This episode has characters named Fred, Ned, and Ed. What are they doing over here?

I’ll say right off that this is another one where Vincent meets some allies (a couple named Ellen and Ed) who learn about the aliens and survive to the end of the episode but then never show up again to help. The one difference is that it is clearly explained that Ellen has a history of mental issues and being disbelieved and she can’t bring herself to wade back into that sort of scene. Still, in this episode they are plenty helpful, because in this episode they help David Vincent destroy an alien plot to make insects eat humanity!

As happens a lot, since these Invaders are bad at their jobs, Ellen stumbles across some aliens doing alien things. They try to kill her using some locusts they have weaponized, but she escapes and her story winds up in the newspaper, attracting David Vincent to town like a moth to a flame. He does get beat up by Ed at first, but he’s persistent, so he uncovers a plot by the Invaders to create a machine that makes insects (even butterflies!) eat meat, with the intent of siccing them on humanity. Vincent is getting fairly good at his job by this point, though not perfect. At one point he calls the FBI or someone for help, only for them to call local law enforcement to look into it, and Vincent already knows that the local law enforcement is in on the plot. Still, that one mistake aside, he does well. He’s good at hiding. When the cops are trying to bring him in, he crashes the car and runs away on foot. He’s winged by a bullet. And in a climactic action hero moment, Vincent gets to punch an alien guy into the butterflies and they eat him. Not everybody gets to do that. The aliens abandon their carnivorous insect plot and use a comical explosion special effect to destroy all evidence they were ever there.

Things suck for Ellen here. The aliens paint her as a “hysterical” woman and a man she trusts turns out to be one of the Invaders and tries to kill her. It’s fairly bleak for her. Hopefully she and Ed have time to recover before the invasion gets to far.

Having mentioned the letter I wrote to the Walking Dead comic that didn’t get printed, I have opened things up so I can write about the letter I wrote to the GI Joe comic that, as far as I know, also did not get printed.

To try to figure out when in my life I wrote this letter, I looked at the covers of issues of GI Joe to see what was most familiar from my childhood. The winners are some Destro-focused ones that came out in 1991. That surprises me because in my memory the GI Joe letter was sent AFTER the one I sent to Blaze, but Blaze was three years later than than these Destro covers.

Still, it’s possible. 1991 is around when I was first getting into comics and GI Joe was a franchise I was familiar with thanks to the cartoons. I could have been drawn to it and misremembered that Blaze was actually later. And I remember the latest parts of my reading GI Joe before dropping off having the Eco-Warriors and searching for them tells me they were in comics in 1992. So I guess I have once again proved that memory is unreliable and I probably wrote this before the Blaze letter.

As for the content of the letter, I don’t remember most of it. Vague praise of the comic, I assume? An insistence that I loved the Joes and they were my favourites that would ultimately be proven untrue when I dropped it in favour of other things? More than likely. The only thing I remember for certain is that I asked that they would use Bazooka more often, because he looked like my father. And it’s true, my father was indeed a white man with a dark moustache. I suppose, if I was ten when I wrote this letter, as I have learned I must have been, I probably gave it to my parents to send and if my father saw that he may have withheld the letter and just told me it was sent. So we have three possibilities: 1) I sent the letter and it was not printed. 2) I sent the letter and it was printed and I’ve just never found out. 3) My father never actually sent the letter.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Writing that letter was a part of my childhood, but GI Joe has simply not lived on in me as a nostalgic franchise. I like some of the designs of the characters and vehicle and stuff, but mostly I just don’t care. Even as an adult I sat down and read the first hundred issues of this comic, and while I could respect what Larry Hama did there, it felt like homework to me and I decided not to continue. It’d be funny to learn that if I had I’d find a letter written by me as a child.

You can tell a lot about someone, I assume, by what kindsa stuff they gots in their room. We have only ONCE in all his nearly fifty years of existence seen a room that we could call Rocket Racer’s room. Well, let’s take a look at it.

First, it’s worth noting that this is in Brooklyn, which is where Bob was born and raised, but not where his family actually lived when he became the Rocket Racer. This is definitely not the small apartment the family lived in when Spider-Man came to visit. I suspect it may not be an apartment at all. I have to assume that at some point Bob made enough money as Rocket Racer to invest in a secret lair. Maybe it’s one of those ones that looks like an abandoned warehouse outside, or maybe it’s an old garage, who knows? All we know is its in Brooklyn.

Now, this is Rocket Racer’s room, sure, but it isn’t his bedroom. This is the room where he kept his mother while she was in a coma. We don’t actually know much about this period in Bob’s life. Emma has had health problems as long as we’ve known her, but last time we saw her she was up and about, and the last time Bob brought her up to a friend he said she had “good days and bad” and those bad days must have got more common, because suddenly she’s in a coma. What we know is that Bob was not able or willing (presumably because of finances) to keep her in a hospital, so he has her in a rigged-up situation at his secret lair. It’s not ideal, and I’m sure he knows it. Incidentally, where are the other Farrell kids during this era? We don’t know! They tell us almost nothing about them ever, so this is no different. I assume that the second sibling (let’s call him Josh) has reached adulthood by this point and is taking care of the kids. Probably there’s friction between Josh and Bob.

But that’s not this room! Let’s look around the room!
We’ve got:

• Blueprints and tools. Half-finished projects in progress.
• A lot of racing stuff. Magazines, model cars, a poster.
• Model planes as well. And vehicles that are either models or toys (A-Team van, Optimus Prime). Whatever that spaceship is.
• A bunch of Japanese-inspired media (the Mazinger Z poster, Optimus again, probably that little chibi-style mech toy).
• Unpaid bills (seen in the one other panel with this room.

So what do we learn from this? Bob’s a broke nerdy guy who likes racing. Alright, thanks, PDR. Definitely breaking news with this one.

Okay, maybe there’s nothing surprising here. But hey, that’s the point of the creators decorating the room this way: it’s shows Bob’s character. I like it.