Captain Carrot And The Final Ark!

Captain Carrot and the Final Ark is Scott Shaw's attempt to revive the animal heroes he co-created with Roy Thomas many years before. His artwork is the highlight of this small collection and the main reason to get a copy. 

The little three-part story is an offshoot of the sprawling Countdown to Final Crisis series that ran for fifty issues (plus tie-ins) in 2007 and 2008. It was yet one more attempt by DC to try and make some sense of the universe which had been tampered with so many times before. This time the main architect was supposed to be Grant Morrison but things changed and altered and as it turned out little of Countdown lasted very long if at all. This is an old story at this point but there are spoilers ahead nonetheless. 

In the debut issue we are treated to an update on the doings of the Zoo Crew and learn that Alley-Cat-Abra had betrayed the team and in fact was accused of killing member Little Cheese. Little Cheese's spot on the roster is taken by American Eagle, a zealous patriot. The story opens in "Sandy Eggo, Califurnia" where the Crew are attending a comic convention. Shaw is in his element here and the in-jokes are fast and furious. They end up fighting an enemy dubbed "Salamandroid" who very strong and can emit fire. There is plenty of hijinks and dark plots but that all comes to a stop when the Crew are confronted with a larger and stronger Frogzilla. 

In the second installment the Crew spend most of their time battling Frogzilla with the help of  Alley-Cat-Abra who appears magically and explains it was her evil twin who did the crimes she was accused of. The Crew take back into the fold as they defeat Frogzill and head down into the depths of the ocean to confront the real enemy Starro the Conqueror. Also revealed is the nastiness of Rash Al Paca, who had been plotting with the corrupt President Beneduck Arnold. 

But it's too late to end the global warming which has caused waters to rise to massive flood levels and the animals of the planet are forced to enter Boa's Ark to save themselves. With the help of Justa' Lotta Animals from Earth C Minus the Zoo Crew fend off Starro and take the Ark into space where they encounter The New Dogs. But that is only a brief encounter and soon enough the Ark has landed on the main DCU Earth and the Crew as well as all the other talking animals have reverted to normal critters as you and I might find. The JLA is around to help and Zatanna takes the former Rodney Rabbit as part of her act. 

This is a hoot. Apparently Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew do get back to some sense of normalcy (by their standards) as two them appear later in Final Crisis. It's all very confusing, but the story itself as drawn by Scott Shaw is pretty funny at times. 

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Showcase Corner - Captain Carrot And His Amazing Zoo Crew!

I positively loved DC's old Showcase Presents reprint series. I gobbled them up almost as quickly as they came out. What I most love about comics is the story, and despite what many would deem cheap production values these telephone book-like tomes gathered together broad sweeps of comics from often distant periods and all for relatively little tiny money. Certainly for example the earliest issues of Superman and Action Comics gathered in those volumes are well outside my price interest for comics of that vintage and type, but as a low-cost Showcase Presents volume they are delightful reading. But as the hoard of Showcase volumes gathered I fell desperately behind in my reading of them and finally just gave up trying to keep up. Now I've waited long enough and I need to just up and read the dang things. So to spur me on in that endeavor I present to you the second (see last month's look at Amethyst) of what I hope will be many "Showcase Corner" posts focusing on any particular Showcase Presents volume. These can occur at any time, so keep an a careful lookout. One of the most fun of the later Showcase volumes was  Showcase Presents Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew. 

Captain Carrot debuted in an issue of Teen Titans, a practice which was common at DC at the time to give readers a preview of a new series in the pages of an already popular one. Not a bad idea at all. 

We meet Roger Rabbit (later called "Rodney" when a certain movie became famous) and the world dubbed Earth-C. Superman ends up there when a meteor with radioactive properties divides and crashes to Earth giving superpowers to a host of funny animals. 

The Zoo Crew is comprised of Captain Carrot, the powerhouse porker named Pig-Iron (actually Peter Porkchops a longtime DC funny animal character), Ally-Kat-Abra a magical pussy, Rubberduck a movie star and stretchable hero, Yankee Poodle a gossip columnist with magnetic powers, Fastback a fast moving hard shelled hero in the tradition of the classic Terrific Whatsit. (In later issues the team will be joined by Little Cheese a small but powerful rodent.) The Zoo Crew is weirded out by Superman but work with him to defeat Starro the Conqueror. 

Later the Crew faces the first of many home-grown menaces i the shape of Armordillo. Created by Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw the Zoo Crew evoke the  Golden Age super funny animals like Super Rabbit from Timely and Marvel Bunny from Fawcett. 

There are a number of shout outs to classic DC funny animal comics such as the already aforementioned use of Peter Porkchops. Frogzilla in the third issue is actually a transformed Fenimore Frog from The Dodo and the Frog comics. Dunbar Dodo makes an appearance as well. 

In the earliest issues the Zoo Crew are battling A.C.R.O.S.T.I.C. (A Cabal Recently Organized Soley To Instigate Crimes). They also battle critters like Mudd as seen above. 

Being an 80's comic book there are a host of pop culture references in the comic such as this allusion to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Truth told I'm not as keen on these as they become clearly dated and make the comics appear musty at times. But it's hard to topical and not do it. 

Thomas and Shaw get a lot of help on this series as it rolls along. Most importantly is the writing of E. Nelson Bridwell who pretty much takes over from Roy "The Boy" after the first several issues, though Thomas will pop up again and again. 

Artists such as Rick Hoberg, Mike Sekowsky, Dan DeCarlo and others help Shaw on the visuals which are at once energetic and filled with visual gags and gimmicks. 

The Zoo Crew have a fractious relationship but never break up in their brief run. They hit a lot of the classic superhero tropes such as time travel, alien invasion, and even some supernatural enemies. 

Stories seems to more and more become two-part affairs as the series rolls along, and that doesn't always benefit the pace of the book 

The addition of Little Cheese was a fun event and if the series had run longer I'm sure we'd have seen more of these kinds of additions. Little Cheese formally becomes a member in the last issue of the original run. 

One of the wackiest stories is a two-parter which evokes the classic JLA-JSA team-ups. Rodney Rabbit is a cartoonist and he draws a strip called Just'a Lotta Animals and he's startled when he discovers these heroic creatures are more real that he imagine on their home planet which is dubbed "Earth-C Minus".

Guest talent steps in to offers up a host of individual adventures for the Crew in issues seventeen and eighteen. Sadly one can feel the energy draining out othe concept a bit by this point. 

The series concludes with the twentieth issue when Earth-1 citizen and Teen Titan the Changeling shows up to see what he can see. Already one of the weirdest heroes in the DCU, he is on his back foot through most of this adventure with the funny animals at his side battling Gorilla Grodd. 

Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew have popped up in the post-Crisis DCU several times. But their first revival was a truly strange offereing in which the Zoo Crew finds itself embroiled in a war between the Land of OZ and Wonderland. More on that in a few days. 

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The Amazing Zoo Crew!

There's something impeccably charming about funny animal comics. They were once upon a time a staple of the industry, as animals of all sorts stood in for humans in both comics and animation. Mighty Mouse, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, Super Rabbit, even the later Thunderbunny are all great characters. Pitching a story containing a rabbit or a duck and then having all manner of mayhem unleashed upon the poor creature was a neat trick to remove the effort from the immediacy of concern that humans might be injured in the production of the product. Nowadays we lavish overweening concern for animals, enraptured with a Disney-inspired adoration for the cuteness of  all creatures great and small, which neither know nor especially care that we find them adorable. But funny animal comics faded when the average age of a comic book reader slipped from six to sixteen and the randy adventures of superheroes came to dominate the concerns of the four-color worlds. Animals ceased to talk and went about their business.

Then came Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. Roy Thomas grew weary of his years in service at Might Marvel and especially so since his time as a largely independent force at the publisher was cast into doubt by the rise of Jim Shooter, an editor with an eye to making the MU a unified edifice once again. The man Kirby once dubbed "Houseroy" brought to DC his adoration for the Justice Society of America and his success with Conan the Barbarian. The former he resurrected in the pages of All-Star Squadron and the latter he attempted to imitate in the pages of Arak. But less remembered I suspect, maybe not, was the feature he co-produced with Scott Shaw.

The Zoo Crew was a delightful attempt to satirize superheroes and at the same time in the tradition of the best funny animal comics, to create a book which was exciting in its own way.

As was the custom at the time, the team debuted inside an actual issue of the hit New Teen Titans comic, insuring a large audience for the title. This is a great idea and I'm stunned it's not used more often, even today to garner interest in new titles.

That story combined the wild artwork of Scott Shaw with the more traditional work of Ross Andru to create a real blend of styles that served to showcase the distinctiveness of the funny animal world. To read this classic go here.

It was  a successful kick off and the debut issue landed not long thereafter. Here the covers for what are some fantastic issues which poke fun at the popular culture of the day as well as exceedingly familiar tropes from comics.  Later in the run, Rick Hoberg takes on the art chores.

After the title was cancelled it was revived later in a weird trilogy of tales which take the Zoo Crew into the combined worlds of OZ and Wonderland. These are exotic and totally strange comics, and pretty well done to boot the creative team of E. Nelson Bridwell, Joey Cavaleri and artist Carol Lay.

After that the Captain and his Crew went to rest in the mists of comic oblivion until recently when they were dusted off and brought back into a post-Crisis DCU as part of the myriad realities which form that multiverse.

The Zoo Crew defies attempts to make them extinct, the funny animal is a tough breed indeed. I own all of the originals save for the most recent stuff. The Showcase volume for the original series is delightful and I need to get a copy of the more recent "Final Ark" story line for my very own.

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