I should follow up on the previous Rocket Racer update. The Jackpot/Black Cat miniseries ended, so I read it and found out what the deal was.

There was a criminal mastermind (who, obviously, has ties to the protagonists, because they always do) who was manifesting as an app that would threaten people into doing their bidding. Basically, it’d be some innocent person sitting there and they’d get a text on this app that would say like “Attack this person for me or I’ll kill your family” and so the innocent people would have to do it. That meant that MJ and Felicia had to try to fight a bunch of innocent people without hurting them. To escalate the story, though, eventually the evil mastermind had to send supervillains against the heroes, and that’s where Bob came in.

So what does it tell us about Bob’s current status quo? Well, not much. We’re never told that Bob (or fellow criminals Squid or Tracer) are being threatened into what they’re doing, but they also don’t say anything about them getting paid for it. Certainly Bob has a family large enough that it’d be easy to threaten one of them and make the Racer do your bidding, but Bob is in good spirits during this whole encounter (something he that is not always true about him). Based on the rest of the story, I’d expect the villain to be blackmailing the criminals rather than paying them, but maybe it isn’t Bob’s family being put in peril. Maybe the criminal is threatening to steal funds from their secret supervillain bank accounts or something.

We’re simply not given the context in the story, where the criminal are just punch-takers meant to stand between the protagonists and the ultimate villain, but given Bob’s flippancy, I’m going to say nobody he cares about was in danger and he was just happy for an excuse to do super-fights. Enjoy it while you can, Bob! It is only a matter of time before everything goes poorly for you again.