We know that Bob Farrell’s career as a super-skateboarding outlaw was motivated by noble desires to help his community, and we can tell that, when things are going well for him he absolutely loves rocketboarding around and having rocket adventures.

But when things are not going well for him, the first thing he does is insult himself and imply his Rocket Racer setup is as stupid as everyone thinks it is. On multiple occasions he has downplayed his technological accomplishments, claiming they’re goofy or childish.

So why hasn’t Bob changed his superheroic identity? Why not design new equipment that’s edgy and cool and not skateboard-themed? Well, I have my ideas, but unless I get to tell those stories I don’t need to let them out right now. But really, when he’s in a good mood about it all, he doesn’t mind that he looks goofy. He’s having a ball. When he does dislike it, he wants out of the whole super-scene, so why bother recreating his identity to something else? He’s either the Rocket Racer or he’s not playing.

In issue number 104 of Spectacular Spider-Man, in which Peter Parker for the first time takes an interest in Rocket Racer as a person instead of just as a punching bag, he learns that Robert Farrell is really smart.

It’s absolutely the sort of thing I want in a Rocket Racer story. Bright young man ruined by the society he lives in and his attempts to better things get him painted as a criminal. My only problem with this is the comparison to Reed Richards. For those not in the know, Reed is Marvel’s superest super-scientist. He’s the type who can do ANYTHING science-related as if by magic. Create a spaceship? Open a gateway to another dimension? Hypnotize aliens into thinking they’re cows? Sure. And what do you want him to do in the afternoon? All fields of science are open to Reed Richards.

Bob doesn’t need to be THAT smart. I like him better at a more realistic (for comics) depiction of a super-scientist. Let him be more comparable to Peter himself. Bob should be good at aerodynamics and engineering and computers, but if you need him to do stuff chemistry or botany or whatever, let that be outside of his scope of knowledge. I am Rocket Racer’s biggest fan and I’d hate to see him trapped in the “Smartest Man On Earth” pit that people like Iron Man fall into. I can say this: Any character who Marvel has claimed to be “one of the smartest people on Earth” is not someone I care for.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s another good take on this whole thing in an issue of the Ta-Nahisi Coates run on Black Panther. A supervillain named Thunderball (a personal favourite from his appearances in Damage Control) is lamenting that before getting into the dumb villainy gig, he was a respected scientist, known as “the Black Bruce Banner” to some. T’Challa, the Black Panther, notes that the “prisons heave with Black Bruce Banners.” So many people who had so much potential, wasted because of the system in which they live.

Super-scientists like Reed Richards are great for big cosmic-scaled tales, but Rocket Racer’s story belongs at street level. He’s a genius, but his focus is on struggling against society in a valiant effort to make things better for his loved ones. Reed Richards could probably destroy capitalism overnight if he wanted to. Bob needs to struggle. If we want a character similar to Bob to play on the grander scale, use Thunderball! This is an amusing request because Thunderball has probably thrice the appearances that Racer does and is infinitely more likely be be used in a comic than Bob is, but I’m still right.

Incidentally, while seeking images for this post (I need something better than pictures of comics taken by my phone, after all), I went to an illicit site featuring comics scans. There, beneath the scans of the issue of Spectacular Spider-Man, was a four-year-old comment saying “Somehow, I liked Rocket Racer better when they weren’t trying to make him sympathetic, and he was just a two-bit punk. Now, he’s going to turn into a hero soon enough. Ugh.” and “And what is this about Rocket Racer making his gear in a junkyard? I could have sworn in his earlier appearances it was mentioned that the Tinkerer provided his gear based on his specifications.” I’m not going to engage with an ancient comment in that shady corner of the Internet, but I’ll sure as heck do it here on mine: Spectacular Spider-Man #104 is Racer’s fourth appearance. Appearances two and three both included his mother’s illness in the plot. The first appearance was four pages long and included the fact that he made his own equipment. If this were a comment about modern comics, I’d be sure the commenter was just being a racist bemoaning “wokeness” ruining the genre. As it is, I just have to assume they’re an idiot who has out-sized nostalgia for the cover to Amazing Spider-Man #172. So, that’s my rebuttal to some jerk on the Internet. This is why you’re not supposed to read comments on the Internet, especially not on illegal scan sites.

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’ve already gone over his career history, but want to make it clear that Bob Farrell’s motivation to act as the super-criminal called the Rocket Racer is less because he’s a “bank robbing supervillain” kind of criminal and more that he’s a “Robin Hood Noble Outlaw” kind of criminal. He’s not just robbing for his own benefit, and he’s not just robbing to help his poor family (though that would be enough to put him on the path to noble criminality already). Bob wants to be, or at least wanted to be, someone who would target rich victims and would redistribute wealth to his entire community.

The earliest of Bob’s crimes we know is stealing bonds and securities from Wall Street people, an obvious target when “robbing from the rich”. In his second appearance he’s already gotten into the crime-for-hire game and his first employer is an embezzler who had mistreated workers, so Bob blackmailed him for more money. When Bob is finally captured and put on trial we’re shown that the judge was lenient because of Bob’s “strong ties to the community” and that community was full of people willing to help him pay his bail for as long as they could. If the community loves Bob that much, he must have been doing something for them.

We don’t have a lot of specifics on Bob’s crimes after that, but we know that he quit for a time and what brought him back was seeing Spider-Man wrongfully accused of crimes and wanting to set that right. Trying to right an injustice like that is also very Robin Hood in style. After that, most of Bob’s career is spent on the mercenary side of the aisle, if not the “superhero” side, and we know what money he gets goes to his family and his schooling, but maybe some still goes to other people.

We know that Bob’s attempts at actually being a superhero have never really come to anything and he’s been seen doing crimes again. Nobody has bothered to focus on Bob in a long time, so we don’t know the details. I like to think that he just realized that punching things as a superhero doesn’t do the kind of good he wants to do. So he’s back to robbing, and hopefully his targets are still rich assholes.

(We can’t ignore the fact that Bob also grew to love the power and adrenaline involved with the super-criminal line of work. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

To begin my grand project of talking about Rocket Racer incessantly, I should get the basic details out there. What follows is a history of the Rocket Racer, completely from memory. If I miss anything, expect me to get a whole post out of correcting it later in the year:

Robert Farrell was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father’s name has not been revealed, but his mother is Emma Johnson Farrell. His parents would go on to have six more children after Robert, Bob for short, so he had to help out a lot around the house. At a young age Bob developed a love of science, frequently winning school science fairs and such. A bright future seemed to be ahead of him.

At some point, apparently while Bob was in high school, his father left the family. The exact details of the matter are unrevealed, but it is known that Bob now sees his father as a failure, the kind who shirked his responsibilities. In the father’s absence Bob stepped up, taking jobs to help support the family. It seems like this is the era when the Farrell family left Brooklyn to live in Harlem. This setback surely hurt Bob’s potential for a career in science, but it wasn’t the final nail. After graduating high school, Bob joined the Air Force on the path to becoming an engineer. This career path was derailed, however, when Emma became deathly ill. Bob quit the academy to help support his family.

In his early twenties, supporting a family of six children while paying his mother’s medical bills wasn’t easy for Bob. Existing as he does in the Marvel Universe, it occurred to him to create a rocket-powered skateboard (using parts salvaged from a junkyard), as well as various other high-tech accoutrements, and begin a career as a super-criminal known as the Rocket Racer. This brought Bob into conflict with the masked vigilante Spider-Man, who stopped Bob mid-crime and left him on the hood of a police car. Bob spent at least some time in jail after this, but it wasn’t the end of his career by any means.

Learning more about NYC’s super-criminal underworld, Bob took his equipment to a man called the Tinkerer, who improved on his technology for a cut of 25% of any profit Racer made on his crimes. Bob would go on to attempt to blackmail an embezzler, which would result in another fight against Spider-Man, though this time Bob escaped. Bob continued his career for some time after this, but eventually Spider-Man and the police did capture him again. This time, the Rocket Racer went to trial for his crimes and faced a prison sentence, though the judge recognized that Bob was trying to support his family and had a lot of ties to his community. He was released on bail, which the family could only afford by going through a bail bondsman. Unfortunately, the bondsman was quite corrupt, intending to force super-criminals to do crimes for him. He also intended to ensure the loyalty of future criminals by making an example of what the Rocket Racer. He hired a “Bounty Hunter” with the intent to kill Bob. This time, the intervention of Spider-Man was to Bob’s benefit, as the vigilante stopped the Bounty Hunter and saved Bob’s life. Bob decided at this point to give up the career as Rocket Racer and go back to school.

And Bob would indeed wind up enrolling at Empire State University, but his super-career wasn’t over. When Spider-Man wound up in trouble, Bob felt he had to help out, so he got back into the Rocket Racer identity and teamed up with a group of people who wanted to help Spider-Man (including the Prowler, Puma, Will o’ the Wisp, and Sandman, with whom Bob would remain friends). After their success, this group would be offered a chance to do freelance super-mercenary work for a woman named Silver Sable.

In what may be the high point of Bob’s life, he balanced a career making legal money as the Rocket Racer with school. On one mission for Sable he encountered a small-town Sheriff, with whom he struck up a friendship, perhaps finding hope of a new father figure in his life. He even did some pro-bono superhero work, such as fighting neo-Nazis and even aliens and monsters. He was able to support his family and felt like his life was progressing in a positive direction. This would not, of course, last nearly long enough, as jobs with Sable eventually stopped coming. Bob turned to general bounty-hunting gigs. But even that wasn’t enough, so Bob and his friend Hobie Brown (the Prowler) tried to join a group called the Great Game, in which rich people would sponsor super-fighters to engage in combat for spectacle. Even though Bob and Hobie tried to fake their fight, it still ended badly when other combatants took the combat seriously.

Despite a lot of financial struggle (and one instance of a supposed friend trying to steal his Rocket Racer equipment), Bob did finally graduate thanks to student loans. The exact details of Bob’s criminal career after graduating are unknown, but he wound up in prison for real. And worse, it was a high-tech prison designed for supervillains, which was extremely cruel to the convicts, even using experimental techniques to modify their behaviour. When a rich person offered a chance for Bob to get out of prison (to again work as a performative supervillain on whose fights the elites could gamble) Bob took the opportunity. This again brought the Racer into conflict with Spider-Man and again, Bob tried to turn away from his life of crime after this.

When his friends Hobie, Will o’ the Wisp, and Puma all attended the wake for the supervillain known as Stilt-Man, Bob went with them, though not in his costume. Unfortunately, the wake was attacked by the vigilante known as the Punisher, who poisoned the attendees, then blew up the bar. Bob was nearly killed, but pulled through after some time in hospital. Bob’s mother, however, became ill once again, and lapsed into a coma. The exact details are as yet untold, but it seems that, rather than saddling his family with more of his mother’s medical bills, Bob took Emma away from them, possibly without their consent, and kept her alive on a life-support system in a supervillain-style warehouse lair in Brooklyn. It has to be assumed that at this point the youngest of the Farrell children are being raised by those who are just a little younger than Bob.

Bob was recruited by the supervillain MODOK into a vast cosmic heist scheme, but Bob sold out his fellow criminals to the law-enforcing organization SHIELD, though it is unclear if SHIELD ever came through and gave Bob money. They may have cleared his record or something, because when next seen he was part of Avengers Academy, where he was being trained alongside many other students (all much younger than him) to become a part of superhero. Again, this path wasn’t profitable enough for Bob’s needs, because when a chance came up to quit the Academy for a more profitable career, he did so. That seems to have also turned out poorly, because any time we’ve seen him since then, he has been struggling and often resorting to crime.

So Bob’s path is one of unfulfilled potential. He tries so hard to get into a better life, but his familial responsibilities have always come first for him. He has tried both sides of the superhero/super-criminal thing, but neither has been lucrative enough for him to get by.