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.

This one time, one of Spider-Man’s villains (it was a Mysterio, for posterity) wanted to know Spider-Man’s secret identity so badly that he kidnapped a bunch of people who know Spider-Man and stuck them all in a machine that combined their memories and personalities and stuff to create an illusory virtual world. But one of those people, Flash Thompson, apparently had a personality so strong it overwhelmed the illusion and created a fantasy world in which he and Spider-Man were a heroic team of heroes. Et cetera, et cetera, amen, this ends with Flash imagining his wedding day and it getting attacked by a bunch of supervillains.

One of those supervillains is the Rocket Racer.

And look, he’s wearing a neat silver version of his suit and board. I prefer the yellow and red, but I admit it’s neat to see him in a different way for a change. The question that arises is, why is Rocket Racer a silver-clad criminal in this fantasy? It’s a world made up of the combined minds of a bunch of people Spider-Man knows, so who there provided this imaginary version of Bob? The story is a bit vague about who is in the machine. We know for sure it includes Flash Thompson, Peter Parker and MJ and Aunt May, Jonah Jameson and his wife Marla, Robbie Robertson, Jill Stacy, and at least one other guy I don’t see identified. But there’s also tubes in the machine that could imply several more people. Basically, I don’t think I can actually narrow it down based on that information. It’s all supposition.

But, in the real world, at this time Bob is a good guy, harmlessly trying to get through university. Peter, at the very least, would know that. My instinct is to just blame it on Jameson. That guy’s always judging people, but usually he’s more concerned with masked vigilantes than the likes of a publicly-known figure like Bob. And the Daily Bugle ran a feature about Bob’s life story once, so surely he’s aware that Bob is actually a good guy (That goes for Robbie too). That still leaves us with too many suspects.

I could, perhaps, argue that one of the unseen people in the machine we don’t get to see if Bob himself. He’s known to be a Spider-Man ally and could on a villain’s list of people to be kidnapped, right? If he were in that machine, imagining some other world, would he cast himself in the role of a criminal out of some kind self-hatred? Possible, but I’d need even one single more bit of confirmation before I committed to that reading.

We’ll never know who imagined Bob to be a baddie during the period in his life when he was most on the side of “the law”, but I guess we can probably just assume it’s Aunt May’s fault. Maybe she just confuses him with the Silver Surfer.

Also, I need to address it: by the rules (such as they are) of Marvel’s multiverse, they say that any reality that can be imagined is real out there somewhere in infinity. I’ve always found that silly, but that’s how they roll, and at some point they designated this world as Earth-99727, so this counts as a Into The Rocket-Verse post. I have to wonder what the life of this version of Bob is like as if he exists as a real person. Well, I’m gonna say that both the fact he’s wearing silver and that he’s an actual supervillain (not for hire or nothin’, he’s just attacking the good guy’s wedding here) indicate that his lust for wealth has overcome his good sense. And Spider-Man and Flash have probably foiled his schemes so often that now he’s degenerated into a standard “out for revenge” type of villain. A truly tragic specimen of Alternate Bob Farrell.

Of course even if, on that world, we can accept that Spider-Man is not Peter Parker, but some person whose identity is as-yet unrevealed, we also have to assume that when Rocket Racer and a bunch of his criminal allies attacked Flash Thompson’s wedding, the whole affair did NOT end with them realizing their reality was fake, but continued on in some other way and that this silver Rocket Racer probably got beat up or something.