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 bit 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.
