There was a brief period in which Bob Farrell was depicted as a stutterer. It came out of nowhere during the Supervillain Team-Up/MODOK’s Eleven miniseries. Bob hadn’t been depicted as a stutterer in the decades he’d appeared before that, in fact he was often a fast-talking type. And he’s not been depicted as one since either, though that is mostly because he’s been lucky to get a line in any appearance since. Here are my thoughts on the Rocket Racer’s stutter:

It comes, as I say, out of nowhere. I can’t get behind it as an actual element of the character. But I do get it. It’s part of an attempt to lean into a “nerd” thing with Bob, trying to give him some personality that helps him to stand out among an ensemble cast. Writer Fred Van Lente also wrote an other-continuity Bob as having a stutter (in a story I’ll try to cover soon), so one thing is clear to me: Van Lente thought about Bob Farrell’s personality and role. He’s not just randomly picking Bob and pasting him there like a sticker in a book. I respect that.

I don’t care for stutters being generally considered to be a “nerd” thing, but I do think Bob being painted as a “nerdy” personality works. That said, I actually don’t think we need to have Bob as the kind of person who grew up with a stutter. Sure, that character type can be useful, even representational for young people with a stutter, but I feel like we can do something with Bob more in keeping with his history up to that point. The Supervillain Team-Up story comes after Bob has spent time in prison, after he was blown up by the Punisher, and after his mother’s illness has worsened and she’s fallen into a coma. I think it would be much more interesting to have Bob’s stutter be the result of all this trauma and injury, showing the consequences of what a man like Bob goes through in a genre where most of the characters are winners and, he’s just not.

(And, just for the record, Marvel does have at least one young Black man who grew up with a stutter, to represent that group: Cloak, of Cloak and Dagger fame, fits that bill perfectly.)

I’ve seen people on the Internet talking about Marvel Snap a lot over the last few months, so I felt like I should check it out. It’s pretty neat. I like a simplistic, quick-to-play card game, and the fact I can’t communicate with the other players makes me forget they are real people. All good. But there is one glaring mistake that I have already said in the title of this post: they managed to make this whole game and they haven’t put Rocket Racer in it!

Well, what am I here for if not to fix problems like that? I found a website that allows one to make custom Marvel Snap cards to do the hard part of making it look like is should (though I added a Rocket Racer logo image as it appeared in a comic I talked about a few posts back). And then I used my extensive knowledge of the character and passable knowledge of the game to come up with:

What you see here is Rocket Racer. He’s a mere 1 Power card, which means he is quite weak, sure, but that’s in keeping with Bob’s track record. I don’t think anyone will argue with that.

He’s also a 1 Cost card, which means he could be played on the first turn if you happen to draw him. Appropriate for a speed-based character, but not as good as, for example, Quicksilver who is guaranteed to be in your starting hand. Bob is fast, but not the fastest.

But what I like most if the power I’ve identified for him. When you draw him from your deck and put him in your hand, you get +1 Energy (or whatever the thing you use to pay a card’s Cost is called). I like this because it means you could use that Energy to play Bob right away, again emphasizing the speed with which he’d enter the field, or you could use that Energy to do something else, which is evocative of his being useful as perhaps a tech guy and helping the team to do other things. This card treats Rocket Racer as someone slightly useful. That’s exactly the right space for him.

I think you will all agree that this is a flawless Rocket Racer Marvel Snap card. It’s so perfect that I can legally state that if this card showed up in the game with these exact mechanics I couldn’t even claim to have created it, because anyone who was trying to make a Rocket Racer card would have come up with the same thing. Legally.

Anyway, I will leave it to the multitude of Marvel Snap players and Rocket Racer fans who visit my website to start the petitions to get this card into the game.

It has happened again! By which I mean that Rocket Racer has appeared in a real comic again. My people informed me that Bob made an appearance in the latest issue of She-Hulk, so I had to check it out. Like last time it is a single-panel appearance. But whereas last time I was able to say it fit well with my take on the character, this time I find this:

The scene is thus: the titular She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters, attorney for super-people, walks into her office. A bunch of people are there waiting for appointments, including the Rocket Racer! Bob gives a wolf-whistle at the sight of Jennifer, so she says she’ll accept any client first except him.

Obviously I don’t like to see Bob as a catcalling prick. That’s not the kind of guy he’s usually been. I accept that he’s a criminal and he has certainly endangered innocent lives with his crimes. I don’t need him to be some paragon of virtue. But his crimes aren’t the same thing as sexual harassment. And I have to add for the record, Bob has even met She-Hulk before when he worked alongside her and some of the other Avengers. She was wearing considerably less then and Bob reacted perfectly normally. Here’s she looks good, but it’s just a dress and she usually wears the equivalent of a swimsuit. The idea that she’d walk into a room and Bob would be unable to control himself doesn’t fit with the man we’ve seen before.

Of course, I won’t lie, my main concern is how it conflicts with my “head-canon” wish to see Bob revealed to be asexual. I’ve discussed it before . There is no direct proof that Bob is asexual within the comics, but my desire for more Ace representation and the fact there also no direct proof that Bob is not asexual have caused me see it as an ideal choice. But now there’s this scene where he objectifies a woman just because she walks past him in, what I maintain is a nice-looking but perfectly normal dress, that I have to contend with. I don’t care for that.

I haven’t been reading this She-Hulk book, but I have read and enjoyed some of writer Rainbow Rowell’s other work, including on Marvel’s Runaways (on which I think she’s the best writer the book has had so far), so I can’t blame her too much. I’d wager that this scene was crafted with the idea one of the loser supervillains would whistle as Jen and Rocket Racer’s name was picked almost at random from some list of potential loser supervillains. It’s like someone going through a book of stickers and finding which sticker they want to add to a page. Bob is just a sticker here. I know that writers can’t care about ever character, and Bob is definitely a character that almost nobody cares about. But he matters to me, so if I’m gonna continue logging my thoughts on this character on my website, I obviously had to register my complaint here, where nobody will care.

I did a whole post about how I think the mild connection shown between the Rocket Racer and the Hypno-Hustler is probably indicative of a larger friendship taking place off the page. But, believe it or not, there is actually another super-character with whom Bob Farrell has struck up a friendship:

The Prowler, whose real name is Hobie Brown, is another Black character from Spider-Man’s stories who straddles the line between hero and villain, though he is much more consistently on the hero side. He actually predates Bob by nearly a hundred issues and has appeared a lot more often. And you can tell why: his costume just looks awesome (I mean, not in the picture I picked for this post, but that’s because I thought it’d be funnier to use that one). So, while Bob is a skateboarding weirdo that comics readers find goofy, Hobie is a cool-looking mofo.

Here’s the thing: if we ignore all the comics where Bob only appears for a panel or two in some cameo role, about a third of his appearances have also been appearances of the Prowler. The two met when they both came to Spider-Man’s aid. They both got jobs working for Silver Sable, and when that job ended they both tried to work together to find other sources of income. Work friends who went on to become real friends. It’s nice because they offer different angles on similar life paths. Hobie comes across as a little older than Bob, though that may just be because he’s married, but they both had monetary issues that led them to use engineering skills to resort to create gizmos that can help them do crimes.

Hobie’s life has veered away from Bob’s in more recent years, but not in a way that I think would prevent their friendship from continuing. I mostly only know this from Wikipedia and such, but it sounds like Hobie has maybe died and been cloned, I guess? And his Prowler identity has been usurped by another character (when the Miles Morales Spider-Man came along, they decided that his uncle should be the new Prowler, which is dumb, but I can confirm he was pretty cool in Into The Spider-Verse.) so he took up a different identity, the Hornet. It does, I admit, seem like Spider-Man is closer to Hobie than he is to Bob, which is why Hobie gets to show up more often. Anyway, even if Peter doesn’t feel the need to check in on Bob, I like to hope that Hobie does.

(Just as an aside, it isn’t the same Hobie, so we don’t know if he’s friends with a version of Bob or not, but it’s neat to note that in an alternate universe Hobie has spider powers and has taken the identity of Spider-Punk.)

I’ve mentioned it before and I don’t deny it: Rocket Racer is goofy. But what makes people mock him in a way they don’t mock other goody superhero stuff like Batman or Captain America? Well, I have thoughts on that.

First, I have to remind you that characters like Batman and Captain America WERE mocked until relatively recently, at least outside of specific fans of superhero stories. The only thing that allowed them to move into the acceptance of more mainstream audiences is that they get to be in good stories. If people take a characters seriously and tell good stories with them, the audience will see the qualities that the storytellers see in the character and maybe come to agree. Nobody has really had the chance to do that for Bob yet.

But also, I think it’s the wheels. For some reason people find those things goofy. Iron Man once in the early had a suit of armour that had retractable wheels and people have mocked that on the Internet for some time. I’ve seen it on lists alongside Super-Ventriloquism as silly superhero shit best left forgotten. But why? It’s wheels. They’re one of the most significant inventions this species has managed. In any case, those wheels were forgotten and I bet if they have been mentioned at all in the last few decades, it’s been to mock them.

But Bob’s whole deal is he’s got an identity based around skateboards, so he has to have wheels, right? Well, not really. There have been attempts to give him a “hoverboard” style board instead. I can see the appeal, but at the same time, I’m not ashamed of how goofy Bob is on his normal board. I actually prefer it when his skateboard looks as much like a skateboard as possible while still looking like a piece of sci-fi equipment.

The solution here is obviously the same one that didn’t work for Iron Man when he tried it: retractable wheels. I’d want Bob to have his wheels as often as possible, he’s skating not flying, but the idea of the wheels going up now and then like landing gear appeals to me given it is evocative of Bob’s aborted stint in the Air Force.

As for the rest of it, I can say that at least one person, yours truly, takes the Rocket Racer seriously and would love to explore the experience of being a loser in a world that only considers you as valuable as you are successful. Would the stories be good? I don’t know, but they’d take the character seriously while still presenting him as a guy on a sci-fi skateboard with wheels.