Annotated 30-32
Who’s to say how Ashok would feel about it if Ulak had done the stabbing with conflict and/or tears in his eyes? But he didn’t, so…
Sundar’s observation, improved by Phil from my version, is so gloriously dumb that it might loop back around to being brilliant.
Something giving this page a bit of a Kirby vibe for me.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I’m a little disappointed that we established Gravedust’s slightly complex M.O. (guide shades of the dead into his arrows and resolve their unresolved issues while serving his own purposes) and then barely ever used it after Chapter 4 or so without subverting it somehow. I did my best to compensate for this lack in this chapter, by having him at least intend to perform the schtick on two separate spirits.
So apparently A.C.R.O.S.T.I.C. is from the short-running Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! comics.
I’m sure I’m not the only one to want to know more about that picture.
Well, then, friend, have you ever come to the right place. Discovering Captain Carrot at age eight is probably the single biggest reason I decided to write comic books.
The Zoo Crew were a talking-animal super team: Fastback the turtle speedster, Rubberduck the malleable mallard, Alley-Kat-Abra the feline magician, Pig-Iron the porcine powerhouse, Captain Carrot the ascended comic-book artist whose carrots gave him vaguely Supermanlike abilities for twenty-four hours or so, and Yankee Poodle, whose telekinetics manifested as stars and stripes. And eventually Little Cheese, the shrinking teenage mouse.
The Earth they defended, Earth-C, was an outrageous and beautiful mishmash much like ours. In this frame, Brother Hood, head of A.C.R.O.S.T.I.C. (an acronym that never signifies the same thing twice), is doing a James Bond-villain routine. He will return in the next issue to reveal he is the literal brother of the president of the United Species of Hammerica, and mastermind a plan to take over the country involving the terroristic use of four funny-animal kaiju. One of these kaiju, Frogzilla, is a villain repurposed from old 1950s humor comics (not the first or last time Zoo Crew would go to that particular well), and one of them is more of a MechaGodzilla: it’s the Linkidd Memorial Statue from Wartington, D.C., which Brother Hood has somehow turned into a giant robot when no one was looking.
The humor ranged from this sort of wild, over-the-top malarkey to knowing satire of the comic-book and show-business industries (its creators were chiefly Los Angeles residents). Imagine, if you can, a version of BoJack Horseman with its toxicity and depression swapped out for dependable superhero thrills and adventurous genre-switching. Original series writer Roy Thomas was the closest Stan Lee had to a direct successor, taking over for him on many titles and as editor-in-chief before moving on to other challenges like this one. Underground cartoonist Scott Shaw, the series’ first artist and most consistent contributor, had an equal love for subversive satire and for bright, goofy old mock-Disney stories. A lot of my old childhood favorites just embarrass me now, but the mesh of Roy and Scott’s sensibilities is still kind of fascinating to me today.
The series lasted a respectable 20 issues, followed by a meaty miniseries with the even unwieldier title Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew: The Oz-Wonderland War. Shifts in the marketplace during and after the 1980s were not particularly kind to the Crew’s brand of humor (though Spider-Ham, from the same period, hung on a bit longer). Most attempts to revive them in this century have not gone well, but ever since Grant Morrison threw the Captain some love as a solo act in Multiversity, there’s a good chance you’ll see him bouncing around without his team, whenever the goofier corners of the multiverse need defending.
Hmm… I never heard of this thing before but I do wonder if there might be any link between this captain Carrot and the other one, of Ankh-Morpork Night Watch.
ah, dangit, beat me to it already..
Captain Carrot sounds a lot like D.C. Thompson’s Bananaman, in that Bananaman also gets his powers from eating something (bananas, in his case). But Bananaman wasn’t part of a superteam that I can recall. (It also wasn’t an insider parody since D.C. Thompson didn’t really do superheroes, or serious comics at all for that matter.)
Waitaminute, the Oz-Wonderland War miniseries was published? I remember ads for it but I never found it. Dammit, now I know what I’m Googling for Christmas.
I fondly remember the cross over with the JLA (“Just a Lotta Animals”), a spoof on the old annual JLA / JSA specials – Batmouse, Firestork, Green Sparrow, etc. At 20 issues, the Zoo Crew lasted a lot longer then the Inferior Five, probably because it was much better written.
Yeah, it’s published, and it’s pretty great. It’s a real tour de force for Carol Lay.
So, this predates the genetically human dwarf Carrot, Captain of the city watch of Ankh-Morpork?
Yep. Captain Carrot the rabbit first appeared in a late 1981 comic. Pratchett introduced his dwarven Carrot in Guards! Guards! The latter was published in 1989.
Cap did have to change his civilian name because of a conflict with a book title, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, which then had a film adaptation in the works. But that’s another story.
So what was the original version that Phil improved on?
SUNDAR
Aw, yeah, Cultist “friendship.” It’s just like actual friendship… except for the “friend” part!
E-MERL
So… it’s… a… ship?
The jump from 29-4 to 30-32 threw me off again.