A Few Stray Cels: WHO'S WHO, CONVERGENCE: SPEED FORCE (Modern Captain Carrot, 5 of 7)

[tcampbell1000]

Over the course of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew's original run, all six charter members of the team got at least one solo adventure (Abra got two, Fastback and Rubberduck three each). Since those days, solo attention for any of them has been pretty rare. But those rare occasions have delivered a few fun moments--or at least some cool art.





Alley-Kat-Abra

I have a very clear memory of shopping at the local grocery store with my grandfather and discovering Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #1, which was the first sign in a year and a half that DC had not entirely forgotten the Zoo Crew. I'm mostly including this (and the other Who's Who pages) for the art now, but it's a treasured memory. Granddaddy was happy to get it for me, and no doubt amused by how it tried to imitate personnel documents that he shuffled as a country lawyer.



The Who's Who covers showed all the featured characters together, relishing in some improbable interactions...



And here's a more recent Scott Shaw! commission and an anonymous model kit, just because.



American Eagle

Not only has he not gotten a solo spotlight, not only did he come out too late for a Who's Who entry, but American Eagle hasn't even shown up in most of the stories that feature other Zoo Crew members after 2008. He was last glimpsed in Multiversity, paired off against Batmouse, since they're both athletic, non-powered gadgets guys.



Allegedly, anyway. His powers situation (as I mentioned) is a confusing mess. (Someone said that flight and super-sight are natural abilities for an eagle, but that still doesn't account for his strength, and Earth-C/Earth-26 animals don't generally "work" like that. Nobody thinks Byrd Rentals can fly just because he's a duck.)



Plus, AE's "two right wings" were a little hard to reconcile with his commitment to interspecies relations in 2007, let alone today.



Of course, sometimes we have unexamined belief systems and we don't see the contradictions in them until they're staring us in the face. I think the character could be salvaged if someone took an interest--sort of like how we get a worthwhile take on USAgent every once in a while. But as it is, he's kind of to the Zoo Crew what the Zoo Crew is to the DC Multiverse: deserving of mention in a comprehensive roundup, but challenging to integrate in any sustainable way.

(And...shouldn't it be HAMmerican Eagle?)

Captain Carrot



Cap's seen a lot of action without the Zoo Crew, but almost all of it's been as part of Justice League Incarnate. However, he did get a story more or less his own in 2023's Legion of Bloom #1--which I will post NEXT time.

Outside of comics, he has been seen in Bradford West Gillimbury, presiding over the residents' annual carrot festival, with neither DC (or Thomas and Shaw!)'s explicit approval nor any cease-and-desist letters telling them to knock it off.



More notably, Captain Carrot has come out as an action figure this year. And in a truly inspiring feat of against-all-odds heroism, Paul Levitz and others at DC have prevailed upon Warner Brothers to pay Scott Shaw! what he's owed for it:



(Shaw! and Roy Thomas are each 10% owners of the characters, and that unusual arrangement goes some way toward explaining why DC hasn't jumped at the chance to throw these guys into an animated movie, even on DVD.)

Fastback



While Captain Carrot was off doing a gladiator fight with Harley Quinn in Convergence: Harley Quinn, Fastback was making a more heroic stand in Convergence: Speed Force #1-2. We join Wally West and his kids as they explore transplanted cities from different universes--



Wally tries sweet reason, but (1) Flashpoint Wonder Woman isn't in a listening mood and (2) she's already sent a division of Amazons to invade Wally's hometown. While Flash and Wonder Woman clash, Fastback makes himself useful elsewhere:



The Amazon countermeasures are some vertigo-inducing grenades, the same tech that Wonder Warhawk is currently using against Wally. And like most turtles, talking or otherwise, Fastback struggles to right himself when he falls on his back.



Wally Speed-Force-summons his kids to his side, which looks like bad news for ol' Timmy Joe, but...



"Who do you think we are, DC COMICS?"



Really, there are lots of team-up possibilities here: Rubberduck/Booster Gold, Pig-Iron/The Metal Men, Yankee Poodle/Stargirl, Alley-Kat-Abra/John Constantine...



Model by OurCustoms.

Just'a Lotta Animals

While I'm at it, here's the original sample art for Super-Squirrel and the Super-Animals, the characters of which became the Just'a Lotta Animals even as the feature was revised into the Zoo Crew. I should've put these in earlier, but I hadn't stumbled across them then!



That's J. Fenimore Frog, Dunbar Dodo, and J. Rufus Lion in the first frame there.

Little Cheese



I'm not gonna list every tiny, one-frame throwaway reference to the Crew; even I have my limits. "See? You can see half of Rodney's ear in the scene where Arsenal's daughter is watching cartoons!" But Little Cheese's appearance as a fictional mascot in TV's The Brave and the Bold was worth a grin. Thanks to icon_uk for discovering it!



It's the closest thing to solo action he's seen, even though his creators originally had, uh, bigger things in mind for him...



Yeah, Chester's concept shifted from a growing mouse to a shrinking mouse. Talk to Hank Pym about that one, Chester--no, wait, on second thought, looking to Hank Pym for perspective is probably a bad idea. Shrinking was probably a better fit for the team's insecure junior member, and at least he got to appear in the comic in some fashion. Poor Whirlibird never made it past the planning stages!



Pig-Iron

Pig-Iron, of course, is the only Zoo Crewer to have had a solo comics career before he joined the team.



He also, er, "merited" a name-drop in Threshold Presents The Hunted, a sci-fi series featuring a burly sensitive sort named Pig-Iron, companion to the irascible mercenary Captain K'Rot, who's a real rocket rabbit type, yessiree indeedy. I'm surprised this Pig-Iron didn't just have one line of dialogue: "I am Grunt."



(No disrespect meant to writer Keith Giffen, whose other comics have brought much joy, but I hated this more than the Alley-Kat-Abra murder story. At least that one had most of the Zoo Crewers acting in character and some good ideas before it went sideways; this one feels like a trap designed to get me scanning the pages, searching desperately for any characterization that was remotely like the characters I remembered. I assure you, I looked in vain.)

Rubberduck

Rubberduck...well, he's got a pretty extensive Who's Who entry. That's something, right?



Byrd Rentals was last seen on the phone with his agent, saying, "Ronny, I'll take anything. ANYTHING. The Birds of Prey? I'm a bird. The Justice League? Look, they're never quite the same without a funny stretchy guy, are they? A scene where Amanda Waller reflects on all the moral principles she's sacrificed, sitting alone in a darkened room with a lamp? I CAN BE THAT LAMP!"

(And if you think that's beneath his dignity, he's letting kids make him a tug-of-war rope on the Who's Who cover.)



Yankee Poodle

Rova and the Zoo Crew got some extra attention in the final issue of the original Who's Who, since it covered Y and Z and her powers made for some nice branding synergy...



And she's shown up Crew-less in, of all places, Scooby-Doo Team Up #35-36. She was technically part of another team there--the Canine Commandoos, a sort of Justice Society made of hero dogs from other DC and Warner series. But let's not be sticklers: they got her speech pattern right!



She also appears in Ambush Bug: Year None #1, mostly by Keith Giffen, as part of a machine-gun-paced set of parodies of DC's more oddball characters. This is a comic where the "women in refrigerators" 1990s-2000s trend is so out of control that Ambush Bug asks a saleslady, "Do you have any appliances that DON'T come with a dead body in them?" She replies, "It's a standard feature." Given that, I'd say Yankee Poodle gets off pretty light. Unlike poor Mazing Man--but don't worry, this one's not in continuity anyway. Aw, Keith, I could never stay mad at you.



Next: Some talk about frustrating ships, and a slice of the best 21st-century Zoo Crew story, hands down.

Comments

[werehawk]

Funny how both the original Justa Lotta Animals and the Zoo Crew/Critters had Flash and Fastback without their shells like the Terrific Whatzit.

Other thoughts - who is this Whirlibird? Funny Little Cheese was in the original Al idea when he didn’t appear until issue 7 or something. Who is this Whirlibird?? And boy does Yankee Poodle look out of place with the normal looking dogs.

[tcampbell1000]

I'll get around to this in the last installment. Essentially, Whirlibird was a drafted character that could have been a charter member of the team, but along with "Big Cheese," she was put aside when the team started looking too crowded. (Pig-Iron was originally conceived as a villain, but got pulled up into the team roster at the last minute.)

Whirlibird's power was to create tornadoes with a gesture...an ability that got reassigned to Fastback, since it was well established that the Flash could create tornadoes by super-speeding his arms.

Would've been interesting for the team to have three female members, something that the Teen Titans and sometimes the X-Men had done around this point. But having a member who could do only one speedster-associated trick next to a full-fledged speedster might've come off as a bit redundant in fight scenes.

[scorntx]

That Fastback / Proper Flash team-up was fun.
But gosh, those are some pretty uptight and judgemental Amazons there.
"Your world is stupid! You must die!"
Someone been feeding them that internet gas?

Scooby-Do Team-Up seems to be the venue for odd team ups with obscure DC characters.
(Meanwhile... Dogaton.. that... it... what.)

Excessively grimdark Carrot and Pig Iron sure looks like a thing that happened.
But usually when someone's making fun of an idea like that, not apparently playing it utterly straight.
Good old New 52.

[zachbeacon]

"uptight and judgemental Amazons"

Flashpoint is the worst.

[beyondthefringe]

I appreciate the extreme thoroughness of this retrospective.
And boy, did I hate "K'Rot" as a reinvention of Captain Carrot. Keith Giffen, nooooooooo.