My cousins and I had some Micronaut figurines - they had Baron Kazaa and I had the guy with wheels on his back (I forget his name momentarily). I also had I think the first three of the four issues of the X-Men / Micronauts crossover. A few years back I decided to buy the full set on eBay so I could finally read the ending. Sadly it didn't age well.
Baron Kazaa though had a very striking visual appearance. I don't know how much he was based off Darth Vadar. Also, he could transform into a centaur. My cousins had a version of the figurine where they could detach his torso and plug it onto a horse body.
Micronauts comics were very heavily advertised by Marvel back in the day, and I wonder if that is because the toy company which own Micronauts paid them to do so.
In a COMICS JOURNAL issue back in 1980, there was a cartoon of 2 kids playing on the grass with their Micronauts toys, describing imaginative adventures they came up with for their toys.
And behind a tree is writer Bill Mantlo holding a notebook, furiously writing down notes on what they say, to swipe for a
MICRONAUTS story.
As I recall, the Micronauts toys were already on the shelves, when someone (maybe Shooter) had the idea to do a toy-based comic book series about them. It could have been Mantlo who came up with the idea, or maybe someone else who proposed it, and then Mantlo was assigned the series. As I recall, Mantlo was assigned.
Then maybe 2 years later in 1980, there was a
ROM toy, and Mantlo was assigned to write that toy-based series as well, that had another 75-issue long run.
Mantlo was also assigned (after Gerber was gone) to do the HOWARD THE DUCK comic, and then later HOWARD THE DUCK magazine, for a few years, which was an acrimonious and thankless job where he was constantly grilled for not being Steve Gerber. As I recall, Gerber himself at least once called him a low-talent hack in the COMICS JOURNAL. I liked Mantlo's writing, on several series. He was prolific, and his work seemed to sell well.
Mantlo's other long-running series was INCREDIBLE HULK, mostly drawn during his run by Sal Buscema.
Mantlo intertwined and crossed over the stories in his various series, and introduced characters like Jack of Hearts, Cloak and Dagger, Woodgod, Rocket Raccoon, and Captain Universe, that appeared across all Mantlo's series work.
Kind of his own Mantlo-verse, within the larger Marvel Universe. And several miniseries as well, with the characters he introduced that got some traction.
