The Best Anthropomorphic Animal Superhero

Here are my two main retirement plans right now:

1. Have someone buy one of my stories and turn it into a movie franchise.
2. Sell my "Introducing... The Beatles" album.

I would have a third retirement plan, but it turns out that comic books are not the investment that people might think they are. They're certainly not the investment equal of, say a corn flake which you can con someone into thinking is shaped like a nondescript state. A corn flake that somebody somewhere thinks is shaped like Illinois is worth, it turns out, $1,350. (or about 10 times the value of communicating with your spouse.)

Here is that cornflake:



And here is Illinois:



They don't even look all that much alike!

Plus, if you turn the cornflake upside down it looks as much like Manitoba as it does like Illinois:

But, whether this cornflake is really Illinois, or Manitoba, or just an example of how haywire our society is that someone somewhere had $1,350 to pay for a cornflake (plus the money to go transport it personally)(plus, it was the second expensive cornflake this person bought), when they could have used that money to buy a hardboiled egg shaped like the Virgin Mary, is all irrelevant, because the cornflake is more valuable than my 401(k) right now, and more valuable than my backup retirement fund, which is my comic book collection.

I thought my comic book collection would be a great retirement asset; maybe not the equivalent of what I'd have had if I'd taken care of my Star Wars Action Figure Collection (I once had not only the Jawa with the removable robe and belt, but a Boba Fett that shot missiles) but a good one nonetheless. Add my comic books to my incredibly rare and valuable "Introducing The Beatles" album and I'd be set.

Then I tried actually selling some of these things. My incredibly rare and valuable "Introducing The Beatles" album brought in lower offers than that cornflake. Lower! It also brought emails to me from potential buyers who would say things like it's probably a fake and not worth anything but I'll give you $900 for it out of pity. As though I'd fallen off the turnip truck yesterday.

My comic books brought less. They may have risen 600% in value -- but a 600% increase in a cover price of 50 cents equals only $3.

So I'm left, for now, not being retired, not being wealthy, not living in Hawaii, and having to get up and go into my office everyday -- where I then spend most of the day blogging and the time I don't spend blogging I spend watching "Weekend At Bernie's" online. So it's not a bad life.

And instead of selling my comics, I get to enjoy them, which no doubt reassures Sweetie that she made the right choice in marrying a guy who's now 39 and spends his time watching "Weekend At Bernie's" and reading comics, and whose retirement plans don't include the phrase "work hard and save money."

I do still enjoy looking at my old comics, and one of my favorites also turns out (surprise!) to be The Best Anthropomorphic Animal Superhero. I've got to get that qualifier -- anthropomorphic animal superhero because, as we all know, there were nonanthropomorphic animal superheroes, ranging from Krypto to... um... Bat-Mite:

Let me take this moment to point out that my Mom always figured I would come to no good because I read comic books; I think she could actually picture my brain liquifying. My going to law school confirmed her worst fears about what happens when you read trash. And whenever I'd try to point out that there were some really good comics out there, out would come one featuring Bat-Mite. Why? Why, comic-book makers? Why?

Regular animal superheroes sucked. Anthropomorphic animal superheroes, on the other hand, were awesome, and the Most Awesomest of All was The Best Anthropomorphic Animal Superhero, Captain Carrot:

Captain Carrot lived in one of the many DC Universes that was eventually wiped out by the Anti-Monitor, a villain who got his name because he was the opposite of The Monitor. The Monitor sat and watched. So being his opposite, the Anti-Monitor, of course... destroyed universes. Because that's the opposite of watching, right? Right: when Sweetie asks me if I want to watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and I don't want to, I destroy the TV set.

I'm not sure, though, on reflection, that Captain Carrot's Universe was wiped out in the Crisis on Infinite Earths. (You're all keeping up with this, right? If you want a primer on just what in the heck I am talking about, read here.) I don't recall Captain Carrot appearing in the Crisis, so maybe he's still out there, saving Superman and eating cosmic carrots.

As far as I can tell, Captain Carrot was a parody of Superman. Or someone. He was Roger Rabbit, a mild-mannered comic book artist who had the (mis)fortune of having a chunk of an asteroid or something fall into his windowbox where he grew his carrots, turning them into "cosmic carrots" which would give him superstrength for (I think) 24 hours. He became a superhero-- Captain Carrot-- and joined together with other anthropomorphic heroes such as Pig-Iron and Alley-Kat-Abra.

(Alley-Kat-Abra, by the way, has the distinction of being the only female comic or cartoon character who you can Google and not get a bunch of sick, twisted, cartoon porn. I'm serious. Try a Google Image Search for Betty and Wilma. You can't even get through the first page.)

After forming Captain Carrot's "Zoo Crew," the team began to have a bunch-- 20 issues worth-- of adventures involving knockoffs of other DC creations and a zillion bad puns. I think the bad puns are what kept me coming back. The storylines at the outset were only okay -- fighting a giant frog by a cruise ship, that kind of stuff. But the dialogue and puns were so bad, so Plan 9 bad, that you had to love it. Things like Newssqueak magazine were so dumb that they went around the continuum to become cool again. And the jokes were worse/better:

I should probably take a moment to explain how things can be cool/lame. Everyone thinks that "cool" and "lame" are on some sort of line, like the farther you get from "lame" the more you get to "cool." But that's not the case. Coolness is a circle-- and as things move away from "Cool" they become more lame, but as they continue moving, they become "cool" again. Kind of like how the universe works -- it's infinite because it's three dimensional and if you kept moving in one direction you'd come back around (just like Modest Mouse explained). The Coolness continuum explains William Shatner. And me.)

Here is it in handy diagram form:

The storylines never got better (unless you count the kind-of-clever Oz-Wonderland wars), but the adventures were silly enough and fun enough that they hooked me in and the offbeat humor of the magazine began to show through a little more -- one issue described the magazine as the world's "Twelfth Best" comic. (If you don't know why that's funny, you'll never understand.)

In the end, that tweak of humor and use of puns made "Captain Carrot" more than just a silly comic book, or maybe made it a silly comic book that was just a hair--

--and see how I avoided that pun? I could have said just a HARE--

better than other silly comic books. And, in a way, "Captain Carrot" was the last stand for comics that were fun without being moronic (Bat-Mite! Seriously!) before we got all Alan Moore'd on serious comic books with Dark Knights using razor-sharp batarangs and Maus and all that stuff. Comics had been on a slow slide into despair and darkness for a long time; when Spider-Man began having trouble paying his rent, some of the fun seeped out of the comics and it only got worse in the 1980s as comic companies began fighting for market share and trying to keep readers into their adulthood by having darker, meaner storylines, villains who killed, heroes who had stubble, the whole 9 yards.

Captain Carrot, for a brief time, stood between me and that darker comic world, a world I never joined; as comics turned more serious, I grew up and stopped reading them. So maybe I liked Captain Carrot so much because it was my last stand, too: I knew that all too soon, I'd be moving out, going to college, getting a job, and then settling in for a life of... blogging about Captain Carrot.

Whatever the reasons, Captain Carrot has always had a special place in my own personal pantheon, right up there on a level just below Jesus, my Dad and William Shatner, and now is enshrined here as The Best Anthropomorphic Animal Superhero.

PS: This is not just a desperate bid to drive up the price of the Captain Carrot collection to hasten retirement. Or maybe it is. And also, in the end, I did not avoid using the pun. Saying the pun while saying I didn't say it is still saying the pun.

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