Jim Lee’s Original X-Men Omega Red Designs Unearthed

A number of early Jim Lee designs for the character of Omega Red have resurfaced online thanks to the CoolComicArt Twitter account.

Lee and fellow X-Men legend John Byrne created the character of Omega Red in 1992, shortly before Lee jumped ship to co-found Image Comics with a half-dozen other big-name comic book artists.

At least one of the designs is notable for having what looks to be very Mister Sinister-inspired costume details, likely suggesting that there would have been a bigger connection between Omega Red and one of the X-Men’s most memorable baddies of the ’90s.

You can check the images out below.

This is not the first time Omega Red designs have surfaced online recently; after the launch of X-Men: Gold, artist Jonboy Meyers released a set of unused X-Men character designs originally intended for use in that title.

Meyers – whose credits include work on Teen Titans, Spawn, and Marvel’s new Inhumans title Royals – revealed that he was working on X-Men Gold but ultimately decided to pass to “do my own thing instead.”

Arkady Gregorivich Rossovich was a serial killer born in Russia. He was captured by the Interpol agent Sean Cassidy and turned over to the KGB, where he was experimented upon in an attempt to create a super-soldier similar to Captain America.

The Soviet government implanted a retractable carbonadium tentacle within each of Omega Red’s arms. Carbonadium was the Soviets’ attempt to recreate the artificial alloy known as adamantium, as Carbonadium is a more malleable form of adamantium. He uses them as weapons and as grappling appendages. He is able to a wrap a victim in his coils to literally drain them of their “life” energy, whic his a necessary condition because the tendrils also slowly poison Rossovich and the vampirism helps to temporarily sustain his immune system. In order to more permanently stabilize his condition, Omega Red requires the “Carbonadium Synthesizer,” a device that was stolen by Wolverine, Maverick, and Sabretooth during their final mission together as “Team X” in the 1960s. For this reason, Omega Red has frequently faced off with these three characters, believing they may hold the key to saving him. Ultimately, he was killed by Wolverine and has been off the table since.

Lee, of course, never drew the X-Men again after leaving in the early ’90s. He returned to Marvel briefly for the Heroes Reborn event, where he reinvented the Fantastic Four, but none of Marvel’s mutants were part of that event. Not long after that, Lee sold his WildStorm studios to DC, and left Image to become an executive at a company where he could draw a salary — and draw Batman.