I’ve given thoughts on Rocket Racer’s villain who is way more popular than he is but how about we discuss a villain who was created as if to be Bob’s arch-nemesis, but has not caught on as such.

This guy here: Skinhead.

This is/was Eddie Cross. He was a Neo-Nazi asshole who was leading a white power group causing trouble at the university that Bob was attending. Bob wanted to beat the heck out of him, but Spider-Man kept showing up to say “Don’t do that!” so Bob and Spidey fought over whether beating up the Nazi was good or bad and then they accidentally spilled some experimental chemicals on the asshole. Those chemicals turned Cross into a big shapeshifty flesh blob (more details here). Bob blamed himself (Spider-Man never really seemed to blame himself much and he’s the one who MADE the chemicals. Which also means Peter Parker could probably be able to reproduce this origin and create more flesh blob guys if the wanted).

When you’re trying to create an enemy for a superhero, it’s about the contrast, right? Bob is a Black man, Eddie Cross is a violent racist. They both spent time hanging out in junkyards, Bob to find parts for his feats of engineering, Eddie as a place to hang out with his Nazi pals away from the eyes of society. Both are college students with complicated family relationships. Their differences and similarities could have provided fuel for many stories. And Bob blames himself Skinhead’s origin, so it’s got the kind of personal stakes they’d want if this was a movie. You’d think that Rocket Racer and Skinhead would clash all the time.

And so Bob does try to investigate Skinhead and put an end to his rampage. He gets knocked out and Spider-Man shows up to save the day. But don’t worry, Skinhead shows up again and Bob is nearby to do something about it! He doesn’t have his gear that time, though, so all he does about it is meet the superhero Captain Marvel (the Monica Rambeau one) and give her the exposition she needs to handle the problem.

So Skinhead has been taken out twice, never by Rocket Racer. Oh well.

You can tell a lot about someone, I assume, by what kindsa stuff they gots in their room. We have only ONCE in all his nearly fifty years of existence seen a room that we could call Rocket Racer’s room. Well, let’s take a look at it.

First, it’s worth noting that this is in Brooklyn, which is where Bob was born and raised, but not where his family actually lived when he became the Rocket Racer. This is definitely not the small apartment the family lived in when Spider-Man came to visit. I suspect it may not be an apartment at all. I have to assume that at some point Bob made enough money as Rocket Racer to invest in a secret lair. Maybe it’s one of those ones that looks like an abandoned warehouse outside, or maybe it’s an old garage, who knows? All we know is its in Brooklyn.

Now, this is Rocket Racer’s room, sure, but it isn’t his bedroom. This is the room where he kept his mother while she was in a coma. We don’t actually know much about this period in Bob’s life. Emma has had health problems as long as we’ve known her, but last time we saw her she was up and about, and the last time Bob brought her up to a friend he said she had “good days and bad” and those bad days must have got more common, because suddenly she’s in a coma. What we know is that Bob was not able or willing (presumably because of finances) to keep her in a hospital, so he has her in a rigged-up situation at his secret lair. It’s not ideal, and I’m sure he knows it. Incidentally, where are the other Farrell kids during this era? We don’t know! They tell us almost nothing about them ever, so this is no different. I assume that the second sibling (let’s call him Josh) has reached adulthood by this point and is taking care of the kids. Probably there’s friction between Josh and Bob.

But that’s not this room! Let’s look around the room!
We’ve got:

• Blueprints and tools. Half-finished projects in progress.
• A lot of racing stuff. Magazines, model cars, a poster.
• Model planes as well. And vehicles that are either models or toys (A-Team van, Optimus Prime). Whatever that spaceship is.
• A bunch of Japanese-inspired media (the Mazinger Z poster, Optimus again, probably that little chibi-style mech toy).
• Unpaid bills (seen in the one other panel with this room.

So what do we learn from this? Bob’s a broke nerdy guy who likes racing. Alright, thanks, PDR. Definitely breaking news with this one.

Okay, maybe there’s nothing surprising here. But hey, that’s the point of the creators decorating the room this way: it’s shows Bob’s character. I like it.

This one time, one of Spider-Man’s villains (it was a Mysterio, for posterity) wanted to know Spider-Man’s secret identity so badly that he kidnapped a bunch of people who know Spider-Man and stuck them all in a machine that combined their memories and personalities and stuff to create an illusory virtual world. But one of those people, Flash Thompson, apparently had a personality so strong it overwhelmed the illusion and created a fantasy world in which he and Spider-Man were a heroic team of heroes. Et cetera, et cetera, amen, this ends with Flash imagining his wedding day and it getting attacked by a bunch of supervillains.

One of those supervillains is the Rocket Racer.

And look, he’s wearing a neat silver version of his suit and board. I prefer the yellow and red, but I admit it’s neat to see him in a different way for a change. The question that arises is, why is Rocket Racer a silver-clad criminal in this fantasy? It’s a world made up of the combined minds of a bunch of people Spider-Man knows, so who there provided this imaginary version of Bob? The story is a bit vague about who is in the machine. We know for sure it includes Flash Thompson, Peter Parker and MJ and Aunt May, Jonah Jameson and his wife Marla, Robbie Robertson, Jill Stacy, and at least one other guy I don’t see identified. But there’s also tubes in the machine that could imply several more people. Basically, I don’t think I can actually narrow it down based on that information. It’s all supposition.

But, in the real world, at this time Bob is a good guy, harmlessly trying to get through university. Peter, at the very least, would know that. My instinct is to just blame it on Jameson. That guy’s always judging people, but usually he’s more concerned with masked vigilantes than the likes of a publicly-known figure like Bob. And the Daily Bugle ran a feature about Bob’s life story once, so surely he’s aware that Bob is actually a good guy (That goes for Robbie too). That still leaves us with too many suspects.

I could, perhaps, argue that one of the unseen people in the machine we don’t get to see if Bob himself. He’s known to be a Spider-Man ally and could on a villain’s list of people to be kidnapped, right? If he were in that machine, imagining some other world, would he cast himself in the role of a criminal out of some kind self-hatred? Possible, but I’d need even one single more bit of confirmation before I committed to that reading.

We’ll never know who imagined Bob to be a baddie during the period in his life when he was most on the side of “the law”, but I guess we can probably just assume it’s Aunt May’s fault. Maybe she just confuses him with the Silver Surfer.

Also, I need to address it: by the rules (such as they are) of Marvel’s multiverse, they say that any reality that can be imagined is real out there somewhere in infinity. I’ve always found that silly, but that’s how they roll, and at some point they designated this world as Earth-99727, so this counts as a Into The Rocket-Verse post. I have to wonder what the life of this version of Bob is like as if he exists as a real person. Well, I’m gonna say that both the fact he’s wearing silver and that he’s an actual supervillain (not for hire or nothin’, he’s just attacking the good guy’s wedding here) indicate that his lust for wealth has overcome his good sense. And Spider-Man and Flash have probably foiled his schemes so often that now he’s degenerated into a standard “out for revenge” type of villain. A truly tragic specimen of Alternate Bob Farrell.

Of course even if, on that world, we can accept that Spider-Man is not Peter Parker, but some person whose identity is as-yet unrevealed, we also have to assume that when Rocket Racer and a bunch of his criminal allies attacked Flash Thompson’s wedding, the whole affair did NOT end with them realizing their reality was fake, but continued on in some other way and that this silver Rocket Racer probably got beat up or something.

As I feel I’ve been very clear about by now, the Rocket Racer has had a decades-long storied career skating around the edges of the Marvel Universe being a superhero or a criminal as whatever writer who picked his name off a list sees fit. But the fun is in making sense of it.

So, what’s the deal with the time the Rocket Racer was in Avengers Academy? In 2012 Bob made three appearances in the Avengers Academy book at a point when it was telling the story of the Avengers (you know, from those movies) opening up their superhero-training campus to any young superhumans who feel like they need training. Two of Bob’s appearances there were purely in the background, typical, but in one he got to speak and everything. So now let me overthink this for a bit.

First of all, Bob isn’t a superhuman. But that’s fair enough, he has sci-fi super-technology. The Avengers have Hawkeye on there and he’s just a fancy archer, so they accept humans.

Bob is, as I’ve tried to point out, not especially young. Establishing the ages of any characters in the never-allow-characters-to-grow-because-it-messes-up-the-corporate-products Marvel Timeline is difficult. Given the amount of life experiences Peter Parker has had, he ought to be decades older than the stories are willing to depict him. So, I accept some vagueness when it comes to Bob’s age, except when they depict him as a teenager, because that’s not a matter of him not being allowed to age, it’s a matter of his age regressing to something he wasn’t.

When he first appeared, he was seemingly a young adult. The only time we get a definitive age for Bob, in 1985’s Spectacular Spider-Man #104, we are told he is twenty-three (and that is Peter reading an article written months earlier, so he could be twenty-four by then). That same year, in The Thing #27 we are told that Vance Astrovik is seventeen. Vance (aka Justice) was an instructor at the Avengers Academy and treated as an adult within the story. Bob is older than Vance. I can’t stress this enough: while it is possible that the Rocket Racer was on some list of “young characters” and the creative team chose him almost at random to be in the backgrounds here, he is not young. And he’s already graduated high school, university, has some Air Force training, and was trained by Silver Sable to some extent. He’s not new at any of this.

So, Robert Farrell is not a young or untrained superhuman, so why is he at this place? Well, in terms of his own history, this is not long after he was spent time in prison and even less long after he was blown up by the Punisher. Immediately before this his mother was in a coma and he was recruited into a heist that went poorly. It has not been Bob’s year (or whatever amount of Marvel Time is spanned). But he seems well. There’s no sign of his stutter, which I maintain was PTSD-induced. Maybe he got therapy or something from the Academy? But given his reason for leaving the Academy, he’s clearly hurting for money, as ever. Maybe he joined the Academy… as a job?

I think he was teaching there. Teaching what? I don’t know. The two non-speaking background appearances just show Bob playing sports with students. In one he’s racing (his favourite thing!) and in the other he’s playing frisbee (I guess he likes that too!). So is he like a gym teacher or something? That seems unlikely in a school where almost all the training is about fighting and stuff. But also, Bob is a real good scientist and engineer, right? But the Avengers is also an organization filled with superscientists who can build spaceships and dimensional portals on a whim. Bob can’t compete with them in the science teaching contest.

Just before Bob joined the Avenger Academy, the aforementioned Justice and another instructor, (Speedball) both quit working there. When those two taught at the Academy, the goal was to take a handful of young potential superhuman villains and make sure their directed their lives toward good things. Justice and Speedball were both young adults with dark times in their pasts, so they could provide good guidance to the kids. Bob is older than those two, but still younger than the other teachers, and he too has a criminal past. Could he have been brought in as a similar guide for the kids? I mean, if he was they didn’t show him doing anything with it. He was mostly only seen with the new kids, who aren’t the potential villains they were worried about. I dunno, maybe he was brought in to do a bit of everything. A bit of a gym teacher, a bit of a science teacher, and a bit of guide on not being a criminal. Increasing the students at the Academy and losing two teachers, they were probably desperate for the help.

When Bob leaves the Academy after what feels like a couple weeks tops, in the only issue in which he gets lines, it’s for another job. Some magic kid billionaire offers all the Academy people a chance to work a high-paying job that uses their talents and powers not in a cycle of violence but to actually benefit the world. I can see that appealing to Bob, but it kinda indicates that if he is, as I insist, working at the Avengers Academy, they aren’t paying him well enough.

Anyway, that kid billionaire soon turns out to be a villain and is brought down by the Avengers and Bob is then without either job. Way to go, Bob.

Mini Marvels was a line of comedic, family-friendly comics retelling Marvel stories in a parodic manner. At some point these stories were declared to take place on Earth-99062. Naturally, that version of Marvel Earth has a Rocket Racer and naturally he is practically a nonentity.

This Rocket Racer only gets one appearance, but he’s in more than one panel. He’s got lines and everything. That’s more than Rocket Ratser got! Hell, that’s more than regular Rocket Racer gets most years…

But anyway, his deal: In this story, a bunch of super-characters are paperboys for the Daily Bugle, and Rocket Racer is among them. When Spider-Man and Venom have some sort of obstacle course contest to prove who is the better paperboy, Bob is the one who provides the exposition to the others about why Spider-Man and Venom are enemies. And, well, that’s it. Look, I said he had multiple panels and lines, I never set he got to be important to the story.

I do think it’s neat that Bob is very excited to see Spider-Man and Venom run the obstacle course. He just likes races, everybody! In every universe.

(When I went back to look at Rocket Ratser, I realized one time I used the phrase Into The Rocketverse to talk about looking at alternate universe Rocket Racers and I definitely like it and will be going back to add it as a tag to the times I’ve done that.)