I mentioned last time that Fred Van Lente had written an “other-continuity” appearance of Rocket Racer not applicable to the mainstream Bob Farrell. Well, let’s delve Into The Rocketverse and explore that:

This was in a book called Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #21. You know how mainstream superhero comics are a poisoned cesspool of non-stop drastic changes to the status quo trying to trick the audience into thinking stories are “important” because apparently the bulk of readers of mainstream superhero comics only value stories for how “important” they are? Well, Marvel Adventures Spider-Man was mercifully not that. It was just a book that sought to tell simple Spider-Man stories and, from what I’ve seen, it did them well. Naturally it’s long dead now.

This story begins with Spider-Man chasing the Rocket Racer who has a big bag of cash stolen from a bank (classic!). This version of Bob stutters with almost every other word and he lobs insults at Spider-Man implying that the vigilante is dumb, showing that this Bob very much values intellect. Bob escapes with relative ease, but Spidey finds one of his rockets hasn’t exploded and it has a “T” logo on it.

Spider-Man then has to deal with two other supervillains, Frog Man (Eugene) and Stilt-Man (Wilbur), only to discover that the three are actually working together. They are just nerdy guys who “met online at a message board for connoisseurs of the mechanical arts” and from there they met the Tinkerer, the guy who provides supervillains with technology. The Tinkerer offered the three guys super-suits for free, no strings attached, because what the Tinkerer actually wanted was to show off how good his tech was to real supervillains. When these three loser villains fail to defeat Spider-Man on their own, Tinkerer remote controls them to attack more violently, against their protestations. The hero still wins, of course, but we see that these guys are crooks, but don’t want to be murderers.

This version of Bob clearly loves technology, but it seems like all credit for his devices goes to Tinkerer here, which clearly makes him less of a self-made Rocket Racer. The regular version of Bob did have his tech improved by the Tinkerer, but only after designing it himself and beginning his Rocket Racer career. Like Van Lente’s Supervillain Team-Up story, this story leans into the “nerd” take on Bob. He’s got a Star Trek shirt and a Godzilla poster and the like. I don’t mind this take, save for the fact I don’t think the mainstream Bob has the disposable income to collect things like that.

As for Wilbur and Eugene: Bob-616 has only minor connections to either of those characters. He attended the funeral/wake for his universe’s Wilbur Day, but more to be with his friends who were closer. And he may have met his universe’s Eugene, but only in passing as far as we’ve been told. For the sake of this story, Bob is roughly the same nebulous age that he always is, but Stilt-Man is, if anything, aged down and Frog Man aged up, so they are all now in the same cohort. For the record, in the Marvel Universe proper, Eugene is not a tech-guy. His Frog-Man suit was built by his father and he’s had to rely on others to repair it. Also, regular Eugene has never been a criminal.