireflyte kills them with her song.  The team mops up the last of the beetles, and they figure that this is Karza’s latest attack on Kaliklak.  The four active Micronauts beam down to the planet, and see how the battle-beetles are ravaging the planet.  They decide their best hope is to go to Hideout, where Bug’s fellow thieves once lived.  When they arrive, Bug thinks about his dead girlfriend, Jasmine, and the others feel his sadness.  The Micronauts are attacked by a bunch of Insectivorids, until they are recognized.  Their leader kisses Bug – it’s Treefern, Jasmine’s little sister, whom Bug has not seen since she was a child.  Mari seems jealous of their connection.  We learn that the battle-beetles have been trying to get to the queen before she hatches, and the Micronauts pledge to help.  Baron Karza stands immobile, watched by Degrayde, who doesn’t like that his leader is dabbling in mysticism. Both Karza and Rann are again at the Temple of Time, trying to gain the favor of the Time Travelers.  Time Traveler gives the power of the Enigma Force to both men – Rann is turned into Captain Universe, while Karza’s armor appears completely white.  Rann realizes that godhood means that he wants to preserve all life in the Microverse, while Karza realizes that conquest means nothing to him.  Karza rejects these gifts, and Rann pledges to follow and fight him.  Returned to his body, Karza decides that it’s better to enjoy his conquest as a man, and we see that his body has been restored within his armor.  On Kaliklak, the thieves accompany the Micronauts to the Nest, but since their movements are slow, Bug summons some Battle-Bats to fly them there.  They arrive at the Nest and start fighting the Battle-Beetles that are trying to get inside.  The fight drags on for a while, and the heroes move towards the nursery.  Once there, they see the queen’s egg, and fight to defend it from a wave of Battle-Beetles.  As they finish the fight, the queen emerges from her egg (fully dressed?).  She’s an adult, and fully aware of what happened while she was incubating.  She tells Bug that she can’t commit Kaliklak’s people to the fight against Karza while there are still Battle-Beetles everywhere.  She gives Treefern a title, and knights her followers.  Later, Bug and Treefern say their farewells, and the Micronauts return to Bioship.  Once there, they see that Rann has come out of his room, and he asks if he can rejoin the team.  Mari kisses him, and everyones’ spirits are lifted.
• Issue fifty-seven is forty-eight pages long, and based on an Anishnaabe/Ojibway story.  We start off on the planet of Never-Summer, where Ojeeg, a hunter from the Wolverine tribe (who are all vaguely cat-like, but never mind that) commands an attack on the Beaver tribe, who are, well, beaver-like.  The Wolverines quickly massacre the Beavers, taking their food, weapons, skins, and anything else of value.  We learn from Ojeeg that it’s always winter on this planet.  Elsewhere, Bioship follows and attacks a courier craft leaving Homeworld.  The ship is under the command of Captain D’ark, who we can assume is related to the Major D’ark that worked for Karza in the Michael Golden era.  Four of the Micronauts fly out of Bioship and attack the Dog Soldier vessel, while on the ship, Rann worries that the team has lost its sense of compassion.  Bioship starts to narrate all that happened to the team while Rann was in meditation, and it’s hard not to read Biotron’s dialogue as a little bitter.  D’ark calls Mari a slut when she faces her, which feels a little shocking, and they start to fight.  Rann worries about his team’s humanity, so decides to enter the fight and gets beamed over to the other ship.  Mari continues to fight D’ark, who we learn was a willing recruit into Karza’s forces.  Having mopped up the other Dog Soldiers, the rest of the team watches the fight, until Fireflyte’s song calms things down.  Mari punches Rann for interfering, and he reminds her that the reason for this mission was to gather intelligence on Karza’s moves.  Fireflyte makes D’ark reveal that Karza is targeting Never-Summer, planning on destroying the whole world as a flex for other worlds that haven’t aligned with him yet.  D’ark escapes using an escape pod, and Rann refuses to order the Bioship to destroy it.  It’s clear that Rann is losing the rest of the team.  On Never-Summer, Ojeeg and his raiders return to their village, where their people welcome the fish they’ve brought.  Ojeeg goes to visit an old blind shaman, who tells him that he’s seen visions of when the world did experience summer, before the clouds started to block out the sun.  He suggests that a brave warrior could climb the tallest mountain and challenge the ice gods.  At the same time, Karza and Degrayde finalize their plans at the top of that very mountain.  They speak to other world leaders, including Little D and the new Queen of Kaliklak, while Karza maintains that he wishes to transcend humanity by being inhumane.  D’ark arrives to let Karza know that the Micronauts know his plans, but Karza feels pretty confident that his position is unassailable.  Bioship lands near the base of the mountain, and the team (Fireflyte just disappears at this point, so I assume she stays on the ship) prepares to ascend.  Bug is in his Prisonworld mobster gear, because it’s warmer than his regular clothes.  Rann tries to talk to Mari, but she blows him off and compliments Bug.  After they leave, we see Ojeeg approach Bioship, and continue up the mountain.  As the Micronauts climb, they confront a sentry-drone and destroy it.  Ojeeg continues his climb as well, and when Mari slips above him, she sends some rocks falling his way.  Ojeeg is attacked by a snowslayer, a beast that lives in the mountains, but is able to defeat it.  He hears fighting above him, and keeps climbing, even as a Dog-Soldier falls past him.  The Micronauts reach the summit and see that Karza is there.  They begin to fight.  Down in the Wolverine village, the shaman and the others hear the fights, and the Shaman leads them to the base of the mountain, telling them to pray for Ojeeg.  The Micronauts keep fighting, and D’ark momentarily notices Ojeeg slipping past her.  He approaches Karza, who is amused by his primitive ways.  D’ark and Mari start to fight again.  Degrayde figures out that Ojeeg is asking for summer.  Huntarr feels sorry for how out of touch with the team Rann is.  Rann notices that Karza’s sunscope is getting ready to operate.  It fires a blast of warmth down the mountain, killing a number of Dog Soldiers in the process, which bothers D’ark.  Ojeeg realizes that Karza is not a benevolent god, and attacks him.  Karza throws him over the edge of his platform.  Down below, the sunscope’s energy lights the trees on fire, sending the Wolverines running.  D’ark and many of the Dog Soldiers flee, leaving the Micronauts to confront Karza.  They start fighting him, but have little luck against him.  Karza notices that his sunscope is out of control.  We see that Ojeeg is doing something to it, and then he jumps onto the lens, smashing it and ending his own life in the process.  Karza transforms into a centaur and phases away.  Mari is shocked at how beautiful the world is, as grass suddenly starts growing as soon as the ground is thawed.  They find Ojeeg’s skeleton among the wreckage of the sunscope, and wonder who he was.  The team looks over the valley, and we see Ojeeg’s image in the sky above.

• The X-Men and the Micronauts miniseries started a couple months before this, but fits here in the story.  I’ve decided to give it its own column, which will be published a day or two after this one.  In that series, the Micronauts had to team up with Baron Karza to fight off an Entity that was threatening the Microverse.  They ended up on Earth, teaming up with the X-Men as well, and in the end, they were able to defeat the Entity, who was maybe just the dark thoughts in Charles Xavier’s head (complete with omnipotent power).  In the course of that series, Chief Scientist Degrayde was killed, and the Bioship died of injuries it sustained.  The Micronauts returned to the Microverse, ready to face Karza, who had disappeared on them while they were on Earth.
• The Micronauts return from Earth, brought towards the Spacewall by Fireflyte’s song, which is steadily weakening.  They see the Time Travelers, who are working to repair the Spacewall.  Our heroes make it through their closing hands, but Rann can tell that Fireflyte is getting ever weaker.  The Micronauts take one last look back at Earth, and speculate about what happened to Baron Karza.  Mari is sure that he’s still alive.  Fireflyte’s song fails her, and the Micronauts, who are in space above Homeworld, realize that the oxygen envelope around them is about to fail.  Huntarr wraps them up in his body, and starts flying towards Homeworld.  He splashes down in the ocean and recovers from the burns he received coming through the atmosphere.  Bug uses his rocket-lance to push them towards the shore, where they discover that First Zone is burning.  They know that the Entity never attacked Homeworld, and realize that this was Karza’s doing.  The city seems abandoned, and they wonder what could have happened.  Fireflyte knows, but she’s too weak to tell them.  They approach the Body Banks, and Mari is sure that all the death has come from here.  Mari can tell that the Body Banks have drained the world’s power, and they start to come across bodies, many of whom were experimented on.  They realize that everyone on Homeworld (or at least First Zone – the two are often conflated) are gone.  They find Lady Coral, who is barely alive.  She confirms that this was Karza’s doing, just as the Baron appears behind them.  Mari throws her sword at him, but he catches it.  We see that a large number of mutated and hideous creatures are behind him.  He throws the sword back at Mari, but Bug blasts it.  Mari draws her short sword and attacks the creatures.  Rann has the rest of the Micronauts join the fight, and we get a double page spread of them fighting while Karza watches.  The fight goes on for ages, and as the Micronauts kill the last of the mutates, Rann notices that Fireflyte has spun a cocoon around herself.  Karza is surprised that all of his ‘unmen’ have been defeated, and Mari tells him that his reign is finished.  Karza fires his chest cannons at her, but Huntarr jumps in front, absorbing the blast.  Karza launches his hands at Mari next, but Bug blasts them and Acroyear crushes them.  Mari rushes at Karza, who transforms into his centaur form, preparing to trample her.  Rann shoots his lasersonic pistol at Karza’s chest, damaging his armor, just as Mari plunges her sword into his heart.  He rears up and they both fall backwards.  Later, in the epilogue, Mari wakes up in the royal palace.  The others are around her (Huntarr looks injured), and Rann confirms that they won.  Mari notices that Acroyear is wearing robes – he’s turned his back on war.  Mari thinks the world still needs the Micronauts, but Bug thinks it’s someone else’s job to keep protecting the universe.  All of the men want peace, but Mari isn’t sure she is going to be able to live a peaceful life.  Rann holds her, and they watch as a number of ships arrive in the sky.  Various aliens approach Karza’s body where it sits outside, wanting to confirm that he’s actually dead.  They all depart, and Rann says it’s time for them to leave too.  They approach their new ship, the Endeavor II, which is manned by the new Biotron and new Microtron.  They board the ship and head into space.  We are given an overview of the ruined Homeworld, and see one more time Karza’s dead body.  In the palace, the cocoon that Fireflyte was in hatches, and we see a tiny Devil emerge.  The back cover shows Bill Mantlo and Butch Guice leaving the Micronauts behind.
• The Statement of Ownership for 1983 lists an average press run of 82 000, and no newsstand returns, which makes sense since the book was direct market only.

• I debated ending this column with issue 58, and then including issue 59 with the relaunched second volume, since it was made by the creators of that run, Peter B. Gillis, Kelley Jones, and Bruce Patterson, but in the end, decided it was neater to put it here, as it serves as a coda to the Mantlo/Guice run.  I noticed that this book came out like five months after 58.  The Micronauts are gathered in the Endeavor II, preparing to depart Homeworld’s orbit, but the ship needs time to absorb power from the sun.  The team talks about their feelings leaving Homeworld, which was completely devastated by Karza.  It’s odd that Acroyear refers to it as his home, given that he never actually lived on the planet except for his time as a prisoner in the Pleasure Pits.  They talk of creating a memorial of some sort to the planet, and Biotron and Microtron work on the idea of implanting a telepathic beacon in the sun, so that people who visit will learn about the planet.  Mari worries that the planet’s great thinkers and artists are dead, and that it’s her fault.  Bug tries to cheer her up, and Arcturus admits to wishing he’d not spent so much time trying to convince the Enigma Force to join him.  Since they have a day to wait for the ship to fully charge, Arcturus suggests that everyone spend that time thinking of what they would like to say to memorialize the world.  Huntarr questions his purpose, as a living weapon without a struggle, and Arcturus talks about how they all need to change now.  Later, Microtron and Biotron watch a holo-tape of Rann talking, before he grew his beard, about Homeworld (but he’s talking as if it’s already dead, which is a bit confusing).  Some of the concepts that he talks about confuse the two roboids (which is odd, since so much has been made of how they are basically human, with organic parts and brains).  This becomes an opportunity to frame the rest of the story, as they contact each Micronaut to ask about a single concept.  They ask Acroyear what love is, and he tells a story from his youth about how he learned that his marriage was being arranged to Lady Cilicia, despite the fact that he loved someone else.  Cilicia came to him, wearing the mask of courtship, and told him that she too loved another, but that she was going to sacrifice that love for her love of her people, and that they would likely grow to love one another (and he felt it right away).  The roboids ask Mari about fear, and she tells them a story about the time that her father, irritated with how she taunted Argon for being afraid, decided to replace her swordsmaster, and by convincing Mari that she’d killed him, taught her a lesson about fear.  Microtron asks Bug about beauty, and he tells a story about how he was walking through the woods with his teacher, talking about a flying insect called the Flutter of Infinite Dawn.  Bug found one, injured, but helped it to fly, and has always remembered the joy it brought his teacher.  Huntarr is asked about hope, and he tells a story about his youth in the slums of Homeworld.  He was running from some Dog Soldiers after tagging their sentry box, and while he hid, the two Dog Soldiers talked about how they were loyal to Karza, but that didn’t stop one of them from drawing a caricature of him with spray paint.  Biotron asks Rann about death, and he tells a strange story from his explorer days, when the first Biotron (with Rann as a telepathic manifestation) came across a human woman and child on a remote planet.  The child was playing with the bones of his dead father, which Rann found ghastly, but the woman thought was normal.  She disappeared into a tree.  Rann learned that death is a gift that day.  Each of the Micronauts records a poem about Homeworld, and the recorder is sent into the sun.  Rann sees this as a new beginning for the team.

Reading through these direct market issues has been a bit of a surprise.  So many of the moments I remember from childhood seemed quicker than I remember, but overall, this was a great run in a great series.  As Mantlo became more comfortable with the direct market, I could detect the book becoming more mature, and the character work more subtle.  

There is a definite harshness to this run, with Argon becoming ever more destructive, until he is replaced by Baron Karza.  Almost the entire supporting cast of this book is killed off, as are a number of Micronauts, making this book very bleak.

It’s worth looking at the impacts these issues had on the characters one at a time.

Arcturus Rann – Commander Rann underwent the most changes in this run, as he fell into despair, watching his team fall apart around him (he didn’t realize that Bug, Mari, and Acroyear were not dead), get injured (Devil was burned badly), and dying (Microtron and Nanotron, whose deaths we need to talk about).  On the way back to the Microverse, he was aged, and once reunited with his people, he was turned into a pacifist who seemed to have lost all stomach for battle.  It took a while for him to recover his true self, but it’s clear as Mantlo leaves the book that the rift between him and Mari has continued to grow.  I like the older, wiser Rann, but can see why his team was frustrated with him.

Marionette – Mari also went through a lot of changes.  After returning to Homeworld ahead of her lover, she ended up taking over the Resistance, and leading the fight against Argon and later Karza.  Once Rann started spending his time in meditation, she became the leader of the Micronauts, and we watched as she slowly became more warlike and blood-thirsty.  It was interesting to watch this change in her, as she had seemed so much more joyful in the early issues.  As Mantlo had her traumas accumulate, we saw how that impacted her, and how the only easy target she had for her frustration was Rann.

Bug – Bug ended up in a bit of a love triangle between Mari and Rann for a while, and that was kind of interesting.  Bug was always shown as being so carefree, but increasingly during this run, we could see that he was the emotional glue of the group.

Acroyear – Acroyear remained the tragic figure of this run, as his attempt at reconciling with his people went terribly wrong.  He discovered that he’s going to be a father, but was so solidly rejected by Cilicia and his people, that it’s a wonder he didn’t fall into further despair.  Aside from the Cilicia issues, Acroyear became more of a supporting character in this run, where he was more or less equal to Rann before that.  Huntarr further minimized his place as the team’s muscle.  I did like his turn to peace in the last issues, but don’t remember that continuing in the next run.

Devil – Devil became a tragic figure in this run.  Long before his mind started to go, due to being away from Fireflyte, we saw that Devil’s appearance started to change.  He became thinner and more svelte, and then started losing his good humour and self-control.  After he got burned in the Prometheus Pit, it was clear that Devil wouldn’t be around in this book for long.  

Fireflyte – I didn’t ever really understand Fireflyte.  I get that she and Devil have a sort of symbiosis, but as one kept dying to turn into the other, it was never explained how they were both alive when we first met them (I also noticed that we never established for sure that Karza killed the other Devils of Tropica as he did the rest of Homeworld’s races).  Fireflyte was more of a plot point than a character, and it would have been interesting to learn more about her connection with the Enigma Force.

Huntarr – Huntarr was an interesting addition to the team, in that he went from being an enemy to quickly agreeing with Mari’s point of view, and throwing himself into the fight against Argon and then Karza.  Huntarr’s lack of humanity, and general lumpen appearance, made him interesting, although aside from his solo adventure, he did not get a lot of screen time.

Bioship – I thought that Bioship was another interesting addition to the book.  I liked Biotron, and was happy to see him return, and I also thought that the idea of him being their ship and their home was a good one, but there wasn’t enough time or space given over to exploring that dynamic.  I did think that his ending, in the X-Men and the Micronauts miniseries was ignoble and glossed over.  The second time Rann lost his closest friend should have been harder on him.

Microtron – Microtron’s death was a real shame.  It didn’t make a lot of sense why he and Nanotron had to pass in order for Bioship to live, but what really bothered me was that Mari never even acknowledged it.  Early in the series, when she thought that Microtron had been killed, she was inconsolable, given that she had grown up with him, but this time around the little guy’s death was meaningless to the whole team.  

Nanotron – Same deal with her, although I could tell from the letters pages that she was not a very popular character.  I think that’s because she wasn’t given a lot of personality or purpose within the team.

Beyond that, there are a number of other characters of some importance who were cleared out of this book by the end of Mantlo’s run.  I think it’s weird that I had no memory of Slug from my childhood, but that she was a central supporting character almost throughout the whole series.  I started to really enjoy the issues that featured her and Belladonna working together, after being enemies for so long.  I thought that Pharoid’s end was a little abrupt too, but not as much as the rest of Homeworld I guess.

This direct market run was decent, but it really picked up once the whole team was back on Homeworld, and Butch Guice started drawing it.  I became a fan of Guice’s work back in these days, and still really enjoy his stuff (such as his Captain America run, and his recent work on the Invaders).  It’s wild to think that his career has been running for forty years, and that he’s only gotten better.

I especially like the combination of Guice’s pencils with Kelley Jones’s inks.  It was in their issues that the characters became a little sexier – especially Mari (I think this is going to be something I’ll have a lot to say about in the New Voyages column).  Gil Kane’s issues were nice enough, and the fill in artists were more than capable but I feel like Guice restored some of the magic that Michael Golden brought to the earliest issues of this title.

I noticed that during this run, the connection to the toy line was completely abandoned.  Gone were the cheesy vehicles and large manned robots used by the Dog Soldiers (Phobos units?) in the earliest issues.  I think that’s because by this point, the toy line was discontinued, and it’s wild to me to think that the comics continued separate from it.

I want to take a moment to talk about how Bill Mantlo took a toy line and conceived an entire universe of strange races, characters, and situations for it. The characters he developed for this series are incredibly memorable, and this was easily one of the most exciting and influential books on the stands at the time. Mantlo’s career is not discussed enough, but he was a giant of the bronze age, and someone I’ve grown to admire even more through looking back at his work (I feel like a ROM column is a sure thing, one day).

I wonder, when people talk about the history of the direct market, and the birth of the ‘mature readers’ comic, if Micronauts ever gets recognized for being part of the wave that predated that.  Sure, this stayed pretty mainstream (although I notice that these books were not Comics Code approved), but it did push the envelope in terms of being sex positive (the Mari/Bug fling), and much more mature in its presentation of violent themes.  

Beyond having a role in advancing the artform and the business, at the end of the day, these were just really good comics.  Because they were in a self-contained world that only sometimes interacted with the Marvel Universe, it felt like the stakes were higher, and it was clear that Mantlo felt comfortable pushing the envelope.  This made this book so much more exciting and memorable.  I’m really glad I took the time to revisit this run.

I do remember being invested in the second Micronauts series, and really enjoying Kelley Jones’s artwork.  I remember that Huntarr’s appearance changed and he became a favourite character of mine, and that the Beyonder turned up during Secret Wars II, but I don’t remember a whole lot else about this title.  I know it felt sophisticated to young me, and I’m looking forward to revisiting that next.  (The X-Men/Micros column will appear before that, though).

If you’d like to see the archives of all of my retro review columns, click here.