Nolan's Books

What looks like a stack of unremarkable genre paperbacks turns out to be a hidden intelligence dossier. Nolan Grayson, better known as Omni-Man, produced these novels across the two decades he spent posing as a human author. He landed on Earth in 2002 and took the writing gig partly to cover a mortgage and everyday bills, filling the pages with tales of odd warriors and far-off adventures. Art Rosenbaum recalled that none of the sci-fi titles ever moved copies, so Nolan quit the trade and handed the unsold stock over as a casual tip, which Art never bothered to open.

The books resurface in 2023 when Debbie nudges her husband back to writing, mostly to keep him occupied while she quietly probes his role in the Guardians' deaths. She eventually pulls their funding and ships the copies off to survivors in Chicago. Later, broken and dragged away by Viltrumite troops on Thraxa, Nolan begs Mark to read them, a coded plea to ready Earth for the coming invasion. Mark comes home to find the collection given away, but Art has kept a few, and paging through them Mark grasps that every fantastical account actually chronicles his father's earliest missions in space.

The revelation spreads once Allen the Alien scans a volume and confirms the intel could aid the Coalition of Planets. Early in 2024, freshly recruited Nolan joins Allen and Telia on a Thaedus-ordered hunt to round up every asset the novels describe ahead of the final clash with the Empire. Many of the listed allies prove long dead or vanished, yet the team recovers the Infinity Ray and enlists its living owner, Space Racer, who in turn helps snare several Rognarrs.

Each title masks a real subject behind a lurid cover. The Man with the Invincible Gun dramatizes Space Racer, a nod to the James Bond entry The Man with the Golden Gun. Savage Planet, Savage Beasts documents the Rognarrs, and an unnamed entry covers the Sinlak Beetle. Two further books, Lost Inside the Chasm to Oblivion and Hate Tribes on the Planet Wrekk, round out the shelf. In the source comics, one of Nolan's works also folded in Tech Jacket, a Space Shark, and a Space Beetle.