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.