Gomi and lobster
Name: Gomi (Alphonsus Lefszycic)
Group Affiliation: Fallen Angels
First Appearance: Fallen Angels #2 (Marvel Comics, 1987)
Powers: telekinesis (moves stuff with his mind)
Last seen: Fallen Angels #8 (also in 1987)
Gomi is, hands-down, one of the weirdest comic characters of all time, on one of the weirdest teams of all time, Fallen Angels. Telekinesis is cool right? But there are a lot of characters who can move things with their minds. What can we do to make this guy stand out from the crowd? I know. We give him two cybernetic pet lobsters named Don and Bill that he can psychically speak to?
Done.
Okay, guy looks like James Spader in Stargate and carries two brightly coloured lobsters around with him. I’m already on board. But add to that his way-tragic back story, and I’m distressed he only lasted a few brief shining moments in the 1980s. Turns out Alphonsus’s older brother was a cybernetics whiz, and he created Don and Bill (the lobsters). But he wasn’t very nice to his brother – called him ‘Gomi’ (Japanese for junk, apparently) – but Alphonsus was too proud of his older brother to realize the guy treated him like dirt.
After the whole lobster trick, Gomi’s brother was feeling the cybernetics sophomore jinx. He needed a hot new trick. And since he was a big fan of Marvel Girl (from the X-Men), he has his team of scientists experiment on his brother to give him telekinetic powers. Things go awry, as mad science experiments often do, and Gomi’s new powers cause some serious damage at the lab. Gomi then rescues the lobsters from being eaten (why are you eating these super lobsters?) and discovers he has a psychic link with them and a friendship forms that will last through the ages (or the rest of the Fallen Angels miniseries, at least).
Bill and Don, superheroing.
Fallen Angels was a miniseries that spun off from the once-wildly-popular New Mutants book. It was really bizarre for the time in that it featured not a team of heroes, but a group of low-level pickpockets organized by sometime X-Men villain The Vanisher. They hung out at something called the Beat Street Club (with Rae Dawn Chong, I guess.) Among its number were such forgotten characters as Chance, Moon-Boy, Devil Dinosaur, Ariel, and more recognized X-Men mainstays like Sunspot, Siryn, Boom-Boom and Multiple Man (or at least a rogue one of his duplicates). The plots were strange, and reveled in an early-80s urbanism placed somewhere between Death Wish and Crocodile Dundee.
Gomi and his tragic tale (and the tragic fate of one of his – spoiler alert – lobsters) can only be found in the nigh-forgotten miniseries Fallen Angels.
