I already did a Rocket Racer update last week, but this is an emergency! It has been brought to my attention that Marvel is doing crossovers with Magic: The Gathering and they forgot their main guy. Don’t worry though, I took care of it:

I admit, there’s a bit of an issue. I know even less about Magic: The Gathering than I did about Marvel Snap when I heroically designed the Rocket Racer card for that. But I put about half an hour of research into this, so I’m pretty sure this is perfect.

I gave him First Strike and Haste because he’s fast. His whole deal is he rides on a rocket-powered skateboard, so if we don’t represent that, what are we doing here? So I looked up other guys who have those powers to see what kind of casting cost and those whatever little stats at the bottom are they’re likely to have. I erred on the side of a lower stats, but gave him the ability to fly while he’s attacking. If it was all-the-time flying that would risk making him too powerful and this just feels more interesting to me, someone who doesn’t play the game and can’t know if it actually is more interesting or not.

I’ve listed him as a “human mercenary hero” to show that this is his desperate-for-cash era, where he strikes out against capitalism in a way I deem heroic, but which is strictly speaking for profit.

I couldn’t get everything I want into the card, but I see that M:TG will give legendary figures multiple cards to explore different aspects of their character. Once they pay me for this one, I’ll come up with another card that focuses on Bob’s engineering side.

I noticed that Marvel had a comic come out today called Amazing Spider-Man #1000 and though I haven’t been a regular reader of Spider-Man in a long time, I thought it might be nice to see the most important Marvel Universe get celebrated, and this might just be a book in which that happens. And I was right! The Rocket Racer is in there!

I just had this idea that a milestone issue like this could do a scene where we get all sorts of cameos of characters who have appeared over the years, so I was happy to see the panel above. And to be clear, that is the only panel in which Bob appears. But what a panel! What a reveal! In the Marvel Universe, there is going to be a Rocket Racer movie? I need more details!

Look, I know this is a joke, I know that. It’s just funny that a character as silly as people think the Rocket Racer is would have a movie. I know. But I also take the character more seriously than anyone else. As I’ve said before, there is nothing in the character of the Rocket Racer more inherently silly than there is in Batman or Captain America or most other supposed “cool” characters in the genre. If we treat the character seriously, we can be amused by his situations and care about what happens in the stories. So here I go.

Possibilities:

1. This is good for Bob.
2. This is bad for Bob.

If this is a good scenario for our hero, what does that mean? Well, it means he’s getting some respect. Bob is someone who likes to show off and joke around while he’s doing his thing and he has been a bit performative about his antics (getting into fights for money while rich people watched) more than once in the past. Note that the billboard makes no mention of an actor portraying Bob and Spider-Man identifies it as “Rocket Racer’s movie career” so to me sounds like he’s talking about the guy he knows being in that there movie. This movie is not only about Bob, but stars Bob (could be sort of half documentary, half action film). I think this is the best chance to show off that he has ever had and it could very well be bringing in much-needed money to his family.

If this is a bad scenario, it could be something that Bob doesn’t want. In spite of (or, probably, because of) his desire to show off, any time he fails, Bob takes it hard. Maybe he doesn’t want this movie to happen but someone has forced him into it. It could be a thing where he needs to maintain the rights to his costumed identity. It could be that he’s being forced into it by threats to his family. Basically, I’m saying there could be a villain or worse a corporation that is making this happen and Bob isn’t getting much profit from it at all. What if the time he was consulting She-Hulk for legal advice, he was trying to stop this from happening? And whether he thinks it is good or bad, how is he gonna take it when it inevitably flops?

We don’t know. Nothing in this story tells us. I think we will mostly only be able to infer what happened here by where Bob is in life the next time we see him. I, for one, can’t wait.

But my favourite part is Parker admitting “I can’t even remember if we left it as friends or enemies.” I genuinely think that Bob falls into a tier of person that Peter knows where they aren’t quite close enough to be real friends and Peter thinks they are “lame” enough that he will make jokes at their expense. Look at what he did to Will O’ The Wisp after all. Peter likes Bob when he helps him, but otherwise barely thinks of him unless they have to fight. This is accurate.

Okay, obviously this has been the Summer of Sleepwalker, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to think about Marvel’s most important character.

As of right now, the Rocket Racer and Sleepwalker have not met. What does PDR, a fan of both characters, think about that? PDR thinks that’s fine. Not all characters in a shared universe should meet one another. If every superhero goes to parties with every other superhero, it makes the universe feel small and I don’t like that. My opinion is that there is no great reason that the worlds of Sleepwalker and the Rocket Racer need to cross over.

Okay, but that’s not much of a post. What if PDR was REQUIRED to make a story where the two of them crossed over? The way I see it, we have two options: A retro-style story set in between the comics from the ’90s, or one in the Marvel Universe of today.

For the former, we’d want it to fit into the early days of Sleepwalkers comics, when things were episodic. In that era Sleepy was not well trusted at that point and Bob was taking jobs as a bounty hunter, so lets say someone puts a bounty on the strange green alien guy and Bob goes for it. There would have to be a flying chase scene. Maybe Sleepy could use his warpbeam on Bob’s skateboard, which brings Bob to despair. When he explains to the alien that he needs the board to make money and support his family, Sleepwalker can help Bob and then Bob lets him go. It’s an easy standalone story.

But what would I do in the present? Gotta go with a miniseries. I’d want it to be kind of cyberpunk, since that’s my take on Rocket Racer, but with the supernatural weirdness of a Sleepwalker story. With that in mind, let’s say that a massive tech company is using some kind of otherworldly power generate their “augmented reality” tech, and it acts the way so many comics from the ’90s thought virtual reality could, and alters the physical world. And let’s say they have some equivalent of a data center that is absolutely wrecking some town.

Rocket Racer wants the tech for himself, both for financial reasons and to stick it to the company in question, and so he is doing a heist that involves hacking into some kind of cyberspace scenario. Meanwhile, Rick Sheridan and Sleepwalker have come to town to investigate the weirdness. In the standard tradition, the heroes tangle at first, but then realize they need to come together against the baddies. Let’s reveal that the rich idiot running the company wants to rewrite reality in a manner more suitable to his preferences and now he has a reality distortion field that makes him the big villain of the story.

Throw in a supporting cast of townsfolk who oppose the data center and some weird cybernetic monsters for everybody to fight. I’m sure there’s a way to tie Rick’s love of movies into the cyberspace stuff. Finally, I may not love when this happens, but we could probably pull off a climax where the heroes are fighting the villain in a big special effects landscape, but it kinda makes sense given the cyberspace setting. In the end, probably Bob gets his hands on the tech and wants to use it to better the world, but someone else (maybe the villain’s downtrodden assistant?) snatches it and uses it to erase the otherworldly power-source itself. In the end, Bob isn’t any better off personally, but he and Rick and Sleepwalker get to enjoy the townspeople’s celebrations.

It could work. There are wrinkles to iron out, but it could be made into something. Maybe I don’t think these characters should cross over, but it wouldn’t be unworkable.

I’ve given thoughts on Rocket Racer’s villain who is way more popular than he is but how about we discuss a villain who was created as if to be Bob’s arch-nemesis, but has not caught on as such.

This guy here: Skinhead.

This is/was Eddie Cross. He was a Neo-Nazi asshole who was leading a white power group causing trouble at the university that Bob was attending. Bob wanted to beat the heck out of him, but Spider-Man kept showing up to say “Don’t do that!” so Bob and Spidey fought over whether beating up the Nazi was good or bad and then they accidentally spilled some experimental chemicals on the asshole. Those chemicals turned Cross into a big shapeshifty flesh blob (more details here). Bob blamed himself (Spider-Man never really seemed to blame himself much and he’s the one who MADE the chemicals. Which also means Peter Parker could probably be able to reproduce this origin and create more flesh blob guys if the wanted).

When you’re trying to create an enemy for a superhero, it’s about the contrast, right? Bob is a Black man, Eddie Cross is a violent racist. They both spent time hanging out in junkyards, Bob to find parts for his feats of engineering, Eddie as a place to hang out with his Nazi pals away from the eyes of society. Both are college students with complicated family relationships. Their differences and similarities could have provided fuel for many stories. And Bob blames himself Skinhead’s origin, so it’s got the kind of personal stakes they’d want if this was a movie. You’d think that Rocket Racer and Skinhead would clash all the time.

And so Bob does try to investigate Skinhead and put an end to his rampage. He gets knocked out and Spider-Man shows up to save the day. But don’t worry, Skinhead shows up again and Bob is nearby to do something about it! He doesn’t have his gear that time, though, so all he does about it is meet the superhero Captain Marvel (the Monica Rambeau one) and give her the exposition she needs to handle the problem.

So Skinhead has been taken out twice, never by Rocket Racer. Oh well.

You can tell a lot about someone, I assume, by what kindsa stuff they gots in their room. We have only ONCE in all his nearly fifty years of existence seen a room that we could call Rocket Racer’s room. Well, let’s take a look at it.

First, it’s worth noting that this is in Brooklyn, which is where Bob was born and raised, but not where his family actually lived when he became the Rocket Racer. This is definitely not the small apartment the family lived in when Spider-Man came to visit. I suspect it may not be an apartment at all. I have to assume that at some point Bob made enough money as Rocket Racer to invest in a secret lair. Maybe it’s one of those ones that looks like an abandoned warehouse outside, or maybe it’s an old garage, who knows? All we know is its in Brooklyn.

Now, this is Rocket Racer’s room, sure, but it isn’t his bedroom. This is the room where he kept his mother while she was in a coma. We don’t actually know much about this period in Bob’s life. Emma has had health problems as long as we’ve known her, but last time we saw her she was up and about, and the last time Bob brought her up to a friend he said she had “good days and bad” and those bad days must have got more common, because suddenly she’s in a coma. What we know is that Bob was not able or willing (presumably because of finances) to keep her in a hospital, so he has her in a rigged-up situation at his secret lair. It’s not ideal, and I’m sure he knows it. Incidentally, where are the other Farrell kids during this era? We don’t know! They tell us almost nothing about them ever, so this is no different. I assume that the second sibling (let’s call him Josh) has reached adulthood by this point and is taking care of the kids. Probably there’s friction between Josh and Bob.

But that’s not this room! Let’s look around the room!
We’ve got:

• Blueprints and tools. Half-finished projects in progress.
• A lot of racing stuff. Magazines, model cars, a poster.
• Model planes as well. And vehicles that are either models or toys (A-Team van, Optimus Prime). Whatever that spaceship is.
• A bunch of Japanese-inspired media (the Mazinger Z poster, Optimus again, probably that little chibi-style mech toy).
• Unpaid bills (seen in the one other panel with this room.

So what do we learn from this? Bob’s a broke nerdy guy who likes racing. Alright, thanks, PDR. Definitely breaking news with this one.

Okay, maybe there’s nothing surprising here. But hey, that’s the point of the creators decorating the room this way: it’s shows Bob’s character. I like it.