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.)

Of all the Rocket Racers in the Marvel Multiverse, this is one:

This is all that we get of this guy. In this story the main Marvel Universe Deadpool is speaking about what he might be like in other alternate timelines where he made different life choices. In this case he wonders what would have happened if he was not driven by money, but was instead a superhero idol. While to regular Deadpool this is a hypothetical, he doesn’t mention any of the details we’re seeing (Black Cat, the symbiote, Bob himself), so one has to assume this is a glimpse into a distant corner of the Multiverse we’re seeing because it matches Deadpool’s wonderings.

So we have a single-page glimpse of that universe and in that single page glimpse, Rocket Racer is hanging out in the background. It ain’t much to go on, is it? Well, allow me to go on about it a lot.

First of all, what is Bob doing here? The main action is Deadpool and Black Cat fighting Modok and his AIM henchmen while Spider-Man follows like a fanboy of Deadpool. Fair enough. But then there’s three people who are loser criminals in the Marvel Universe, Rocket Racer, the Big Wheel (mostly covered by word balloons), and the Clown. The Clown is visibly fighting AIM, so he’s on Deadpool’s side. The Big Wheel seems to be opposing AIM as well, in a way that could appear unintentional but I am taking as a sign that he is also alongside Deadpool. Bob is kind of just watching, but his angle suggests he is storming the AIM goons alongside the Big Wheel. Pretty clearly, Deadpool has led these guys to this fight. In this universe he is a hero and this is his team. These guys are crimefighters here.

It’s notable that Bob here seems to just be hanging from the wall like a weirdo, his feet on a strange piece of some-thing-or-other that happens to be affixed there. But that is obviously supposed to be some kind of rocket skateboard that has been miscoloured and now blends into the wall.

Our regular Bob in the Marvel Universe has a history with the Big Wheel, who only came into being because of Bob. I have apparently not done a post about him yet, but I will. Bob has also had minimal revealed connections with Deadpool, and even the one we do know of is of dubious canonicity. It’s kind of a surprise to me that Bob’s not known to have crossed paths with Deadpool. He’s the exact kind of character a Deadpool writer would misuse to take cheap shots at, and Deadpool had a team called the Mercs For Money on which Bob would have definitely fit in.

In fact, I’ll say right now: if Marvel wants a new Mercs For Money book, let me at it! It’s a more likely place for Rocket Racer to find an audience than most of my other ideas.

It’s perfectly in keeping with Rocket Racer’s luck that his supervillain arch-nemesis is a character who has appeared about three times as often as Bob has. And who also first appeared almost a decade before Bob. And who really only tangled with Bob twice. Okay, really, it’s a bit of a stretch to say Speed Demon is really Bob’s arch-nemesis, but the two times they encountered each other they really did get under each other’s skin.

It makes sense too. Rocket Racer and Speed Demon are both guys who go fast and they’re both the types who enjoy it and love showboating and stuff. They’re kinda similar, really. The difference is that Bob built all his tech himself and Speed Demon was just some chemist who was seemingly chosen at random by a cosmic entity to receive the ability to move at superhuman speeds. It feels right that Bob’s rival would be a capable but a little dumb guy who got his powers by chance and decided to be a dick with them.

Bob and Speed Demon clashed in the era when Bob was trying to be a hero as a job. That all fell through, so Bob is now often back on the wrong side of the law again. And, outside of the fictional universe, each character is the type who I can imagine on a list of criminals that some Spider-Man writer would choose from to assemble a crowd scene. I could easily see Rocket Racer and Speed Demon being on the same random gathering of criminals robbing a bank or something, like stickers being placed in an activity book. If it happens, I can only hope Speed Demon continues to annoy Rocket Racer. It’s fun.

I haven’t posted many Rocket Racer Thoughts since 2024, but that’s not because I haven’t been thinking them, I’ve just had other things I had to do (including doing some minor Rocket Racer work elsewhere on the Internet that will be discussed next year). But I want to get at least one official Bob Farrell post on the site in 2025, so here I go:

A Rocket Racer Video Game Would Be Cool

You start with an open world New York, like in those Spider-Man games that are so popular. It’d be very possible to create a more mission-based setup with each being a well-crafted location for skateboarding, but in this hypothetical I want an open world game. And the thing about those games, I assume, is that it is fun to swing around like Spider-Man. Having to get around in an open world game is tedious if you don’t have a fun way to travel. Well, you know what has been a fun way to get around in a bunch of video games over the years? Skateboarding! And you know who can not just skateboard like normal, but he has a rocket-powered skateboard that lets him go straight up buildings and even fly. That’s fun.

So we have an Open World NYC that you traverse on your rocketboard. It already seems like fun to me (admittedly a man who doesn’t play games like this). But what next? Well, I figure there’s two kinds of currencies in the game: Money and Respect. Money you get by doing missions. There ought to be a wealth of side-quests where you can rob banks or catch bounties or any of the things that Bob usually does when he needs money. Apart from taking care of your family (which would need to at least be mentioned) money could probably be used to finance upgrades to your equipment and get new powers and stuff.

Respect would be about how the public sees you. The more you are respected, the better missions you can be hired for. A bank robbery you can probably do on your own, with no respect, but if you want to get hired for a cool casino heist that pays millions? For that you need to be impressive to potential hirers. And, for the record, I’d make a cheap way to earn respect to be performing stunt moves on your board in view of onlookers. You’re skating down the road and you do a cool flip, someone is gonna be impressed.

Story? I dunno, typical Rocket Racer stuff. There are probably factions (the mob, SHIELD or whatever, stuff like that) and you’re trying to make money by working for them. The more they respect you, the better the jobs they give out. Eventually you have to pick a side and probably betray the mob to work with SHIELD or vice versa. There’s gonna have to be personal stuff involving friends and family. Speed Demon could be a recurring foe. You want more detail than that, hire me? I’ll try to do a flip if that helps.