Rocket
20 years ago - Raquel Eruin is born in Paris Island, the poorest part of Dakota City.
6 years ago - 14-year-old Raquel Eruin starts dating Noble, a runner for the local street gang.
5 years ago - 15-year-old Raquel Eruin is pressured by Noble and his friends to break into a mysterious old brownstone on Christmas Eve. The owner, Augustus Freeman IV, chases then away. She is left behind by her boyfriend, and apologizes. They become friends, and she soon learns that he is a stranded alien with superhuman powers. She urges him to come out of seclusion and become the superhero Icon. She uses an inertia winder, technology from his escape craft, to become his sidekick Rocket.
4 years ago - 16-year-old Raquel Eruin discovers that she is pregnant. Both her mother and ex-boyfriend want her to terminate the pregnancy, but she chooses to have her son Amistad. She temporarily stops working as Rocket for a time, and Augustus Freeman IV is far less effective without her.
3 years ago - 17-year-old Raquel Eruin & Augustus Freeman IV seek out his old partner Jenny Sparks when she returns, joining her as she starts the new Stormwatch.
1 year ago - 19-year-old Raquel Eruin and Stormwatch make themselves public when they join the battle against Mageddon.
now - 20-year-old Raquel Eruin publishes her first book of poetry, with the help Augustus Freeman IV, who is inspired to start construction of his community center.
I probably fanboy a little too hard about the Milestone characters. They were just unlike anything else in an era when everything was starting to get a little same-y, and their characters had a depth and an underlying humanity that seems almost absent from anything else from their era. Rocket is probably the best character to point to for this, a character whose status as a superhero and sidekick is pretty easy to wrap your head around, but that so barely scratches the surface of her story and her practically unique role within her own heroic narrative. We barely had to do anything at all here, all we had to do was pretty much transpose her verbadim.
Rocket's Comic HistoryRocket first appeared in Icon #1 in 1993. Dwayne McDuffie's brilliant repurposing of the Superman mythos was already great, but true subtle genius of the series was Raquel. As the true lead and moral focus of the series, we get to follow her personal challenges and conflicts, elevating the Superman-allegory character to an even more mythic status as she works to influence him.
It doesn't hurt that Raquel herself is probably one of the most well-imagined characters in her generation. She's a deeply soulful character with big unrealized dreams, weighed down by the unbearable weight of her surroundings. She feels like a million people you actually know in real life, people with huge hearts and infinite capacity for greatness, if the world wasn't conspiring to keep them pressed down in their little hole. Meeting Icon becomes a revelation for her, opening her eyes to her OWN possibilities. What's really genius here is that Icon might have helped her realize what she's capable of, but as the series goes on we see time and again that it's Raquel herself that pushes herself to become something bigger than she ever dreamed she could be. |
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Our Rocket StoryI don't think there's much we changed at all about Rocket's story. While we needed to get a little more thorough in the long history of Icon and of how his powers work, we really already know everything we need about Raquel. We know she was born in poverty, that she fell in with a bad crowd and was probably on a very bad path, but that meeting Icon helped her turn herself around and that in turn she pushed him to make himself visible and help other people to do the same.
We of course are going to include her pregnancy. This was a huge story at the time, depicting a superhero undergoing a teen pregnancy; DC followed suit with Spoiler not long afterward, but Raquel still remains the first. It's a story told with so much grace and compassion, and I don't think I've ever felt myself internally cheer for a character more, her journey as a young mom as heroic as anything else she ever does. We've added Icon and Rocket to Stormwatch, as a way to simultaneously raise their profile and also maintain their status as slightly separated from the rest of the story. This makes her the youngest member, and there's something magical about a character who has interdimentional adventures and then comes home to take care of her son. |
Rocket in AnimationRocket was the very first new character added to the core team in the Young Justice animated series from 2010, in the last two episodes of the first season. She was added for a few reasons; to introduce Milestone characters to the series, and to provide an audience surrogate in the final storyarc so she could ask the questions that needed to be asked to tell the story properly. Also, they wanted a character they knew they could expand on in future seasons. After the five year time jump between seasons, Rocket was now fully an adult, serving on the Justice League, and was a new mom.
Unlike a lot of characters in animation, we don't really have to draw too hard on the Young Justice Rocket... primarily because she had so much great content to draw on already. |
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Rocket's CostumeRaquel's costume notably started out with what we in the industry call a 'boob window', but in a really fun moment she actually got rid of it because she decided she just wasn't comfortable with it. That's a moment that should absolutely stick, because it's so incredibly humanizing. People talk all the time about how characters are choosing to wear these costumes, so how great is it to actually watch someone choose NOT to?
In an earlier pass at this page, we took a look at her original costume and said that it was maybe a little plain. We looked at her animated costume and how they basically expanded her jacket into a full body flight jumpsuit, called it a neat attempt at expanding her look that kept her very grounded, but that it still didn't quite feel like a superhero costume. Since then, DC has created a new imprint reintroducing the Milestone characters, and has reimagined both Rocket and Icon's costumes. Icon's is clearly not as cool, but Raquel's costume is worth looking at, because it does so much of what we thought we wanted. It updated the look into something more modern, more superhero-forward... and it is also just not as good. I think I just need to admit I was wrong. Raquel's original costume, the more we look at it, is pretty much perfect. leave it just as it is. |
Rocket's FutureRocket's role in the future of our project is an interesting one. For one thing, she's such a fantastic expression of the idea of a sidekick. Even now that she's fully an adult, and a mom to boot, there's absolutely nothing saying that she can't continue to serve in this role. The pairing of Icon and Rocket clearly WORKS, and they could absolutely continue to do so for years to come.
However, while ROCKET can absolutely stay just as she is, Raquel feels like a character that can go on to be so much more. I don't think she'd ever need to evolve her superhero persona, but I get the real sense that her role in the world is just going to go on expanding. You can easily see her, as Rocket, one day showing up in the Justice League Task Force... or even the League itself... honestly even the Watchtower doesn't seem out of reach. One thing that I think is probably inevitable... I do think that just like in the comics, eventually Agustus is going to leave Earth. He's served the role Raquel set for him admirably, but ultimately I do think this just isn't his home. That of course means that the role of Icon would be vacant. Raquel, I think, will always be more than happy as Rocket... but one wonders just how old little Amastad would be at that point, right? |
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