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scans_dailyCaptain Carrot and the Final Ark wants to get back to the fun of the series' classic days, but it's weighed down by its past, present, and future.
The past: it's still keeping the prior story in canon. The present: the series was shortened from six issues to three (regular-sized) issues while in production. The future: DC editorial also saddled it with a predetermined ending that's a real downer once you think about it for more than a minute.
Still, I know some fans love it, and it does have its charms before its problems catch up with it. So let's dive in.
The miniseries reframes the interspecies conflict from the last story as a land-versus-sea conflict. The team is hoping to drum up some support for their activities at the Sandy Eggo Comic-Con. Cartoonist Rodney Rabbit has other reasons to be at a comics show. After his bout with the bottle and some legal troubles, his career is back on the upswing:
(Krypto the Superdog was one of the animated series on Scott Shaw!'s resume.)
(You'd think Yankee Poodle's updated costume would get at least a little nerd attention. Furries aren't my thing--surprising, I know--but it doesn't mean I can't imagine that costume on a human.)
The Salamandroid shows up, wrecking everything as an act of terror against the hated landlubbers. Rodney crunches an emergency carrot and catches up to the team:
It is never cleared up why the Salamandroid has changed from a humorless drone serving Dr. Hoot's will, as seen below, into a snarky, self-determined activist. No one remarks on it, either.
But later for that.
It's the Zoo Crew at the door. The team watch TV for about three pages (...?!?!), learning that Salamandroid has threatened to destroy Gnu York City. So they fly there--though without Alley-Kat-Abra or their government-issued Zoo-Cruiser, flying there means hopping a plane. Somehow, they manage to get there in time for Frogzilla to show up.
Meanwhile, President Beneduck Arnold meets with Vicuna Pacos, environmental activist who is not at all a secret supervillain:
"Uh, sure, my name. Let's go with that."
The Zoo Crew notice Frogzilla is dumber than ever. Between this and the Salamandroid, it seems like Bill Morrison was drafting the prior Zoo Crew villains who had aquatic connections, but he showed little interest in using their original personalities.
For his part, Scott Shaw! was using more "underground humor" and Mad influences instead of his classic "funny animal George Perez." Those two factors give this Frogzilla battle a different tone than the others:
Frogzilla vomits out Pig-Iron, who hurtles into a downtown structure, and who should emerge from it but...
Abra changes Frogzilla back to J. Fenimore Frog, who tries the ol' "kiss me and I'll turn into a prince" routine on her. Look, I don't know.
"Zoo Crewers, you have to believe me! I never would have murdered Little Cheese! Clearly I would have murdered YANKEE POODLE!"
Gosh, that Feline Faust stuff sounds real exciting! Wish we could've squeezed some short flashbacks to it instead of having Abra just tell us everything. Or maybe a flashback to that adventure where they rescued Fastback from the future instead of the watching-TV scene? No?
This is about where I checked out of the miniseries, emotionally. It's nice to at least get a nod to Yankee Poodle and Alley-Kat-Abra's old rivalry. But Yankee Poodle's 100% right in the last few frames here, and Abra's still not acting like the character we remember.
Bill Morrison was a nimble humor writer--he did comics for Simpsons and Futurama--but he seems unable or unwilling to handle the messy emotional issues of rebuilding trust that should follow a setup like this. There's no follow-up at all: after this page, Abra's just a Zoo Crewer again, the end. She stops acting like an ass and mildly flirts with the Captain, but that's about it for her characterization. Nobody reacts any further to her return, either.
Granted, classic Captain Carrot didn't have a whole lot of feelings talk. But if you want to carry the emotional baggage of the prior story, you've got to unpack it sometime, you know? Otherwise it's just stinking up the stage while you're doing your comedy bits.
The Crew do try to track Salamandroid, using Abra's magic to help them breathe underwater. Pig-Iron skips the mission, for obvious reasons. So if Abra had turned out to be Dark Alley, they all would have drowned. The results of their trip are barely more impressive than that:
While the Zoo Crew fail to recognize the face of their first villain ever, a new bad guy schemes. Vicuna Pacos is actually Rash Alpaca, the Earth-C parallel of Ra's al Ghul. And he has an apocalyptic endgame:
The Zoo Crew wake up on Corny Island beach with a weird feeling that everything's fine. They learn a peace has been declared between the land and the sea, but that's about to become irrelevant:
Starro is behind the Zoo Crew's depowering: his mini-starfish have robbed the Crew not of their powers, but of the mental ability to use them. The Zoo Crew have no time to learn that this is a mental block, much less overcome it, before the miniseries ends.
I think we're meant to read American Eagle as using gadgets instead of superpowers proper, so he can fly Abra down with a glider in his cape...
But at other times, he sure acts superpowered. Maybe his real power is being inconsistent, just like conservative America!
Cap/Rodney does have one idea to at least save some animals from the rising tides, and in my opinion, it's the highlight of the entire miniseries:
You can tell this was written in 2007 because it's simply assumed that a billionaire will not choose to let millions die.
Green Lambkin's ring creates a terrarium for those left behind, with plans to come back for them...though it's hard for me to imagine that even all the people near the ship represent the full population of a world that parallels our own. Anyway, Starro starts messing with the evacuation attempt, mind-controlling some passengers into committing suicide...and THEN a tsunami shows up.
Faced with all that, Pig-Iron makes a choice, abandoning the ark to complete his arc.
The yacht's path through the cosmos is derailed, so it will never return to Earth-C to pick up more refugees. So no matter how you slice it, billions of talking animals, along with Pig-Iron, are now dying watery deaths. The sea-dwellers will live on, at least...but there'll be no one left there to stop Starro when he betrays Rash Alpaca.
As if genocide is not enough, the yacht lands in the mainstream DC universe, and all its passengers--including the Zoo Crewers--find that their lives as talking, civilized beings are over.
The last Zoo Crew story had an alcoholic Captain Carrot, a murderous Alley-Kat-Abra, and a declining civilization. HOW HAS THIS ENDING MANAGED TO BE MORE DEPRESSING THAN THAT?!
You might notice one of the transformed animals in panels 4 and 5 is a gray pig. It seems like Phil Winslade was not informed of Pig-Iron's fate earlier in the story. Would've loved to see his reaction when he saw the cover.
Still, when a comic-book publisher claims that anything is a "final" anything, it's worth taking it with a grain of salt. Heck, that conclusion does end with Rodney in close proximity to a magician, one who'd surely reverse his transformation if she became aware of it. And then, with her aid, he could find the others...still wouldn't bring back Earth-C, but it'd be something, right?
Also, the miniseries had been advertised as a Countdown tie-in, so there was an implied promise that the loose ends left here would pick up there.
They didn't. They did pick up in Final Crisis' final issue, #7-- in the most half-assed way imaginable.
Captain Carrot's internal monologue here: What the leapin' lettuce is THIS fight about? Do I know any of these people? Are my powers working again? How did I even GET here from Zatanna's studio? Where are Abra, Fastback, Rubberduck, and American Eagle? No time to figure it out, just look determined! I think that's Supermax over there...Wait, is that Pig-Iron next to me? Didn't he DIE?
This is the only page that has anything to do with any Captain Carrot characters. Their revival comes down to a couple of frames and a single entry in a "reasons I'm awesome" checklist. While Grant Morrison (no relation to Bill) had often done wonders with a sort of allusive writing style that let readers fill in the blanks, this is what happens when you take that approach too far. Eventually you stop thinking things through, the blanks get bigger, and nothing can fill them in that actually makes any sense.
Though, to be clear, there seems to have been lots of editorial miscommunication and unreasonable demands surrounding this series, and it may not be fair to put all its troubles on Morrison. At any rate, Morrison themself would do much, much better by Captain Carrot some years later, sparking a mini-revival that gives me some hope for the Zoo Crew's future. We'll get into that next time.
Next: I just said.
The past: it's still keeping the prior story in canon. The present: the series was shortened from six issues to three (regular-sized) issues while in production. The future: DC editorial also saddled it with a predetermined ending that's a real downer once you think about it for more than a minute.
Still, I know some fans love it, and it does have its charms before its problems catch up with it. So let's dive in.
The miniseries reframes the interspecies conflict from the last story as a land-versus-sea conflict. The team is hoping to drum up some support for their activities at the Sandy Eggo Comic-Con. Cartoonist Rodney Rabbit has other reasons to be at a comics show. After his bout with the bottle and some legal troubles, his career is back on the upswing:
(Krypto the Superdog was one of the animated series on Scott Shaw!'s resume.)
(You'd think Yankee Poodle's updated costume would get at least a little nerd attention. Furries aren't my thing--surprising, I know--but it doesn't mean I can't imagine that costume on a human.)
The Salamandroid shows up, wrecking everything as an act of terror against the hated landlubbers. Rodney crunches an emergency carrot and catches up to the team:
It is never cleared up why the Salamandroid has changed from a humorless drone serving Dr. Hoot's will, as seen below, into a snarky, self-determined activist. No one remarks on it, either.
But later for that.
It's the Zoo Crew at the door. The team watch TV for about three pages (...?!?!), learning that Salamandroid has threatened to destroy Gnu York City. So they fly there--though without Alley-Kat-Abra or their government-issued Zoo-Cruiser, flying there means hopping a plane. Somehow, they manage to get there in time for Frogzilla to show up.
Meanwhile, President Beneduck Arnold meets with Vicuna Pacos, environmental activist who is not at all a secret supervillain:
"Uh, sure, my name. Let's go with that."
The Zoo Crew notice Frogzilla is dumber than ever. Between this and the Salamandroid, it seems like Bill Morrison was drafting the prior Zoo Crew villains who had aquatic connections, but he showed little interest in using their original personalities.
For his part, Scott Shaw! was using more "underground humor" and Mad influences instead of his classic "funny animal George Perez." Those two factors give this Frogzilla battle a different tone than the others:
Frogzilla vomits out Pig-Iron, who hurtles into a downtown structure, and who should emerge from it but...
Abra changes Frogzilla back to J. Fenimore Frog, who tries the ol' "kiss me and I'll turn into a prince" routine on her. Look, I don't know.
"Zoo Crewers, you have to believe me! I never would have murdered Little Cheese! Clearly I would have murdered YANKEE POODLE!"
Gosh, that Feline Faust stuff sounds real exciting! Wish we could've squeezed some short flashbacks to it instead of having Abra just tell us everything. Or maybe a flashback to that adventure where they rescued Fastback from the future instead of the watching-TV scene? No?
This is about where I checked out of the miniseries, emotionally. It's nice to at least get a nod to Yankee Poodle and Alley-Kat-Abra's old rivalry. But Yankee Poodle's 100% right in the last few frames here, and Abra's still not acting like the character we remember.
Bill Morrison was a nimble humor writer--he did comics for Simpsons and Futurama--but he seems unable or unwilling to handle the messy emotional issues of rebuilding trust that should follow a setup like this. There's no follow-up at all: after this page, Abra's just a Zoo Crewer again, the end. She stops acting like an ass and mildly flirts with the Captain, but that's about it for her characterization. Nobody reacts any further to her return, either.
Granted, classic Captain Carrot didn't have a whole lot of feelings talk. But if you want to carry the emotional baggage of the prior story, you've got to unpack it sometime, you know? Otherwise it's just stinking up the stage while you're doing your comedy bits.
The Crew do try to track Salamandroid, using Abra's magic to help them breathe underwater. Pig-Iron skips the mission, for obvious reasons. So if Abra had turned out to be Dark Alley, they all would have drowned. The results of their trip are barely more impressive than that:
While the Zoo Crew fail to recognize the face of their first villain ever, a new bad guy schemes. Vicuna Pacos is actually Rash Alpaca, the Earth-C parallel of Ra's al Ghul. And he has an apocalyptic endgame:
The Zoo Crew wake up on Corny Island beach with a weird feeling that everything's fine. They learn a peace has been declared between the land and the sea, but that's about to become irrelevant:
Starro is behind the Zoo Crew's depowering: his mini-starfish have robbed the Crew not of their powers, but of the mental ability to use them. The Zoo Crew have no time to learn that this is a mental block, much less overcome it, before the miniseries ends.
I think we're meant to read American Eagle as using gadgets instead of superpowers proper, so he can fly Abra down with a glider in his cape...
But at other times, he sure acts superpowered. Maybe his real power is being inconsistent, just like conservative America!
Cap/Rodney does have one idea to at least save some animals from the rising tides, and in my opinion, it's the highlight of the entire miniseries:
You can tell this was written in 2007 because it's simply assumed that a billionaire will not choose to let millions die.
Green Lambkin's ring creates a terrarium for those left behind, with plans to come back for them...though it's hard for me to imagine that even all the people near the ship represent the full population of a world that parallels our own. Anyway, Starro starts messing with the evacuation attempt, mind-controlling some passengers into committing suicide...and THEN a tsunami shows up.
Faced with all that, Pig-Iron makes a choice, abandoning the ark to complete his arc.
The yacht's path through the cosmos is derailed, so it will never return to Earth-C to pick up more refugees. So no matter how you slice it, billions of talking animals, along with Pig-Iron, are now dying watery deaths. The sea-dwellers will live on, at least...but there'll be no one left there to stop Starro when he betrays Rash Alpaca.
As if genocide is not enough, the yacht lands in the mainstream DC universe, and all its passengers--including the Zoo Crewers--find that their lives as talking, civilized beings are over.
The last Zoo Crew story had an alcoholic Captain Carrot, a murderous Alley-Kat-Abra, and a declining civilization. HOW HAS THIS ENDING MANAGED TO BE MORE DEPRESSING THAN THAT?!
You might notice one of the transformed animals in panels 4 and 5 is a gray pig. It seems like Phil Winslade was not informed of Pig-Iron's fate earlier in the story. Would've loved to see his reaction when he saw the cover.
Still, when a comic-book publisher claims that anything is a "final" anything, it's worth taking it with a grain of salt. Heck, that conclusion does end with Rodney in close proximity to a magician, one who'd surely reverse his transformation if she became aware of it. And then, with her aid, he could find the others...still wouldn't bring back Earth-C, but it'd be something, right?
Also, the miniseries had been advertised as a Countdown tie-in, so there was an implied promise that the loose ends left here would pick up there.
They didn't. They did pick up in Final Crisis' final issue, #7-- in the most half-assed way imaginable.
Captain Carrot's internal monologue here: What the leapin' lettuce is THIS fight about? Do I know any of these people? Are my powers working again? How did I even GET here from Zatanna's studio? Where are Abra, Fastback, Rubberduck, and American Eagle? No time to figure it out, just look determined! I think that's Supermax over there...Wait, is that Pig-Iron next to me? Didn't he DIE?
This is the only page that has anything to do with any Captain Carrot characters. Their revival comes down to a couple of frames and a single entry in a "reasons I'm awesome" checklist. While Grant Morrison (no relation to Bill) had often done wonders with a sort of allusive writing style that let readers fill in the blanks, this is what happens when you take that approach too far. Eventually you stop thinking things through, the blanks get bigger, and nothing can fill them in that actually makes any sense.
Though, to be clear, there seems to have been lots of editorial miscommunication and unreasonable demands surrounding this series, and it may not be fair to put all its troubles on Morrison. At any rate, Morrison themself would do much, much better by Captain Carrot some years later, sparking a mini-revival that gives me some hope for the Zoo Crew's future. We'll get into that next time.
Next: I just said.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-01 09:33 pm (UTC)And this is one of those cases.
Slightly more realistic Rova is scary...
Countdown: So awful it ruins things it's only vaguely peripherally involved in.
But that's this era of DC.
(Though there is some cleverness in the Crew facing off against Starro in their final story.)
Dark Alley - both a good play on words and union approved!
"Clearly I would've murdered YANKEE POODLE!"
They all would've tried. It'd have wound up like Murder on the Orient Express.