RRUOTHK'AR

Real Name: Rruothk'ar

Identity/Class: Alternate timeline (Reality-791) extraterrestrial (Ariguan) reptilian semi-humanoid tech-user

Occupation: Sith-Lord of the Ariguan Confederacy; warrior; assassin

Group Membership: Rulers of the Ariguan Confederacy;
   Secretly a member of the conspiracy that plotted to stage a coup d'état against Emperor Jason of Sparta

Affiliations: Kyras Shakati (deceased) of Cinnibar, Prince Gareth (deceased) of Sparta

Enemies: Meredith Quill (deceased), Peter Quill (later Star-Lord), Emperor Jason of Sparta; Ship, Kip Kölm, Sandy;
   (indirectly) Ragnar (a.k.a. the Master of the Sun, deceased)

Known Relatives: None

Aliases: Ariguan Sith-Lord; "Lizard-Beak" (to Sandy); "Monster" and "the lizard" (to Star-Lord)

Base of Operations: Mobile throughout the space controlled by the Ariguan Confederacy;
   (as a guest of Prince Gareth) allowed entry into the Imperial Chalet on the continent of Marathon on the Imperial homeworld of Sparta;
   briefly visited the Colorado Mountains on the planet Earth

First Appearance: (Unidentified) Marvel Preview#4 (January, 1976);
   (name revealed) Marvel Preview#11 (Summer/June, 1977)

Powers/Abilities: Rruothk'ar presumably possessed the same basic physical abilities as other Ariguans. Although it seems likely that he may have been among the larger and stronger members of his race, this possibility has not been confirmed.

   Like other Ariguans, Rruothk'ar had a prehensile tail which he could use like a third arm. While fighting at close range, he had enough control over his tail to wrap its end around an opponent's neck in an attempt to either snap their neck or choke them to death. It has not been revealed if all (or most or many) Ariguans have this amount of control over their tails.

   Rruothk'ar was a master duelist. Prince Gareth claimed that he was one of only two men living who were capable of defeating Rruothk'ar in single combat, but Star-Lord proved himself to be a third.

Paraphernalia/Weapons: Ruothk'ar sometimes carried a sword that he was very skilled at using in duels.
   When not on Sparta, he often used a small, handheld directed-energy weapon that may have been called a blaster. A single blast from this weapon could kill an adult human and leave their corpse smouldering.

Transportation: While on his mission to assassinate Meredith Quill and her son, Rruothk'ar landed on Earth in a small spacecraft.

Height: 6' (estimated)
Weight: Unrevealed
Eyes: Red (with pink sclera)
Hair: None
Skin color: Green

(Marvel Preview#4/Marvel Preview#11 (fb) - BTS) <August 11, 1973 A.D. (Earth date)> - Rruothk'ar and at least one other Ariguan landed in the woods of Earth's Colorado Mountains in a small craft. In what may not have been a remarkable coincidence, their landing was witnessed by one of their targets, Peter Quill, who had been taking a walk.     Peter immediately ran home to get his mother and bring her to the landing site so that he could show her that flying saucers were real.    When Peter returned with his mother, their second target, Rruothk'ar was standing at the bottom of the lowered access ramp, with one foot on the planet.      As Peter pointed out the aliens to his mother, Rruothk'ar saw them both. At the same time, Meredith realized that she and her son had been seen by the aliens and warned Peter to get back, but Ruothk'ar was already drawing his weapon even as his companion, carrying a larger weapon, joined him on the ramp.

(Marvel Preview#4/Marvel Spotlight II#6 (fb)) <February 9, 1990 A.D. (Earth date)> - Despite having been expelled, Quill managed to steal a scout ship from Cape Canaveral and fly it up to Space Station Eve where he used violence to force his way aboard and take the place of the astronaut who had been chosen. Although the guards attempted to use lethal force to stop him, Quill was saved from death by being transported off the station to another planet. Welcomed by Ragnar in his guise as the Master of the Sun, Quill soon found himself wearing the costume of the Star-Lord that had appeared on his body out of nowhere. After discovering that he could now fly, Quill investigated the gun in the costume's holster and found that it could fire blasts of any of the four ancient elements (earth, air, fire, and water). When asked by the Master of the Sun if he was going to forget his vow to seek revenge on the aliens who had killed his mother, Quill could not deny it and so the Master of the Sun seemingly transported him out into space when he was almost immediately attacked by an alien ship. Believing them to be the same aliens who had killed his mother, Star-Lord fought back and was able to blast his way into the ship where he then killed all the reptilians in the crew. As he stood there amongst the bodies, thinking that they were all dead, he was suddenly transported back to the planet where the Master of the Sun told him that he had fulfilled his vow. Wondering how he had gotten back there, Quill suspected that he had never left at all, but the Master of the Sun only told him that he had experienced his vengeance and was now free of his past life and free to form a new life, if he wished. Quill replied that he wished.

(Marvel Preview#11) - An unspecified time later, Star-Lord and his partner, the sentient starship Ship, interacted with some slavers who had been attacking remote planets, wiping out most of their populations and capturing the few survivors as slaves. Although he had not arrived in time to save the lives of the almost eight million Scania who had just been killed by the slavers, Star-Lord was able to disable their starship and prevent them from making the planet Windhölme uninhabitable before he and a group of rebelling slaves disposed of the slavers. When one of the young Scania survivors, Kip Hölm, demanded vengeance against whoever had sent the slavers to his world, Star-Lord and Ship were able to use Kip's own psychic talent to identify that person as the merchant Kyras Shakati. Accompanied by another freed slave, Sandy from Pryd'ri, who had formed an emotional connection with Kip, the foursome traveled to the planet Cinnibar where they infiltrated Shakati's floating palace. Although Shakati soon ended up dead, Star-Lord was able to his computer records to learn that the slaving operation was being used to finance a coup against Emperor Jason, so the foursome set course for Sparta where, after some difficulties which separated them, Star-Lord was reunited with Kip and Sandy inside the Imperial Chalet.

.    While searching for the emperor, the trio were soon confronted by Prince Gareth and the Sith-Lord Rruothk'ar, who stated their intent to execute the three of them.      However, even though his mother's killer had been wearing a mask, Star-Lord recognized Rruothk'ar's face so he gave the data-pack to Kip and Sandy and told them to take it to the emperor while he handled the fighting.     Then, as the teenagers left, Star-Lord savagely attacked the Ariguan Sith-Lord and the two began battling ferociously with their swords. During the duel, Star-Lord was able to counter Rruothk'ar's raw power with a skill he hadn't known he possessed.     The Ariguan wrapped his tail around Star-Lord's throat in an attempt to kill him, but Star-Lord countered by cutting off the end of the Ariguan's tail. Angered by this, Rrruothk'ar charged at his foe but in doing so he left himself open.      Star-Lord took advantage of that opportunity to impale Rruothk'ar with his sword, driving it into his chest and out through his back, while crying out, "In my mother's name, monster--DIE!!"

    Distracted by an approaching group of people, Star-Lord turned away from the prince who threw a poisoned blade into his back and then boasted that, since any accusations that the children might make would be disbelieved, Star-Lord had failed to stop him. Enraged and acting on instinct, Star-Lord turned and hurled the prince's own sword into him. Mortally wounded, Prince Gareth made a necessarily-brief speech about how Star-Lord had won a Pyrrhic victory because, even as he died, the poison was killing Star-Lord, and then the prince fell backwards off the balcony to the ground a mile below.

   However, Prince Gareth's belief that the person who had killed him would himself soon die was quickly disproven. Not only was Star-Lord's body able to handle the poison, the arrival of first Ship and then Emperor Jason prevented those three Imperial troopers who were first on the scene and had been contemplating executing him without a trial from taking action. Also, the information from Star-Lord's data pack enabled the Imperial Guard to smash Gareth's conspiracy within a few hours of his death.

Comments: Created by Steve Englehart and Steve Gan.
   Named (and slightly redesigned) by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin.

   Unlike every other alien in the original Star-Lord stories, Rruothk'ar is the only one whose spoken words are not translated into English. Presumably the glyphs in his speech balloons are meant to be from the Ariguan language, but what they mean is anyone's guess. However, the dialogue of other Ariguans who appear in later classic stories is translated.

   Rruothk'ar appears in only three panels in Marvel Preview#4 and only twelve panels in Marvel Preview#11, making a total of fifteen panels, and I've used thirteen of those panels as images in this profile. With seven of them coming from his final duel and its immediate aftermath, I might have gone a bit overboard with the images. Sadly, one of the two panels I chose to not use contained one of his only four speech balloons, so this profile's record of his spoken words is incomplete.

   As the being who murdered Meredith Quill, Rruothk'ar appears, without being named, whenever Star-Lord's origin is recapped. These appearances include single-panel recaps in Marvel Preview#18, Marvel Comics Super Special#10 and Marvel Spotlight II#6-7. The recaps in the first two stories show Meredith being confronted by two Ariguans but only being shot by one of them, as was presented in Marvel Preview#4. However, the recaps in those two Marvel Spotlight issues differ somewhat. Aside from the fact that the Ariguans are drawn to look slightly different, the recap in Marvel Spotlight II#6 shows Meredith being gunned done by two of the five Ariguans who had exited their much larger spacecraft while the recap in Marvel Spotlight II#7 shows her being killed by the two Ariguans who had exited a spacecraft that was more consistent with its original appearance. I don't believe that these latter two recaps were meant to be retcons and so have not used them to tweak the events depicted in Marvel Preview#4.

   The fact that Rruothk'ar was alive (at least for a while) when Star-Lord encountered him on the planet Sparta is pretty conclusive evidence for the idea that the vengeance against his mother's killers that Peter Quill seemingly experienced just after meeting the Master of the Sun was, as he suspected, something that had taken place solely within his mind. If those events did occur only within a realistic but illusory world of Ragnar's creation, then Ragnar might have used some unspecified mental powers to create that world. Alternatively, if Ragnar's powers did come from his advanced science, then he may have used something like the Telempathic Crystal that Kyras Shakati would later use to briefly trap Star-Lord, Kip and Sandy. While I personally prefer the idea that the Master of the Sun was, as implied by Chris Claremont's stories, a sentient star or some other type of Cosmic Being, that doesn't preclude the possibility that he might have used technology to create that experience which gave Peter Quill the opportunity to free himself from his past life so that he could form a new life as Star-Lord.

   In the original Star-Lord story, the aliens who killed Meredith Quill were pretty much a mystery. We readers weren't told who they were or why they had come to Earth and, while it seemed likely that they had killed her in order to keep their visit a secret, the story didn't explain why they didn't also kill Peter, the other witness, or why they then quickly left the planet without apparently doing whatever they had come to Earth to do. Meredith Quill's death was presented as a case of her being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it was basically bad luck that her son had just happened to see a flying saucer land while he was walking alone in the woods and had then brought her to see it. The fact that the landing rockets of the flying saucer Peter saw blasted the ground beneath them, presumably leaving burn marks similar to the "strange, charred circle" that Peter had found on a far valley floor while walking in the woods in the spring of 1971, was probably meant to indicate that the aliens may have visited the area before, as remembered in local stories from 1930 about when the spacemen had landed.

   Chris Claremont's revision of that story did reveal who the aliens were and why they had come to the Colorado Mountains, but it did leave two questions unanswered: How did they just happen to land in the woods within sight of Peter Quill and why did they leave Earth without killing him? Although the story doesn't address the first question, a good (albeit speculative) possible answer would be that the Ariguans knew, from Gareth, the general area where Meredith had lived when Jason knew her and may have possessed advanced sensors capable of locating individuals in that area who possessed a genetic code that was half-human and half-alien. Unfortunately, the only answer to the second question that has ever been provided is that Rruothk'ar simply botched the job and that just doesn't make sense. If someone travels many light-years across space on a mission to kill two specific beings, then one doesn't successfully kill the first of them but then just "fail" to kill the second one when, by standing there in clear sight while paralyzed by shock and grief, he is making such an easy target of himself. Until some explanation for how Rruothk'ar could have "missed" Peter is presented, Peter's survival remains a mystery that, at least to me, weakens his origin story. 

In re-reviewing this profile, I noticed that, although the alien words ("iTU") that were spoken as Meredith was killed are the same in both Marvel Preview#4 and the flashback in Marvel Preview#11, the Ariguan who said them was actually different. In the original story, those words were spoken by the alien who was carrying the larger weapon and standing behind the alien who had just shot Meredith, but in the later story the only alien visible in the flashback was Rruothk'ar who was speaking those words as he shot Meredith. I suppose that the second Ariguan was omitted from Emperor's Jason retelling of how Meredith was killed because he wasn't the one who had killed Meredith and therefore wasn't important to the story of her death. It's an odd difference but, unless those words were somehow significant, I suppose it's not that important.

   The fact that Rruothk'ar was known as "Sith-Lord of the Ariguan Confederacy" was interesting but nothing else was ever said about it. Although the "Lord" part of his title clearly implied a position amongst the rulers of the Ariguans, that only highlighted how little had been revealed, and led to questions like these:

1. Was Rruothk'ar "a" Sith-Lord or was he "the" Sith-Lord? If he was "a" Sith-Lord, then he would presumably have been one of a group of Sith-Lords who were the rulers of the confederacy, but if he was "the" Sith-Lord, then he might have been the single supreme ruler of his race.
2. What power, if any, did Rruothk'ar possess as a Sith-Lord? Did having that title give him any political power within the Ariguan Confederacy? Or was it primarily a ceremonial title, one with no real power?
3. How did Rruothk'ar become Sith-Lord? Was it a hereditary title he received at birth (hatching?) or after the death of his father? Or was it a rank that had been awarded to him because of something he had done? Or was it a position to which he had been elected?
4. When did Rruothk'ar become Sith-Lord? Was it at birth? Or before, during or after the war?
5. Did the fact that Rruothk'ar was "champion of his people" have anything to do with his rank as Sith-Lord?

   It was also interesting that Rruothk'ar had some sort of professional relationship with Kyras Shakati at a time when there was a war being fought between the Ariguan Confederacy and the empire within whose territory Shakati both lived and conducted his business. Did the fact that they were working together during that war mean that they were committing treason against their respective races/governments? Or were their joint ventures so far outside the law that being treasonous was a trivial matter by comparison? Or were they both somehow profiting off the war?

   By the way, it seems like an interesting coincidence that a space opera written Chris Claremont in which one of the villains was a "Sith-Lord" went on sale (according to online sources) on July 5, 1977, a little over a month after a certain movie whose main antagonist would become a far more famous "Sith-Lord" had its U.S. release date on May 25, 1977. Then again, when I found a transcript of Star Wars (later known as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope) online and searched through it, I couldn't find the word "Sith" anywhere. I then found other online sources that revealed that the word was mentioned in a scene from the movie that was cut before the theatrical release, and confirmed that "Sith" was never mentioned in the original trilogy and didn't make an on-screen appearance until Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was released in 1999. However, that online source also stated that the term "Sith" did appear in the novelization of the first film that was based on the screenplay by George Lucas and was first released (as a paperback) in November of 1976 by Ballantine Books, prior to the film's 1977 release. The term "Sith Lord" appeared in the first Star Wars Marvel comic series as early as Star Wars I#78 (December, 1983), and started being regularly used, and was finally defined, in the Star Wars Expanded Universe in the early 1990s.
   A link to that deleted scene from the first movie can be found here.

   Since I don't own either Marvel Preview#4 or Marvel Preview#11, the images used in this profile come from reprints of those two stories that were presented in, respectively, Star-Lord: The Hollow Crown#1 (2013) and Starlord, the Special Edition#1 (1982).

    Rruothk'ar originally had a sort-of sub-profile in the Ariguans profile by Snood 02/12/2013.

Profile by Donald Campbell.

CLARIFICATIONS:
Rruothk'ar, Sith-Lord of the Ariguan Confederacy, has no known connections to

• Ruthar - an Atlantean pirate who was defeated by Prince Namor--Marvel Comics Presents I#7/4
• any person, group, race, place or thing with a name that sounds even vaguely like "Rruothk'ar"
• or any other "Sith-Lord"

spacecraft

   The vehicle that Rruothk'ar and another Ariguan used when they landed on Earth in the Colorado Mountains on August 11, 1973 (local date). When it was first spotted by Peter Quill, the spacecraft was hovering about twenty feet above the ground as it prepared to land and was being held aloft by something emanating from its underside that was blasting the ground beneath it.

   By the time Peter had returned with his mother, the spacecraft had landed, with its landing gear holding its hull about eight feet off the ground. A circular hatch/ramp on the spacecraft's underside had been lowered and one of its occupants (Rruothk'ar) had descended the ramp and had just step one foot on the ground when he saw that the two humans were watching them. Within seconds, Rruothk'ar fired a blast from his handheld weapon that instantly killed Meredith Quill and left her corpse smouldering. Rruothk'ar and his companion then immediately boarded the spacecraft which then launched itself back towards space, blasting forward on a course that was about 15 degrees upward from horizontal. And that's the last time that Peter Quill ever saw that spacecraft.

   Seventeen Earth-years later and only minutes after having been transformed by the Master of the Sun, Quill (as Star-Lord) had a violent encounter in outer space with hostile aliens who were flying a ship that he seemed to recognize as the one flown by the aliens who had killed his mother. Although realistic, the experience was apparently no more than an illusion of some kind, but the ship presumably did closely resemble the one that Quill saw as a child.

SHIP PROPERTIES

   The spacecraft had a discoidal shape, with a hull that was circular and had a diameter of about 20-25 feet that was much greater than its height of less than 3 feet. As such, it resembled the popular idea of "flying saucers" or "flying discs" that had been widely reported in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. The spacecraft was bilaterally symmetrical around its centerline, and its bow and stern sections were quite distinct.

   The outer edge of the spacecraft's hull was rounded, with no right angles, and the only features that marred its smoothness were situated in the bow. A round object (or opening) was at the center of the bow and above it, at the foremost edge of the craft's topside, was a wide bubble window (or viewport). There were also two oval openings, located at the outer edge of the hull, to either side of that round central whatever and about halfway between the craft's centerline and its outermost edges, that looked somewhat like the air intakes for jet engines. Extending rearwards from these opening were two parallel raised ridges that were visible on both the upper and lower surfaces of the craft.

   Aside from the central window and those parallel ridges, the only other features on the craft's upper side were two widely-spaced pylons situated near the rear of the craft, each of which supported a small pod or nacelle. These pylons, which looked somewhat like vertical stabilizers, may (or may not) have been aligned with the ridges on the upper hull.

   The craft's underside was similarly lacking in features. Aside from the two ridges that extended backwards from the bow, there was a clearly-defined circular area in the middle of the underside that consisted of a round area that was maybe 6-8 feet wide and had two concentric circular areas around it. That central area was the descent engine from which, when the spacecraft was landing or taking off, a force beam (or rocket thrust) emanated downward in order to keep the craft in mid-air. When at the correct height above the ground, retractable landing gear, in the form of four thin legs, would telescope out from within the vehicle so as to keep the hull of the craft about 6-8 feet off the ground. This was necessary because that round area was also the underside of the hinged hatch/landing ramp that had to be lowered so that beings could enter or exit the spacecraft.

   No information about how this spacecraft propelled itself forward or controlled its course has ever been revealed. Its propulsion may have come from some form of rocket engine or by somehow manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum to provide thrust.

   The fact that there was no evidence to suggest that the spacecraft had been detected by the United States military suggests that it was equipped with some stealth technology that was able to hide it from primitive human detection devices (like radar) that were part of missile defense systems used during the Cold War.

   The most distinctive thing about the spacecraft was how small it was. With a height of only 2 or 3 feet, it would have been seemingly impossible for Ariguans to stand up inside the vessel. This suggests that either the Ariguans spent their entire time within the craft lying down in supine or prone positions, or that the spacecraft was somehow bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. A third possible explanation is that those who entered the craft were somehow miniaturized upon entry so that the small interior would be relatively much larger to them. However, no evidence supporting any of these theories has ever been presented. Of course, the fact that the alien spacecraft that Star-Lord battled right after he first met the Master of the Sun apparently contained a crew of at least six Ariguans and had more than enough interior space could support the "larger on the inside" theory, but that encounter was part of an illusion and therefore the starship may not have been depicted realistically.

--Marvel Preview#11

Noted: The spacecraft which Rruothk'ar used to land on Earth only appears in four panels from Marvel Preview#4. Images from two of those panels appear in the main profile and the other two are the two topmost images in this sub-profile. The image in the lower right, the one which most clearly shows the craft's circular shape, is taken from Star-Lord's illusory battle with the aliens. The two beams of energy that this image shows being fired from those two openings on the bow are not something that young Peter saw during his first alien encounter and so may not accurately depict the weapons with which the real spacecraft may have been equipped. Alternatively, the Master of the Sun may have known that Ariguan spacecraft were equipped with such weapons and therefore chose to include them as part of the illusion that Star-Lord experienced.

   In an odd coincidence, the basic design of Rruothk'ar's spacecraft somewhat resembled the "flying saucers" that sometimes appeared in Peter's dreams years earlier.

   Most recaps of Star-Lord's origin don't bother to show the spacecraft used by the alien who killed his mother. The only two that do (in Marvel Spotlight II#6-7) depict a starship that looks somewhat different from the one seen in Marvel Preview#4.

   It seems likely that the Ariguan spacecraft was drawn to be as small as it was in order to make it more plausible that it hadn't been seen by anyone other than Peter and Meredith during its brief visit to Earth. However, it seems equally unlikely that human-sized Ariguans would have been comfortable traveling across interstellar distances while crammed into such a small vehicle. Since the "bigger on the inside" and miniaturization explanations have no evidence to support them, I have come to favor the idea that maybe the small craft that landed in the Colorado Mountains was not actually the starship that brought Rruothk'ar to Earth. Maybe the spacecraft that Peter and Meredith was just a landing craft (or shuttlecraft) that the Ariguans had used to covertly descend to the planet's surface from a much larger starship that had remained in orbit?
    Of course, this theory is also not supported by any in-story evidence.

images: (without ads)
Starlord, The Special Edition#1, page 42, panel 1 (main image)
      page 43, panel 4 (head shot)
      page 52, panel 5 (with Shakati and Gareth)
Star-Lord: The Hollow Crown#1, story page 6, panel 2 (being seen by Meredith and Peter)
      story page 6, panel 3 (seeing Meredith and Peter)
      story page 6, panel 4 (shooting Meredith)
Starlord, The Special Edition#1, page 52, panel 6 (shooting Meredith - colorized)
      page 43, panel 1 (face-to-face with Star-Lord)
      page 43, panels 2-3 (having his tail severed by Star-Lord)
      page 43, panels 5-6 (being killed by Star-Lord)
      page 43, panel 7 (lying dead at Star-Lord's feet)
Star-Lord: The Hollow Crown#1, story page 5, panel 5 (spacecraft landing on Earth)
      story page 6, panel 5 (spacecraft flying away)
      story page 29, panel 4 (round craft from illusion)

Appearances:
Marvel Preview#4 (January, 1976) - Steve Englehart (writer), Steve Gan (artist), Bob McLeod (inker), Archie Goodwin (editor)
Marvel Preview#11 (Summer/June, 1977) - Chris Claremont (writer), John Byrne (penciler), Terry Austin (inker), John Warner (editor)

First Posted: 04/19/2014
Last updated: 04/21/2024

Any Additions/Corrections? Please let me know.

Non-Marvel Copyright info
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