Snapper Carr
31 years ago - Lucas Carr is born in Happy Harbor, Maine.
25 years ago - 6-year-old Lucas Carr is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1.
21 years ago - 10-year-old Lucas Carr first gets the nickname Snapper, referring to his stimming, which he embraces enthusiastically.
19 years ago - 12-year-old Snapper Carr builds his first computer using several broken surplus computers from his school.
17 years ago - 14-year-old Snapper Carr starts assembling a car using donated parts.
16 years ago - 15-year-old Snapper Carr is able to avoid the mind control of Starro. He attaches a dead Starro spore to his face and infiltrates its lair in the mountain outside Happy Harbor, observing the mind controlled humans as the assemble their equipment, learning how to use the alien tech. He helps a group of heroes stop Starro, and agrees to help them maintain their new mountain headquarters as they form as the Justice League. He works with Michael Holt & Iron Munro to adapt their alien technology.
15 years ago - 16-year-old Snapper Carr offers to continue to maintain Mount Justice when the Justice League moves their headquarters to their new Satellite, keeping the Mountain for its archival, research and medical facilities.
12 years ago - 18-year-old Snapper Carr graduates high school, devoting himself to supporting the Justice League full-time.
11 years ago - 19-year-old Snapper Carr begins using the Justice League tech to work as an investigator, traveling internationally to track down situations that require attention and contacting the appropriate hero to respond. He works with a small operational budget from Queen Consolidated, Wayne Industries and Atlantis.
4 years ago - 27-year-old Snapper Carr opens up Mount Justice so that Young Justice can use it as their headquarters. He continues his investigative work, but when he is back he sometimes offers the young heroes advice based on his experience.
3 years ago - 28-year-old Snapper Carr helps M'gann M"orzz as she solves several mysteries in Happy Harbor, acting as her assistant.
Soon - Snapper Carr helps Young Justice adapt Mount Justice, now displaced into the Ghost Zone, maintaining it as their new headquarters.
For pretty much my entire lifetime, Snapper Carr was not an active part of DC's lore. He was a vestigial reference to a time long past when comics were written for a much younger audience. Because of that, I really only saw comics that loosely referenced his existence or subtly satirized him. This isn't uncommon; superhero comics often go through these periods thinking that maturing their readership means leaving behind the whimsy that is so important to their success. Snapper, however, might be the best example of this, because not only is he whimsical, he's downright silly.
There IS a character worth thinking about here, though, and I don't think he has to be rendered into a cautionary tale to do so. Maybe we can find a way to actually latch onto the original idea of a sidekick for the early Justice League and actually carry it through to now? Let's see.
There IS a character worth thinking about here, though, and I don't think he has to be rendered into a cautionary tale to do so. Maybe we can find a way to actually latch onto the original idea of a sidekick for the early Justice League and actually carry it through to now? Let's see.
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Snapper Carr's Comic HistoryThe Justice League first debuted in the Brave and the Bold #28 in 1960. The first appearance of the Barry Allen Flash in Showcase #4 in 1956 is considered the beginning of the Silver Age, but this issue introducing the flagship team that will define the coming era is really where it takes off. As I understand it, it was actually legendary editor Julius Schwartz who insisted that Gardner Fox include a hip teen sidekick for the League, and so we were introduced to Snapper Carr, a character that can only be described as "hep".
This move by Schwartz & Fox makes more sense in the context of the era. This is only six years after the creation of the Comic Code Authority, when the entire industry had to shift to a more family friendly-format, ditching comics written to appeal to adults. Schwartz was particularly good at navigating this environment and knew that this was simply what you had to do to make sure your superhero comic story was appropriately family-friendly. Still, Snapper's weird hep-teen jive talk and penchant for constantly snapping his fingers in every panel reads completely bonkers today. |
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Thanks to Schwartz, and a whole litany of Silver Age era creators, comics managed to make it out of that awkward adolescence of the 60s. There's less uniformity as to specifically when the next age of comics, the Bronze Age, started. It's generally considered to be 1970, when Green Arrow joined the Green Lantern book under Denny O'Neal & Neal Adams, Jack Kirby left Marvel for DC, and Schwartz took over as the Superman editor from Mort Weisinger. These are all very important milestones, but I would humbly also like to suggest that the Bronze Age could also have started in 1969, with Justice League of America #77, "Snapper Carr - Super Traitor!" Snapper had been TRICKED into revealing League secrets before, but this issue saw him actually articulating feelings of abandonment and resentment, which leads to him actively joining an anti-superhero movement and revealing the League headquarters to its leader, who turns out to be (I'm not kidding) the Joker. The blame for this incident basically followed Snapper for the rest of the Bronze Age, until he really stopped showing up that much at all. He did pop in again in the 200th issue in 1982, but this version was notably regressed back to his sillier Silver Age persona, fully skipping the weird angst of the 70s.
Post-Crisis, Snapper briefly developed teleportation powers and led a team of spacefaring misfits in the book Blasters... and while he generally shows up in quick cameos, he did have a brief period as a sort of mentor for Young Justice. |
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Our Snapper Carr StoryThe thing that made Snapper suddenly click as an element we could absolutely include was an observation from a reader (who happens to be autistic themselves) that Snapper's snapping habit makes way more sense if you think of it as stimming. That doesn't necessarily mean Snapper is autistic, but once that door was opened it just seemed to frame his relationship with the League in such an interesting way. During the League's first mission, as they tried to stop Starro from taking over Happy Harbor, one kid managed to avoid being mind-controlled. In the comics its because he just happened to be putting lime down in a garden, but what if it was actually something he DID? What if that kid managed to avoid the spoor-controlled people of Happy Harbor and made his way inside the mountain laid, and actually got a headstart on understanding the alien technology there?
Keeping Snapper in the story actually does some really neat stuff to the history of the League overall. There's an understanding that Mount Justice is still there and still a resource for the League even as they move into other headquarters. Moreover, the same can be done with Snapper himself. We described the role we imagine for him as a sort of investigator, specifically traveling the world looking for situations that require involvement from League members. He becomes a sort of active archivist. By skipping over his entire Bronze Age personification, when he was resentful and functioned as a walking deconstruction of the optimism of the Silver Age, and instead letting him just be a competent ally with a JOB to do, Snapper becomes are really fun inclusion in the lore of the Justice League. |
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