What do you think?
Rate this book
Showcase Presents #101
Showcase Presents: Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew - The Pluto Syndrome [#1]
These 1980s tails--sorry, tales--of Captain Carrot and the JLA (Justa Lotta Animals) have never been reprinted before. Featuring pun-filled tails--sorry, tales--written by comics legend Roy Thomas, with animated illustrations by Scott Shaw, these stories star Captain Carrot, along with his fellow four-legged heroes including the magical Alley-Kat-Abra, super-strong Pig-Iron, stretchable waterfowl Rubberduck, the super-speedster turtle Fastback and more. Together, they battle the evil of Brother Hood and A.C.R.O.S.T.I.C., Salamandroid, Feline Faust, the Wuz Wolf and more, plus DC Universe villains Starro and Grodd. This collection also includes the three-part epic saga "The Oz-Wonderland War," in which our heroes are caught between the forces of these two magical realms, each of which are illustrated in the style of classic illustrators John R. Neill, W.W. Denslow and others.
Reprints a story from NEW TEEN TITANS #16, plus CAPTAIN CARROT AND HIS AMAZING ZOO CREW #1-20 and THE OZ-WONDERLAND #1-3.
Reprints a story from NEW TEEN TITANS #16, plus CAPTAIN CARROT AND HIS AMAZING ZOO CREW #1-20 and THE OZ-WONDERLAND #1-3.
668 pages, Paperback
First published March 25, 2014
7 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Roy Thomas
4,480 books273 followersRoy Thomas was the FIRST Editor-in-Chief at Marvel--After Stan Lee stepped down from the position. Roy is a longtime comic book writer and editor. Thomas has written comics for Archie, Charlton, DC, Heroic Publishing, Marvel, and Topps over the years. Thomas currently edits the fanzine Alter Ego for Twomorrow's Publishing. He was Editor for Marvel comics from 1972-1974. He wrote for several titles at Marvel, such as Avengers, Thor, Invaders, Fantastic Four, X-Men, and notably Conan the Barbarian. Thomas is also known for his championing of Golden Age comic-book heroes — particularly the 1940s superhero team the Justice Society of America — and for lengthy writing stints on Marvel's X-Men and Avengers, and DC Comics' All-Star Squadron, among other titles.
Also a legendary creator. Creations include Wolverine, Carol Danvers, Ghost Rider, Vision, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Valkyrie, Morbius, Doc Samson, and Ultron. Roy has also worked for Archie, Charlton, and DC among others over the years.
Also a legendary creator. Creations include Wolverine, Carol Danvers, Ghost Rider, Vision, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Valkyrie, Morbius, Doc Samson, and Ultron. Roy has also worked for Archie, Charlton, and DC among others over the years.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 10, 2015
More like three-and-a-half stars.
By all rights, I probably shouldn't have enjoyed this Showcase volume. But, this is the third in a row where I came in expecting little and becoming greatly pleased with the end result. Now, Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew's adventures aren't quite on par with the Atomic Knights/Great Disaster or the surprisingly fun Superfriends volumes, but there was a nice charm to these stories, especially the early ones.
Let's get a couple minor complaints out of the way first. For starters, while most of the Zoo Crew were fun, I never saw the point of Yankee Poodle. Despite the stars-and-stripes powers, she wasn't really all that patriotic. In fact, her career as a gossip columnist seemed more likely to come up than any flag waving, which mostly made her annoying of the subject of odd, rather sexist humor. On the other end of the spectrum, Alley Kat-Abra was a fine character, but rather useless in most fights, especially odd since the writers apparently forgot her origin story as a martial arts instructor as she uses those particular skills all of twice (not an exaggeration).
OK, so, what was the whole Captain Carrot thing anyway? In the first storyline, Superman crosses dimensional boundaries to Earth-C, which is populated by talking animals. A handful get superpowers as a result, and their leader is one Roger (later Rodney) Rabbit, comic book artist who gains some neat rabbit-related powers when he eats one of his cosmic powered carrots. You can't make this stuff up mostly because someone has already beaten you to it. The remainder as the aforementioned Yankee Poodle and Alley Kat-Abra, swamp-dwellin' good ol' boy Fastback the turtle, movie star Byrd Rentals who can stretch as Rubberduck, and the swine of steel Pig-Iron, who apparently was a pre-existing DC funny animal character from the 40s.
That's actually a minor selling point for the book. Earth-C is home to all DC funny animal characters. Many appear in the book, and since Roy Thomas was a co-creator, he does signal when such a character is from an old book, like Pig-Iron pre-transformation, or Fastback's uncle, a World War II era superhero.
Then factor in how many of the jokes are not really aimed at kids. An old prospector complains about liberals. There are recession jokes. Nothing really "mature," but a good deal is something your average kid probably won't get. And the dialogue is, at least at first, rather clever. Yeah, a lot of the humor is bad puns based off animal words, which is found confusing by Teen Titan Changeling when he does a guest appearance, but the Zoo Crew find human world place names to be odd too, so at least that much is consistent. The stories do start to get old after a while, and later writers didn't even seem to remember Captain Carrot didn't fly so much as jump really far. Oh, and once or twice late in the book they break the fourth wall.
The final three reprinted issues may be the biggest artistic treat, the three-part Oz-Wonderland War, where the Zoo Crew was drawn in their usual style, but the various denizens of Wonderland and Oz were drawn in the style of their original illustrators, and keeping close to the old books as opposed to various movies made since.
All in all, a surprisingly fun set of reprints.
By all rights, I probably shouldn't have enjoyed this Showcase volume. But, this is the third in a row where I came in expecting little and becoming greatly pleased with the end result. Now, Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew's adventures aren't quite on par with the Atomic Knights/Great Disaster or the surprisingly fun Superfriends volumes, but there was a nice charm to these stories, especially the early ones.
Let's get a couple minor complaints out of the way first. For starters, while most of the Zoo Crew were fun, I never saw the point of Yankee Poodle. Despite the stars-and-stripes powers, she wasn't really all that patriotic. In fact, her career as a gossip columnist seemed more likely to come up than any flag waving, which mostly made her annoying of the subject of odd, rather sexist humor. On the other end of the spectrum, Alley Kat-Abra was a fine character, but rather useless in most fights, especially odd since the writers apparently forgot her origin story as a martial arts instructor as she uses those particular skills all of twice (not an exaggeration).
OK, so, what was the whole Captain Carrot thing anyway? In the first storyline, Superman crosses dimensional boundaries to Earth-C, which is populated by talking animals. A handful get superpowers as a result, and their leader is one Roger (later Rodney) Rabbit, comic book artist who gains some neat rabbit-related powers when he eats one of his cosmic powered carrots. You can't make this stuff up mostly because someone has already beaten you to it. The remainder as the aforementioned Yankee Poodle and Alley Kat-Abra, swamp-dwellin' good ol' boy Fastback the turtle, movie star Byrd Rentals who can stretch as Rubberduck, and the swine of steel Pig-Iron, who apparently was a pre-existing DC funny animal character from the 40s.
That's actually a minor selling point for the book. Earth-C is home to all DC funny animal characters. Many appear in the book, and since Roy Thomas was a co-creator, he does signal when such a character is from an old book, like Pig-Iron pre-transformation, or Fastback's uncle, a World War II era superhero.
Then factor in how many of the jokes are not really aimed at kids. An old prospector complains about liberals. There are recession jokes. Nothing really "mature," but a good deal is something your average kid probably won't get. And the dialogue is, at least at first, rather clever. Yeah, a lot of the humor is bad puns based off animal words, which is found confusing by Teen Titan Changeling when he does a guest appearance, but the Zoo Crew find human world place names to be odd too, so at least that much is consistent. The stories do start to get old after a while, and later writers didn't even seem to remember Captain Carrot didn't fly so much as jump really far. Oh, and once or twice late in the book they break the fourth wall.
The final three reprinted issues may be the biggest artistic treat, the three-part Oz-Wonderland War, where the Zoo Crew was drawn in their usual style, but the various denizens of Wonderland and Oz were drawn in the style of their original illustrators, and keeping close to the old books as opposed to various movies made since.
All in all, a surprisingly fun set of reprints.
April 21, 2015
Like many in the coming months and years, I picked up this collection after reading Captain Carrot's adventures in Grant Morrison's Multiversity. While I didn't enjoy parts of this (particularly most of the Oz/Wonderland War), Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew is a really fun comic that is written with a ton of wit. It's certainly a good comic for kids, but longtime comic readers will find a lot of winks and nudges to appreciate. Love the reuse of some of DC's Funny Animals from the 40's. The art is fantastic throughout
June 3, 2016
Holy cow! (no pun intended) I had no idea what a deep impression these talking-animal, satirical superhero comics made on adolsecent me until I read this collection. I remember covers, gags, even the layouts of entire pages, from the all too short life of the series. A lot of the references were pretty topical, of the times for the early 80s, but I remembered almost everything the pop culture jokes were about and understood far more of the writing than I did as a kid.
July 4, 2016
Spoofy nostalgia.
February 19, 2019
Essentially the comic is just another superhero story, albeit told very tongue-in-cheek, with anthropomorphic animals in place of humans. After Superman knocks a strangely glowing meteorite into another dimension, it breaks into five pieces and bestows superpowers on five random animals. There is the titular Captain Carrot, Pig Iron, Rubberduck, Fastback (a turtle variant on the Flash), Yankee Poodle, who can shoot from her hands attraction and repellents beams in the forms of stars and stripes, and Alley Cat Abra, the mystical feline. Together they have some standard and mediocre adventures.
The material is clever, but not laugh-out-loud funny, and it became a little draining, reading twenty issues in a row of bad animal puns: San FROGcisco, Gnu York, President Mallard Fillmore, and so on. Normally I would never say this, but I think the absence of color in the Showcase Presents volume detracts from the comic. Something about the funny animal art lends itself to color. Along with the twenty issue run is a three part double sized limited series-which was always intended to be the next arc in the Captain Carrot run, called The Oz-Wonderland War. In this, the Zoo crew actually go to OZ, via Wonderland, to defeat the Nome King and restore Ozma to the throne of Oz. While this story has been right criticized as being way too similar to the L. Frank Baum book, Ozma of Oz, the art in both the Wonderland and Oz sections are dead-on recreations of illustrations in the original books. I think for this reason alone, the Oz-Wonderland War is the best in the book.
The material is clever, but not laugh-out-loud funny, and it became a little draining, reading twenty issues in a row of bad animal puns: San FROGcisco, Gnu York, President Mallard Fillmore, and so on. Normally I would never say this, but I think the absence of color in the Showcase Presents volume detracts from the comic. Something about the funny animal art lends itself to color. Along with the twenty issue run is a three part double sized limited series-which was always intended to be the next arc in the Captain Carrot run, called The Oz-Wonderland War. In this, the Zoo crew actually go to OZ, via Wonderland, to defeat the Nome King and restore Ozma to the throne of Oz. While this story has been right criticized as being way too similar to the L. Frank Baum book, Ozma of Oz, the art in both the Wonderland and Oz sections are dead-on recreations of illustrations in the original books. I think for this reason alone, the Oz-Wonderland War is the best in the book.
March 2, 2023
Ignoro el interés que reporten las historias de Captain Carrot a los fanáticos del universo DC. Supongo que ninguno, ya que tanto el personaje como sus compañeros (animales antropomorfizados que enjacan en los arquetipos del justiciero enmascarado) se acercan más a las caricarutas sabatinas que al comic-book con historias que o bien reiteran el esquema aventurero de los superhéroes o bien lo parodian. No faltan las buenas ideas en sus veinte números regulares, las que quizás pudieron evolucionar mejor sin anclarse permanentemente al universo madre: Un dibujo animado fuera de la esfera DC Comics pudo ser una opción.
No obstante, los seguidores de Alicia en el País de las Maravillas y/o El Mago de Oz quedarán admirados por la labor gráfica de Carol Lay en la miniserie la saga The Oz-Wonderland Wars, emulando a John Tenniel y John R. Neill en una historia que se encumbra entre las mejores de estos personajes. Humor y aventuras en una propuesta que hoy solo podrían apreciar los nostálgicos.
No obstante, los seguidores de Alicia en el País de las Maravillas y/o El Mago de Oz quedarán admirados por la labor gráfica de Carol Lay en la miniserie la saga The Oz-Wonderland Wars, emulando a John Tenniel y John R. Neill en una historia que se encumbra entre las mejores de estos personajes. Humor y aventuras en una propuesta que hoy solo podrían apreciar los nostálgicos.
September 1, 2018
I remembered loving this series growing up and it was nice to revisit. It was a peculiar series that bordered adult and kid mentality. While the original series was interesting, what surprised me was how good the Oz Wonderland War was and how exact in details to all three series the comic book was. It would be great to go back and explore that again.
December 19, 2014
An amazing mix of humor, strong superhero/action writing, and satire on the nature of comics, along with good generic storytelling.
The breadth and complicated nature of the concept really helps it have a lot of meaning. Basically, what if superheroes came to a universe comprised entirely of animals who walk and act like humans more or less, the "funny animal concept".
It offers for a lot of fun puns on the human world, like JLA standing for "Just A Lotta Animals" and tons of others. Also, it builds a lot of interesting constructs of how the characters interact. For example is how the shape of humans is treated as being grotesque and bizarre, how Captain Carrot thinks of Superman as being too weird for his world.
The stories have a very strong ability to work in jokes and basic entertainment of character personalities, as each member of the team has distinct tropes. Cat-Abra is friendly and quietly suffering, Yankee Poodle is rude and vain, Rubberduck is a famous actor in real life and loves to talk about Hollywood, Fastback is a hillbilly tortoise who often has a hard time sorting out intellectual thoughts, etc. Clearly defined yet nuanced characters make it a breeze.
There's a lot of fun story arcs that play across multiple issues. There's an evil secret society in the first few issues that builds up a lot of interesting and sarcastic surprises. And there's an excellent mini-series at the end where the Zoo Crew tries to save the Land of Oz and Wonderland from an evil magical king, very imaginative.
It also has effortlessly beautiful artwork from Carol Lay. The regular adventures of the Zoo Crew always have expressive artwork (they are cartoon characters) by the likes of Scott Shaw! and others.
Mastermind of the concept Roy Thomas and E. Nelson Bridwell do what they always do, write the generic superhero but with a professional charm.
READ THIS BOOK 5/5
The breadth and complicated nature of the concept really helps it have a lot of meaning. Basically, what if superheroes came to a universe comprised entirely of animals who walk and act like humans more or less, the "funny animal concept".
It offers for a lot of fun puns on the human world, like JLA standing for "Just A Lotta Animals" and tons of others. Also, it builds a lot of interesting constructs of how the characters interact. For example is how the shape of humans is treated as being grotesque and bizarre, how Captain Carrot thinks of Superman as being too weird for his world.
The stories have a very strong ability to work in jokes and basic entertainment of character personalities, as each member of the team has distinct tropes. Cat-Abra is friendly and quietly suffering, Yankee Poodle is rude and vain, Rubberduck is a famous actor in real life and loves to talk about Hollywood, Fastback is a hillbilly tortoise who often has a hard time sorting out intellectual thoughts, etc. Clearly defined yet nuanced characters make it a breeze.
There's a lot of fun story arcs that play across multiple issues. There's an evil secret society in the first few issues that builds up a lot of interesting and sarcastic surprises. And there's an excellent mini-series at the end where the Zoo Crew tries to save the Land of Oz and Wonderland from an evil magical king, very imaginative.
It also has effortlessly beautiful artwork from Carol Lay. The regular adventures of the Zoo Crew always have expressive artwork (they are cartoon characters) by the likes of Scott Shaw! and others.
Mastermind of the concept Roy Thomas and E. Nelson Bridwell do what they always do, write the generic superhero but with a professional charm.
READ THIS BOOK 5/5
April 13, 2015
Just read The Oz/Wonderland War, but that was enough for me.
1. Extremely silly, but well done funny animal superhero comic, with dedication to characters.
2. An interesting, coherent vision of Oz with the full cast of characters from the first three books everyone likes best.
3. And then some stuff about Wonderland.
All three of these had some merit, but I wasn't sure why it was all together. It prolly makes more sense as a coda to the series, but I'm not that interested in the idea of (1) all by itself. I think the most promising part was (2) and would love to see more of that (it reminded me a lot of what Shanower did in his comics, but with some needed edge). And without (1), (3) could've been developed more, but then, without (1), the whole thing would have no reason to exist. Which is kind of my point.
1. Extremely silly, but well done funny animal superhero comic, with dedication to characters.
2. An interesting, coherent vision of Oz with the full cast of characters from the first three books everyone likes best.
3. And then some stuff about Wonderland.
All three of these had some merit, but I wasn't sure why it was all together. It prolly makes more sense as a coda to the series, but I'm not that interested in the idea of (1) all by itself. I think the most promising part was (2) and would love to see more of that (it reminded me a lot of what Shanower did in his comics, but with some needed edge). And without (1), (3) could've been developed more, but then, without (1), the whole thing would have no reason to exist. Which is kind of my point.
July 17, 2016
Read out of nostalgia. My uncle had bought me six or seven issues of this as a kid and I loved them then so I always wanted the complete run.
December 27, 2014
This was my favourite title when I was a kid and it's just as hilarious today.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews