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| MARVEL BOY: THE URANIAN #1 preview art by Felix Ruiz |
He's one of the Marvel Universe's premiere alien adventurers yet his secrets remain mostly unrevealed-until now.
AGENTS OF ATLAS writer Jeff Parker peels back the layers of mystery surrounding Bob Grayson, the former Marvel Boy, in a brand new limited series. MARVEL BOY: THE URANIAN #1, debuting this January 6, plunges the reader into Grayson's heyday, when a young man from another planet transformed himself into a super hero.
"We want to remind everyone around Marvel's 70th Anniversary that Bob Grayson is a hero from the 1950's, and that's the decade we stay in for this," says Parker of the three-part series. "You see him in AGENTS OF ATLAS in a very post-super hero mode, feeling out of place on Earth, so it's a good time to show him at the start of his adulthood, when he's very excited about being an adventurer and coming to his home planet.
"This is a part of Marvel embracing its long and action-packed history, that didn't just begin with the Silver Age. I think some readers will expect us to play with some of the conventions the way AGE OF SENTRY did, and we do to an extent, but I think people will come away finding they can identify with Bob way more than expected."
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| MARVEL BOY: THE URANIAN #1 preview art by Felix Ruiz |
"I use the subjects of what Timely and then Atlas Comics were putting out as the backdrop for the period of history, mixed with the actual 1950's," he notes. "So some are very fantastic, and some are very down-to-Earth, like Communist spies planting bombs in the U.S. [In the series] Marvel Boy visits the Timely Publishing offices of the time and gets a little insight to what the public expects of a super hero. We find that a lot of the more bizarre information associated with his early days comes from their comic book imaginings of his life-though he certainly runs into his share of weirdness."
Faithful followers of AGENTS OF ATLAS may also see aspects of MARVEL BOY touched upon in down the road and the character of Bob Grayson further fleshed out.
"Besides the robot he's still the quiet one, but now you'll understand more of the personality buried under that alien persona," Parker says.
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| MARVEL BOY: THE URANIAN #1 preview art by Felix Ruiz |
"Marvel Boy's powers are largely technology; at first he projects 'hard light' which is the photon emitter of his wristbands," explains Parker. "But he was raised to exercise telepathic ability, and we see that he can read minds. His headband helps with that-it's a supercomputer that keeps him connected to the Uranian Council as he runs around on Earth. He can't fly when we meet him, though."
MARVEL BOY: THE URANIAN #1 sports unique art from the talented Felix Ruiz, an illustrator Parker sees as multi-faceted.
"I'm looking forward to readers seeing how Felix brings this all to life," the writer remarks. "He's the first artist I've seen in a long time with a Bill Sienkiewicz influence and he has a strong grasp of how to do period scenes as well as science fiction. The story involves very different settings and types, and under his expressive rendering it all comes together. Felix gets across the serious, the funny and the heart-breaking, all with conviction."
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