Rocket Racer’s Glasses

I’ve covered the stutter, but that isn’t the only affectation of nerdiness that has been grafted onto Bob Farrell over the years. He’s also had glasses in some of his more prominent appearances since the year 2000 (of which, God knows there have not been many). He wore the glasses in the Supervillain Team-Up book that brought us the stutter, but unlike that, Van Lente did not originate the glasses. Bob was first seen wearing glasses in the story in which he was in prison and was first seen alongside the Hypno-Hustler. I may not care for that story, but it has given me several things I like, apparently.

And I do like the glasses. Like the stutter, I think it is unfortunate that glasses are considered symbolic of “nerdy” people, but it does work for Bob as a tech guy. Also like the stutter, we’ve got decades of evidence that Bob did not always have glasses. Photos of him as a child show him not wearing them, and most of his adult life he’s been without as well. But still, you can need glasses without having them, especially if you’re from a low-income family. It could be that he didn’t realize he needed them until he was doing crimes and could afford to get some. It’s also very likely that he wears contacts on occasion. Bob has currently only made one appearance without his eyewear since they were introduced, attending a funeral, so maybe he just felt like contacts when he was dressing up that day?)

And, it is important to note that every iteration of the Rocket Racer’s outfit has included eyewear. Before and after his civilian eyewear came into play, he’s had visors and goggles as a part of his equipment. He has only occasionally had a helmet, but always something to protect his eyes. It would be perfectly believable to me that the Tinkerer or someone could make sure those things work with his prescription. I’ve also always kind of assumed the visor has some sort of HUD going on, but vision correction could be involved too.

Rocket Racer of Earth-20051

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.

Rocket Racer’s Stutter


There was a brief period in which Bob Farrell was depicted as a stutterer. It came out of nowhere during the Supervillain Team-Up/MODOK’s Eleven miniseries. Bob hadn’t been depicted as a stutterer in the decades he’d appeared before that, in fact he was often a fast-talking type. And he’s not been depicted as one since either, though that is mostly because he’s been lucky to get a line in any appearance since. Here are my thoughts on the Rocket Racer’s stutter:

It comes, as I say, out of nowhere. I can’t get behind it as an actual element of the character. But I do get it. It’s part of an attempt to lean into a “nerd” thing with Bob, trying to give him some personality that helps him to stand out among an ensemble cast. Writer Fred Van Lente also wrote an other-continuity Bob as having a stutter (in a story I’ll try to cover soon), so one thing is clear to me: Van Lente thought about Bob Farrell’s personality and role. He’s not just randomly picking Bob and pasting him there like a sticker in a book. I respect that.

I don’t care for stutters being generally considered to be a “nerd” thing, but I do think Bob being painted as a “nerdy” personality works. That said, I actually don’t think we need to have Bob as the kind of person who grew up with a stutter. Sure, that character type can be useful, even representational for young people with a stutter, but I feel like we can do something with Bob more in keeping with his history up to that point. The Supervillain Team-Up story comes after Bob has spent time in prison, after he was blown up by the Punisher, and after his mother’s illness has worsened and she’s fallen into a coma. I think it would be much more interesting to have Bob’s stutter be the result of all this trauma and injury, showing the consequences of what a man like Bob goes through in a genre where most of the characters are winners and, he’s just not.

(And, just for the record, Marvel does have at least one young Black man who grew up with a stutter, to represent that group: Cloak, of Cloak and Dagger fame, fits that bill perfectly.)

They Forgot To Put Rocket Racer in Marvel Snap

I’ve seen people on the Internet talking about Marvel Snap a lot over the last few months, so I felt like I should check it out. It’s pretty neat. I like a simplistic, quick-to-play card game, and the fact I can’t communicate with the other players makes me forget they are real people. All good. But there is one glaring mistake that I have already said in the title of this post: they managed to make this whole game and they haven’t put Rocket Racer in it!

Well, what am I here for if not to fix problems like that? I found a website that allows one to make custom Marvel Snap cards to do the hard part of making it look like is should (though I added a Rocket Racer logo image as it appeared in a comic I talked about a few posts back). And then I used my extensive knowledge of the character and passable knowledge of the game to come up with:

What you see here is Rocket Racer. He’s a mere 1 Power card, which means he is quite weak, sure, but that’s in keeping with Bob’s track record. I don’t think anyone will argue with that.

He’s also a 1 Cost card, which means he could be played on the first turn if you happen to draw him. Appropriate for a speed-based character, but not as good as, for example, Quicksilver who is guaranteed to be in your starting hand. Bob is fast, but not the fastest.

But what I like most if the power I’ve identified for him. When you draw him from your deck and put him in your hand, you get +1 Energy (or whatever the thing you use to pay a card’s Cost is called). I like this because it means you could use that Energy to play Bob right away, again emphasizing the speed with which he’d enter the field, or you could use that Energy to do something else, which is evocative of his being useful as perhaps a tech guy and helping the team to do other things. This card treats Rocket Racer as someone slightly useful. That’s exactly the right space for him.

I think you will all agree that this is a flawless Rocket Racer Marvel Snap card. It’s so perfect that I can legally state that if this card showed up in the game with these exact mechanics I couldn’t even claim to have created it, because anyone who was trying to make a Rocket Racer card would have come up with the same thing. Legally.

Anyway, I will leave it to the multitude of Marvel Snap players and Rocket Racer fans who visit my website to start the petitions to get this card into the game.

Rocket Racer News Update May 2023

It has happened again! By which I mean that Rocket Racer has appeared in a real comic again. My people informed me that Bob made an appearance in the latest issue of She-Hulk, so I had to check it out. Like last time it is a single-panel appearance. But whereas last time I was able to say it fit well with my take on the character, this time I find this:

The scene is thus: the titular She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters, attorney for super-people, walks into her office. A bunch of people are there waiting for appointments, including the Rocket Racer! Bob gives a wolf-whistle at the sight of Jennifer, so she says she’ll accept any client first except him.

Obviously I don’t like to see Bob as a catcalling prick. That’s not the kind of guy he’s usually been. I accept that he’s a criminal and he has certainly endangered innocent lives with his crimes. I don’t need him to be some paragon of virtue. But his crimes aren’t the same thing as sexual harassment. And I have to add for the record, Bob has even met She-Hulk before when he worked alongside her and some of the other Avengers. She was wearing considerably less then and Bob reacted perfectly normally. Here’s she looks good, but it’s just a dress and she usually wears the equivalent of a swimsuit. The idea that she’d walk into a room and Bob would be unable to control himself doesn’t fit with the man we’ve seen before.

Of course, I won’t lie, my main concern is how it conflicts with my “head-canon” wish to see Bob revealed to be asexual. I’ve discussed it before . There is no direct proof that Bob is asexual within the comics, but my desire for more Ace representation and the fact there also no direct proof that Bob is not asexual have caused me see it as an ideal choice. But now there’s this scene where he objectifies a woman just because she walks past him in, what I maintain is a nice-looking but perfectly normal dress, that I have to contend with. I don’t care for that.

I haven’t been reading this She-Hulk book, but I have read and enjoyed some of writer Rainbow Rowell’s other work, including on Marvel’s Runaways (on which I think she’s the best writer the book has had so far), so I can’t blame her too much. I’d wager that this scene was crafted with the idea one of the loser supervillains would whistle as Jen and Rocket Racer’s name was picked almost at random from some list of potential loser supervillains. It’s like someone going through a book of stickers and finding which sticker they want to add to a page. Bob is just a sticker here. I know that writers can’t care about ever character, and Bob is definitely a character that almost nobody cares about. But he matters to me, so if I’m gonna continue logging my thoughts on this character on my website, I obviously had to register my complaint here, where nobody will care.