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FLAMING CARROT RETROSPECTIVE!
An excerpt from FC comics #24;
THE FLAMING CARROT STORY!
In 1976 I moved to Windermere Apartments here in Atlanta, right where Roswell Road intersects with I-285, the Perimeter Highway. Atlanta was over-built and apartments were pretty cheap, but this was a really nice place. It had a swimming pool, weight room, lots of single, young girls… we really thought it was the cat’s pajamas. I had a 2 bedroom-2 bath apartment that I shared with Lamar Waldron, who was the publisher and driving force behind VISIONS, and who also ran the Atlanta Fantasy Fair for a number of years. Lamar and I had always been pretty good friends and were fellow comic collectors back in the early ‘70s when we moved into this place. We were both pretty young. Lamar was working for some government agency, and I was working on a number of schemes that never went anywhere. Most of them dealt with getting into the movie business through the back door. I had a deal to distribute old Manhattan Moreland-Pigmeat Markhan films with all black casts made back in the Thirties to the modern college circuit, I wrote a screenplay for the Sheena movie that disappeared into the morass of Hollywood and, at one time, formed a consortium to buy up the rights to all the old Hershel Gordon Lewis movies like Blood Feast and 10,000 Maniacs, but we could never figure out who really owned them.
Meanwhile I was living by my wits, buying comics, baseball cards, movie posters through ads in the paper, and doing mail order, antique shows, flea markets etc… In those days it was a gold mine. There was so much stuff around most people had no idea that any of it was valuable. To me it was kind of like being a prospector in the old west or a treasure hunter. My average day consisted in getting up somewhere between 10-12 o’clock, eating breakfast, and going out and laying by the pool for an hour or two maybe. There were always a lot of girls in bikinis out there, and if I got up the nerve to talk to them (or if they hit on me) I might go out on a date later.
Around two I’d head back to the apartment and eat lunch. After lunch, a lot of times I’d go out and wander around in the city, go hit antique shops, pawn shops, thrift stores, or whatever. It was kind of fun, but kind of surreal, wandering around in this world where everyone had something to do and I was just wandering. It gave me sort of a different sense of life, a different perspective on the world. When happy hour hit, I’d go eat free food at all the bars and have a good time hang-out. A lot of times I’d meet friends at the latest hot spot and we’d all carry on and cut up. It was a wonderful, carefree existence.
As the night passed on, maybe I’d go visit with friends, or go to a disco, or go home and work on something or whatever. Basically, I did whatever I wanted and, for a number of years after graduating from college, goofed off a lot.
It was always kind of hard to explain what I did for a living. You say that you buy old comic books and baseball cards and people look at you strange. In a bar, a girl expects to meet a lawyer or a stockbroker or a salesman—but not a comic books collector. In those days comic books and baseball cards weren’t known as collector’s items, which is one of the reasons you could buy them for next to nothing. Telling somebody that that’s what you did for a living was not unlike telling someone you made mud pies or designed footwear for animals. A lot of people would just look at you like you were crazy. Half the time, I would just say something crazy like I sold guns to the Indians, and let it be at that.
Anyway, here I was one night. I walked into the apartment (it must have been in the winter or fall because I remember it was dark out at 8 o’clock) and Lamar was at his drawing board working on his story for VISIONS #1. I’d been to happy hour and was in a good mood. If I’d gotten a flat tire that night, or met a babe, things may have been different. Lamar had been on to me about having all these grandiose plans but never finishing anything.
By some chance of fate, I chose this character called “Flaming Carrot”. He was just one of a lot of different characters I’d come up with, and I just chose him like a number I’d pulled out of a hat. He was a joke more than a character like this, and what would he do?
There was no intelligent premeditation. I took a character that was preposterous, ridiculous and impossible and just ran with it. In a way, he was like an old beat-up hundred dollar car that you could raise hell with, drive through the woods, and drive until the doors fell off.
With Superman you have to be real careful not to screw up the character; with Flaming Carrot he is already screwed up beyond all recognition. His costume makes no sense whatsoever. So much does it not make any sense, that over the years I have been asked once or twice a year about it. People actually accept it because it’s so strange. The idea of a costumed character with super-powers is rather strange if you sit down and think about it, but here was a character that would been out of place in “Wizard of Oz,” “Alice in Wonderland,” or Dante’s “Inferno”. My gut instincts told me that this was perfectly and precisely what I wanted.
I never even toyed with the idea of giving him super-powers. I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me. He has no super-powers, but then neither does Batman. But Batman is a pretty sharp detective, so I made the Flaming Carrot sort of simple minded. There. Now we really have nothing to go on.
So I wrote the first story. I was sitting there and I had my desk, an old door for a table top, up on along the edge so I could just stick two 5 penny nails in there to hold a big, leaning piece of plywood at an angle up against the wall, and that was my drawing table. For a smooth surface, I had thumb-tacked on to it a sheet of big poster board, like you buy at the dime store. I also had two benches, like picnic table benches, one on top of each other, between the board and the wall to create a better angle and to set things on. One minute I had a drawing board, and by removing the nails and the board I had a desk top again.
