Cave Carson
58 years ago - Calvin Carson is born in Imnaha, Oregon.
47 years ago - 11-year-old Calvin Carson becomes a Boy Scout.
44 years ago - 14-year-old Calvin Carson begins participating in cave explorations with local chapters of the National Speleological Society. He quickly earns the nickname "Cave".
41 years ago - 17-year-old Cave Carson earns his Eagle Scout rank, his project mapping extensive subterranean passageways across Oregon.
40 years ago - 18-year-old Cave Carson attends the University of Arizona to study Geology, creating his own chapter of the National Speleological Society.
36 years ago - 22-year-old Cave Carson begins his graduate work in Geology.
33 years ago - 25-year-old Cave Carson earns his doctorates in several different Geological studies. He works along with the Challengers of the Unknown to venture under the surface to track strange seismic activity, discovering the volcano men. Professor Walter Haley works with him to design an advanced underground exploration vehicle.
32 years ago - 26-year-old Cave Carson begins working for E. Borsten & Sons as a geologist and explorer. They fund the creation of his advanced tunneling vehicle, the Mighty Mole.
29 years ago - 29-year-old Cave Carson brings on a team of specialists to work with the Mighty Mole; Tunnel Expert Bulldozer Smith, Geologist Christie Madison, & Spelunker Johnny Blake. When E. Borsten & Sons tries to take back the Mighty Mole, he steals it, beginning to set up his secret labs scattered across the planet.
28 years ago - 30-year-old Cave Carson and Johnny Blake's ongoing conflict over Christine Madison boils over, and they come to blows. He apologizes and backs off.
26 years ago - 32-year-old Cave Carson and his team discover Strata, the hidden underground kingdom formed eons ago around the corpse of an alien deity. They help save the civilization from Deep Fungal entities, becoming friends to the royal family. Cave, in particular, befriends Princess Mazra P'Thrall
24 years ago - 34-year-old Cave Carson marries Princess Mazra Mazra P'Thrall of Strata against the will of her parents. She joins Cave's team as Eileen Carson.
22 years ago - 36-year-old Cave Carson and his wife Eileen Carson have their daughter Chloe Carson.
16 years ago - 42-year-old Cave Carson's team follow mysterious underground signals to a deep underground laboratory where Dr Kraklow is opening ruptures in space. They stop him, but in doing so Bulldozer Smith is trapped and lost in one of the ruptures. Upon their return home their vehicle, the Mighty Mole, is decommissioned by E. Borsten & Sons. Christine Madison and Johnny Blake are married.
4 years ago - 54-year-old Cave Carson's daughter Chloe Carson attends Seattle Pacific University as a communications student with a minor in film.
3 years ago - 55-year-old Cave Carson's wife Eileen Carson is diagnosed with a terminal illness. He tries to find a cure, but she passes within three months. His relationship with his daughter Chloe Carson becomes even more strained. His eye cavity is invaded by a modular cybernetic eye, evidentially left over from his deceased wife's laboratory. It grants him wide-spectrum vision capability but also makes him hallucinate his wife.
2 years ago - 56-year-old Cave Carson's daughter Chloe Carson escapes an attempted kidnapping by agents of E. Borsten & Sons (Now EBX) as they attempt to breach a vault only accessible by members of the Strata royal family. Cave and Chloe steal the Mighty Mole and venture into Strata to save her grandparents. They start an educational podcast together.
Cave Carson's Comic HistoryCave Carson appeared for the first time in the Brave and the Bold #31 in 1960, the cover story in three subsequent issues. This is a really classic Atomic Age premise; Cave feels like one of those pre-superhero comic characters with his specific scifi niche, having episodic adventurers with his team of science-heroes. However, an eagle-eyed observer might notice that these three issues of Brave and the Bold are RIGHT after issues 28-30, the first appearances of the Justice League. Cave might seem like something that should have preceded the launch of the Silver Age, but he's RIGHT in the middle of it. After that initial run of stories in The Brave and the Bold, there was another follow up run over in Showcase a few years later, where they changed from their yellow costumes to the red and white ones with hard hats that are usually what would be reference in the future.
Cave's adventures with his underground tunneling car took him "Inside Earth" through all sorts of underground biomes, having adventures with a lot of different monsters and underground creatures, including one group that I absolutely swear are Sleestaks Cave is often competing with his teammate Johnny Blake for the attention of their geologist, Christine Madison, even though they were already a couple. What really stood out was the really phenomenal art by Bruno Premiani, which brought an unbelievable amount of realism to stories primarily about running away from giant underground monsters. |
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Like a lot of classic comic characters, there's nothing wrong with these classic stories; they're fun, but the character would probably not still be around if there wasn't something happening somewhere in the midpoint of their history that brought them up again to keep them relevant. In Cave's case, that was the Forgotten Heroes. A group assembled in 1983 in Action Comics made up of several characters from old anthology stories. Tim Hunter, Congo Bill, Dolphin, almost all of them characters that would go on to be reintroduced in one capacity or another in the Post Crisis years. Cave never saw any sort of resurgence, but he became an incredibly common reference character. He would pop up all the time (Time Masters, Eclipso, War of the Gods), but even more often he would be name-dropped. Practically any time anything happened in any series involving geology, someone would mention that Cave Carson had investigated.
Cave saw a sudden and kind of unprecedented turnaround in 2016, when he suddenly starred in a brand new miniseries as part of Gerald Way's Young Animals imprint; Cave Carson has a Cybernetic Eye, by Way himself. It is an utterly delightful series, full of love and loss and family, as well as incredible body horror and gore and psychedelia. We are introduced to Cave after a long career full of adventure and regrets. We meet his recently deceased wife, secretly the princess of an underground kingdom, and his young college-age daughter Chloe, who is also dealing with the loss of her mother... and that's all I'm telling you. Go read it right now. |
Our Cave Carson StoryCave Carson has a Cybernetic Eye was one of those revelatory comics that you read and just know it's burning itself into your brain like a CD. It's full of so much heart and great characters that I was immediately trying to work out how we're including it. It has actually been followed up by a small sequel miniseries, Cave Carson has an Intergalactic Eye, but for out part we were mostly zeroing in on anything we needed to do to get the first series in place in our timeline. We went back and read the classic Cave stories as well, but at this point they really just read like flashbacks meant to set up this series. We build up a more complete history for Cave, establishing his childhood and education (and also tie him to the Challengers of the Unknown briefly... he can't be QUITE as old as that team in order for his daughter to be the right age, but it does feel right that they cross paths). We included his team of fellow science-adventurers, but didn't build them out so much that they merited their own timelines. They're really only relevant in that they are involved here.
With that done... the most important thing about Cave is that we set him up for the events of the Cybernetic Eye story. We're not following it verbatim, there's some multiverse stuff in there we'd just as soon skip, but we focus on what matters; his relationship to his daughter Chloe, which almost effortlessly sets her up as a new favorite character in DC's modern lexicon. |
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