Hey, let’s just reveal that Rocket Racer is asexual already. We have nothing to lose with this, and plenty to gain. Superhero comics are slowly getting better at representing people from all spectra of sexuality, but I’m not aware of any prominent Ace characters at Marvel. Let there be one, and let it be a character who has existed for nearly half a century.

Robert Farrell has been around since 1977, and even though he’s a smart handsome young man, no writer has ever thought it would be worth exploring a romantic storyline with him. There’s only even been one thing that came close:

There’s was one time when Bob was seen calling home to tell his Ma about a woman he’d just met. We’re obviously meant to assume he’s into his teammate, Nightshade. Except he wasn’t really calling his mother (who was in a coma at this point anyway), he was calling SHIELD to snitch on his fellow criminals, but pretending he was talking to his mother to obscure his motives. That fake conversation is the closest Bob has come to on-screen romance or sexual tension.

Obviously this is actually due to nobody caring much about Bob either way. My proposal here isn’t like when multiple creators tried to reveal that Iceman was gay and dropped hints about it before it was actually allowed to happen. No writer ever intended to make Bob asexual. I bet if he’d ever had a book in which to regularly appear, he’d have been given some love interest along the way. But that didn’t happen, and I say we ought to embrace it. We have here a character with decades of minor appearances who could be revealed to be asexual without it contradicting a damned thing and thus give an aspect to him that may make it easier to use him in appearances that are less minor, while giving representation to a group that could use it.

It seems like a good idea to me.

I don’t have a complex Superman Thought here, but have you ever noticed that the recent television shows in the Superman Family line have a thing for giving characters siblings that aren’t present in the source material?

In Supergirl, they gave Kara an adoptive sister named Alex. They also gave Kara’s mother a sister named Astra. They gave Jimmy a sister named Kelly. Then, over on Superman and Lois they gave Jon a brother named Jordan. And then (big ol’ spoiler here) Superman is revealed to also have a brother. Heck, even Steel is mentioned to have a sister he doesn’t have in the books, though it remains to be seen if she’s a reworking of his sister-in-law from the books or what.

It varies when this works and when it doesn’t. Some of the sibling characters are fine. But it even when it does work out it raise my hackles for one of the things that I dislike about superheroes as a genre that seems to be beloved by most others: personal stakes. Just say they’re siblings and it is supposed to matter when they are in trouble or one is revealed as a villain or whatever. It’s way easier to just tell us they have a pre-existing relationship than actually show two characters relating on screen and letting the audience see it. It isn’t always lazy, but when it is, it’s Especially Lazy.

Anyway, that’s just crankiness. What really bothers me about the need for personal stakes is that it makes it feel like the world revolves around the superhero. If the writers think that we can only have stories about the hero’s parents dying or their spouse being murdered or their friends turning evil or their headquarters being demolished, it really feels like the only thing the characters actually care about is their own bullshit. And that’s not what I want from my superheroes.

There’s a story in the comics going on these days about Clark finding out that there are some oppressed people who have a connection to Krypton, so he leaves Earth to go help them out. I just want it known that I’d be a lot more invested in a story in which Superman goes on an epic quest to rescue an oppressed people who have nothing to do with him whatsoever. That’s the Superman I like.

The Strondovarians (and, indeed, most life on Planet Gurx) don’t have the biological sex differentiation that we see here on Earth. Every Strondo has the same reproductive organ (they call it a Thebwont), which is located between their legs inside an orifice from which it can protrude when needed for copulation. The Thebwont has bits for expelling genetic material, as well as bits for receiving it. During copulation, a Strondo’s Thebwont docks with their partner’s Thebwont and they exchange their material and take it into themselves, where impregnation can happen.

Unlike humans, while a Strondo is pregnant they can not copulate, so it is fortunate that they don’t place the value on sex that we do (they like it fine, but their hedonistic tendencies more often point toward eating and mind-altering substances). The Thebwont undergoes a transformation during pregnancy, taking on the role of a womb. Gestation lasts for about six Earth-months (I’m just going to use Earth times for now for ease of translation) and the infants (usually one or two at a time) are born live, after which the Thebwont will return to copulationable form. If a Strondo has been pregnant about five or six times, the Thebwont can become incapable of the transformation, leaving the Strondo still capable of performing the sex act, but sterile.

Here we see Nibnassin, our Strondo volunteer, as an infant from an old family picture. The intricate musculature and large brains of a Strondo are still developing when they are newly born, so they need a lot of help for the first couple years. Fortunately, Strondo parents (the Strondo who gave birth being the one considered the parent) are usually quite attentive.

For about the first five years of their lives the young Strondos are in a “toddler” stage, learning to walk and move and speak and all that as they get bigger. Here were see young Nibnassin hanging out in their parent’s mouth, which is a common thing on Gurx. Because things in the mouth cavity aren’t digested unless the Strondo consciously focuses their Rel tow the task of pulling it apart and forcing it into the stomach, it’s actually a safe place for Strondos to store things, including their young kids. While in the mouth cavity the young Strondo can share food being eaten by the parent and, in the process, pick up valuable bacteria from their parent to develop a healthy gut biome.

After about five years the young Strondos are usually too big to fit in their parent’s mouth anymore, but that’s okay because they’re also now able to walk and move as deftly as they would be for all their life. They continue to grow until about eighteen to twenty years, at which point they reach their mature adult size and would now be capable of reproduction.

An average natural lifespan for a Strondo is about 120 Earth years, but they rarely live by their natural standards anymore. Technology has advanced enough for the species that the lifespan can be extended in various ways, including suspended animation used, most often, in space travel. There are Strondos out there who were born over three thousand Earth years ago, but most of that time was spent in stasis.