If you had to ask me “Which superhero or villain is the closest friend to Rocket Racer?” I’d obviously have to reply the Prowler. They’ve been friends in a bunch of comics. But Bob’s relationship with Prowler is a topic for some other post. Today I’m talking about the best friend Rocket Racer has that we’ve barely been shown: Antoine Delsoin, the Hypno-Hustler!

Bob and Antoine first appeared together in a story that is likely the worst story in Rocket Racer’s limited history of appearances. But I won’t hold that against the relationship between the two characters.

When we first see Bob and Antoine as a pair, they are in prison together, and join a “crew” assembled by the criminal known as Tombstone (also, Big Ben is there, but we don’t need to worry about him now). We’re not told if this is the first time Bob and Antoine have met, but they don’t seem to get along well. I posit maybe they knew each other and even worked together, got caught, and blame each other. That would certainly cause some tension between them.

That story came and went until, suddenly, fourteen years later, another comic depicted the two together. This time, it was just a single panel (but a better comic). Bob and Antoine, both out of prison at this point, were just talking about developments in the superhero/villain community. We have no way to know if this was their first time catching up since prison, or if they’ve stayed in touch all along.

But what I do know is that Bob and Antoine make a good pair of friends. Antoine, like Bob, is a low-level supercrook who is pretty ridiculous on the surface and is routinely mocked for it. The main difference between them is that Antoine is never embarrassed by it. In his way, Antoine has a lot more self-respect than Bob. He’s more socially active, he is comfortable being himself, and unlike Bob, Antoine definitely fucks.

They’re a great contrasting pair. I’d like to see their relationship continue to shine in what few appearances these chumps get. Heck, make ’em roommates, sharing a supervillain lair because neither makes enough to afford one on their own.

I mean, why not?

We know that Bob Farrell’s career as a super-skateboarding outlaw was motivated by noble desires to help his community, and we can tell that, when things are going well for him he absolutely loves rocketboarding around and having rocket adventures.

But when things are not going well for him, the first thing he does is insult himself and imply his Rocket Racer setup is as stupid as everyone thinks it is. On multiple occasions he has downplayed his technological accomplishments, claiming they’re goofy or childish.

So why hasn’t Bob changed his superheroic identity? Why not design new equipment that’s edgy and cool and not skateboard-themed? Well, I have my ideas, but unless I get to tell those stories I don’t need to let them out right now. But really, when he’s in a good mood about it all, he doesn’t mind that he looks goofy. He’s having a ball. When he does dislike it, he wants out of the whole super-scene, so why bother recreating his identity to something else? He’s either the Rocket Racer or he’s not playing.

In issue number 104 of Spectacular Spider-Man, in which Peter Parker for the first time takes an interest in Rocket Racer as a person instead of just as a punching bag, he learns that Robert Farrell is really smart.

It’s absolutely the sort of thing I want in a Rocket Racer story. Bright young man ruined by the society he lives in and his attempts to better things get him painted as a criminal. My only problem with this is the comparison to Reed Richards. For those not in the know, Reed is Marvel’s superest super-scientist. He’s the type who can do ANYTHING science-related as if by magic. Create a spaceship? Open a gateway to another dimension? Hypnotize aliens into thinking they’re cows? Sure. And what do you want him to do in the afternoon? All fields of science are open to Reed Richards.

Bob doesn’t need to be THAT smart. I like him better at a more realistic (for comics) depiction of a super-scientist. Let him be more comparable to Peter himself. Bob should be good at aerodynamics and engineering and computers, but if you need him to do stuff chemistry or botany or whatever, let that be outside of his scope of knowledge. I am Rocket Racer’s biggest fan and I’d hate to see him trapped in the “Smartest Man On Earth” pit that people like Iron Man fall into. I can say this: Any character who Marvel has claimed to be “one of the smartest people on Earth” is not someone I care for.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s another good take on this whole thing in an issue of the Ta-Nahisi Coates run on Black Panther. A supervillain named Thunderball (a personal favourite from his appearances in Damage Control) is lamenting that before getting into the dumb villainy gig, he was a respected scientist, known as “the Black Bruce Banner” to some. T’Challa, the Black Panther, notes that the “prisons heave with Black Bruce Banners.” So many people who had so much potential, wasted because of the system in which they live.

Super-scientists like Reed Richards are great for big cosmic-scaled tales, but Rocket Racer’s story belongs at street level. He’s a genius, but his focus is on struggling against society in a valiant effort to make things better for his loved ones. Reed Richards could probably destroy capitalism overnight if he wanted to. Bob needs to struggle. If we want a character similar to Bob to play on the grander scale, use Thunderball! This is an amusing request because Thunderball has probably thrice the appearances that Racer does and is infinitely more likely be be used in a comic than Bob is, but I’m still right.

Incidentally, while seeking images for this post (I need something better than pictures of comics taken by my phone, after all), I went to an illicit site featuring comics scans. There, beneath the scans of the issue of Spectacular Spider-Man, was a four-year-old comment saying “Somehow, I liked Rocket Racer better when they weren’t trying to make him sympathetic, and he was just a two-bit punk. Now, he’s going to turn into a hero soon enough. Ugh.” and “And what is this about Rocket Racer making his gear in a junkyard? I could have sworn in his earlier appearances it was mentioned that the Tinkerer provided his gear based on his specifications.” I’m not going to engage with an ancient comment in that shady corner of the Internet, but I’ll sure as heck do it here on mine: Spectacular Spider-Man #104 is Racer’s fourth appearance. Appearances two and three both included his mother’s illness in the plot. The first appearance was four pages long and included the fact that he made his own equipment. If this were a comment about modern comics, I’d be sure the commenter was just being a racist bemoaning “wokeness” ruining the genre. As it is, I just have to assume they’re an idiot who has out-sized nostalgia for the cover to Amazing Spider-Man #172. So, that’s my rebuttal to some jerk on the Internet. This is why you’re not supposed to read comments on the Internet, especially not on illegal scan sites.

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’ve already gone over his career history, but want to make it clear that Bob Farrell’s motivation to act as the super-criminal called the Rocket Racer is less because he’s a “bank robbing supervillain” kind of criminal and more that he’s a “Robin Hood Noble Outlaw” kind of criminal. He’s not just robbing for his own benefit, and he’s not just robbing to help his poor family (though that would be enough to put him on the path to noble criminality already). Bob wants to be, or at least wanted to be, someone who would target rich victims and would redistribute wealth to his entire community.

The earliest of Bob’s crimes we know is stealing bonds and securities from Wall Street people, an obvious target when “robbing from the rich”. In his second appearance he’s already gotten into the crime-for-hire game and his first employer is an embezzler who had mistreated workers, so Bob blackmailed him for more money. When Bob is finally captured and put on trial we’re shown that the judge was lenient because of Bob’s “strong ties to the community” and that community was full of people willing to help him pay his bail for as long as they could. If the community loves Bob that much, he must have been doing something for them.

We don’t have a lot of specifics on Bob’s crimes after that, but we know that he quit for a time and what brought him back was seeing Spider-Man wrongfully accused of crimes and wanting to set that right. Trying to right an injustice like that is also very Robin Hood in style. After that, most of Bob’s career is spent on the mercenary side of the aisle, if not the “superhero” side, and we know what money he gets goes to his family and his schooling, but maybe some still goes to other people.

We know that Bob’s attempts at actually being a superhero have never really come to anything and he’s been seen doing crimes again. Nobody has bothered to focus on Bob in a long time, so we don’t know the details. I like to think that he just realized that punching things as a superhero doesn’t do the kind of good he wants to do. So he’s back to robbing, and hopefully his targets are still rich assholes.

(We can’t ignore the fact that Bob also grew to love the power and adrenaline involved with the super-criminal line of work. But that’s a discussion for another day.)