Omega Men

19 years ago - Vril Dox receives a message from his own clone in the future, Brainiac 5. Partnering with Kalista, the imprisoned crown princess of Euphorix, he surgically reactivates Ti'julk Mr'asz' powers and uses them to escape along with several fellow prisoners. They form the Omega Men, fighting the control of the Gordanians in the Vega system.
Membership. 21-year-old Vril Dox, 22-year-old Kalista, 30-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz, The 53-year-old Durlan, 41-year-old Ferrin Colos, 25-year-old Medphyll

18 years ago - 26-year-old Medphyll is selected for the Green Lantern Corp, leaving the Omega Men
Membership. 22-year-old Vril Dox, 23-year-old Kalista, 31-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz, The 54-year-old Durlan, 42-year-old Ferrin Colos

17 years ago - The Omega Men liberate the Gordanian planet of Slagg with the help of the slave dancer Felicity who becomes their newest member. Intergalactic bounty-hunter, Lobo takes a contract from the Godanians on Kalista. He is outsmarted by Vril Drox & joins the Omega Men as a probationary member.
Membership: 23-year-old Vril Dox, 24-year-old Kalista, 32-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz,The 55-year-old Durlan, 43-year-old Ferrin Colos, 16-year-old Felicity, 24-year-old Lobo.

15 years ago - Adam Blake encounters the Omega Men, and attempts to capture them as escaped criminals. Cornered on Lythtyl, Vril Dox outsmarts Blake, pitting him against Gordanian shock troops, revealing the regime they are fighting. Blake agrees to become a probationary member of the Omega Men.
Membership: 25-year-old Vril Dox, 26-year-old Kalista, 34-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz, The 57-year-old Durlan, 45-year-old Ferrin Colos, 18-year-old Felicity, 26-year-old Lobo, 62-year-old Adam Blake

14 years ago - 27-year-old Lobo leaves Omega Men, becoming an independant contractor.
Membership: 26-year-old Vril Dox, 27-year-old Kalista, 35-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz, The 58-year-old Durlan, 46-year-old Ferrin Colos, 19-year-old Felicity, 63-year-old Adam Blake

11 years ago - Vril Dox and the Omega Men defeat Calculators of Colu. He helps establish a new Coluan government, using their manufacturing facilities to construct his own interplanetary drone fleet. 66-year-old Adam Blake fights the Starbreaker, and goes to Earth to warn the Justice League and Adam Strange, staying in the satellite to recover.
Membership: 29-year-old Vril Dox, 30-year-old Kalista, 38-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz, The 61-year-old Durlan, 49-year-old Ferrin Colos, 22-year-old Felicity,

10 years ago - Vril Dox is able to replicate the the powers of 39-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz using cloned fungal growths sharing his DNA. Ti'julk is able to retire, moving to Hardcore Station.
Membership: 30-year-old Vril Dox, 31-year-old Kalista, The 62-year-old Durlan, 50-year-old Ferrin Colos, 23-year-old Felicity,

7 years ago - The Omega Men assist 19-year-old Dick Grayson as he ventures into the Vega system to free a kidnapped 20-year-old Koriand'r from her sister 23-year-old Komand'r. Assisting 23-year-old General Ph'yzzon's Tamaranian rebellion, they free Tamaran from the rule of the Gordanians, and capitalize on that victory to finally overthrow the Gordanian regime. 34-year-old Kalista returns to her throne, assumes stewardship of five other planets in the Vega system, and gives 33-year-old Vril Dox a full pardon. The Omega Men are officially disbanded, their enemy defeated. Vril begins to operate his interplanetary drone fleet as an independent peacekeeping force in the Vega system, using the designation L.E.G.I.O.N. 53-year-old Ferrin Colos & the 65-year-old Durlan return to Citadel space, retiring in Hardcore station with 42-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz. 26-year-old Felicity returns to her native planet of Karna, working in a spaceport as a dancer and bar owner.

2 years ago - 38-year-old Vril Dox learns that the forces of Lady Styx's Terror Fleet have killed The 70-year-old Durlan & 58-year-old Ferrin Colos, and attempted to kill 47-year-old Ti'julk Mr'asz & 75-year-old Adam Blake. he begins to secretly position his L.E.G.I.O.N. forces tactically through the galaxy to prepare for her coming invasion.

now - 39-year-old Adam Strange begins assembling a new Omega Men to combat the legions of Lady Styx. They free 41-year-old Lobo's dolphins.
Membership. 39-year-old Adam Strange, 35-year-old Alanna Strange, 25-year-old Vril Dox, 77-year-old Adam Blake, 29-year-old Maxima, 46-year-old Galius Zed, 34-year-old Tigorr

Noteworthy Teams

Original Team

Gates

Other Members

Felicity

Lobo

Modern Team

The Omega Men exist in this sort of nebulous background space; most readers who are at least passingly familiar with DC know the name and know the team exists... or at least that it existed. The specific story and characters of the Omega Men never really took firm hold in the DC narrative and, in fact, have always been at best peripheral. You can safely just breeze over these stories without missing much in the way of interconnected storytelling...

That is... until you actually read it. A lot of this crosses over into the New Teen Titans, since it was all a Marv Wolfman joint... a ton of Starfire's backstory is explained once you dig into the politics of the Vega System. This all also really comes to a head later in the Invasion crossover, when a lot of these alien races play major roles, and then on into the future, where a lot of the general cosmic world of DC has its roots here.

There's more to it, though. The team itself is tapping into a very particular vibe that, once you recognize it, permeates the entire experience. I'll see if I can explain it, but really, you kind of need to experience it for yourself.

The Omega Men's Comic History

The Omega Men first appeared in Green Lantern #141 in 1981, a story by Marv Wolfman. They are a small, hidden society of alien creatures, led by an attractive and powerful king and queen, which to me suggests that Marv was doing a riff on the Inhumans. He continued to tell the story of the Omega Men in Action Comics with Superman before using them in one of the first really big, epic New Teen Titans stories, even stretching into the series' first Annual.

This was followed shortly thereafter by the Omega Men's original standalone ongoing series. The series started with writer Roger Slifler with art by Keith Giffen. The first issue is where you almost immediately see the very particular tone that will carry through the entire series. It's loaded with graphic but cartoonish gore, and a lot of incidental sexuality viewed through a weird alien lens. I really struggled to figure out what I was looking at until I considered the year this was released. 1983... close enough to the release of Heavy Metal, the movie, for it to feel like a massive influence. I doubt they would tell you they were specifically chasing that vibe, but you can go back to that era and see similar influences all over various animated projects. I really think that the Omega Men series was hugely influenced by adult animated movies like Heavy Metal, and the French and European comics that spawned them.

Perhaps because of this focus on emulating a decidedly non-linear storytelling style, the actual plot focus of the Omega Men wandered quite a bit over the course of its 38 issues. It's main characters underwent big changes that rendered several of them completely unrecognizable, and in places the book got downright surreal. It is notable as the book that brought us the first appearance of Lobo, although it would be a while before he took on the look and satirical attitude we all know today.

The series ended in 1986, with the various long-standing Omega Men going off in different directions. They would appear again in the Invasion crossover, where longtime team leader Primus and longtime team sex-appeal character Felicity were both killed. The Omega Men were largely gone from continuity all the way until the fantastic Andy Diggle Adam Strange series in 2005 brought them back. They would go on to feature across several spacefaring series in the late 2000s, particularly fan-favorite character Tigorr.

In the post-flashpoint era, the Omega Men were reimagined by Tom King in his usual deeply depressing style in a standalone series, and his new team lineup has since appeared in the pages of Supergirl.

L.E.G.I.O.N.'s Comic History

We do want to quickly also mention a completely different sci-fi team from DC, this one taking place in the post-crisis DC, particularly after the Invasion! crossover, where we're first re-introduced to Vril Dox, the clone of Brainiac. He went on to create a team called L.E.G.I.O.N. (Licensed Extra-Governmental Interstellar Operatives Network), a name that really only makes sense in a meta sense if you also know that the Legion of Super-Heroes will exist someday.

This series was created by Keith Giffen, and was extremely long-running, essentially taking the ball from the Omega Men as the main resource for spacefaring superhero adventures. It went for 70 issues and then was replaced by a new book, R.E.B.E.L.S. in the mid-90s, which was actually brought back in 2009 and continued to be a major part of DC's cosmic storytelling.

For as large a role as L.E.G.I.O.N. had, the central conceit of the story, that Vril Dox was maintaining what amounted to a mercenary army, didn't quite have the same punch as the Omega Men's original concept of freedom fighters trying to recover their stolen planets from an evil regime, but it did have some pretty solid character dynamics, particularly with Vril himself.

Our Omega Men Story

Our goal here is to build the sort of spacefaring adventurer team that really feels so vital in a DC universe, something that feels like it adheres to that Heavy Metal spirit of the original Omega Men while still having a little more structure. To do that, we're actually stealing a lot of ideas from L.E.G.I.O.N., from using Vril Dox as the leader to starting them out with a massive prison break. By starting them off with Dox and Kalista, the deposed princess leader from the original Omega Men, we can have the sort of clashing leadership styles that fueled the original Omega Men, and we can fill their ranks with powerful characters recruited by Dox, as was often the case in the pages of L.E.G.I.O.N. We tried to make sure the team included weird alien members to evoke the strangeness of the original team.

We do want to really focus on the fact that this team is specifically made of fugitives fighting an evil regime. In the comics the Regime was the Citadel, but we've kind of adapted that idea in our timeline, making the Citadel more of an overarching intergalactic federation (although still predictably corrupt), so we've instead had the Vega system overrun by the Gordanians, the monstrous evil slaver aliens that were heavily featured in the original Omega Men, and in Starfire's backstory. We get to see them fight to retake their home, and even made the major Teen Titans story, when Starfire is kidnapped by her sister and Dick Grayson has to go to space to save her; the big final arc of this iteration of the team. Hopefully, we're building what feels like an epic space adventure, while also giving you a taste of that original Heavy Metal strangeness.

The Future of The Omega Men

Part of what we really wanted to do with our Omega Men team was give them an epic finale, depicting their victory over the Gordanians, but we also didn't want to leave the name languishing. We wanted to find a reason to build a new Omega Men, and we found that in the late 2000s comics depicting the adventures of various spacefaring heroes, all centered around the arrival of the cosmic threat Lady Styx.

By introducing her, we create a vast invading fleet and create a specific need for heroes to band together again. This time we've done so around perhaps the MOST famous DC space hero, Adam Strange, but we've brought in a group that will be a lot of fun to see battle a cosmic eldritch horror and her space fleet.

This should be a major plotline, but it's also a finite one. We can see a massive war play out across the galaxy, but sooner or later you need to resolve that story, and once that happens, do we have a reason to keep these incredibly powerful heroes together? Do they need to maintain an external threat that they're allied against, or can they operate as a sort of intergalactic Justice League, meeting out of a mutual desire to protect the galaxy?

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