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Captain Carrot and his fellow animal heroes might be some of DC’s most bizarre heroes — but even they couldn’t escape a grim and dark approach.
The DC Universe includes a wide range of characters that cover a massive breadth of tone. It’s a universe where down-to-Earth characters can encounter magical forces, alien armadas, and untold cosmic forces. But even their most openly silly heroes can go through some dark days, and get their own versions of the industry’s grimmest turns.
Scott Shaw — one of the co-creators of the Zoo Crew — along with Geoff Johns and Jeromy Cox brought Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew back in Teen Titans #30 and #31 as an extended parody of the same grim and dark sensibilities that had come to define superhero comics by more or less giving the goofiest characters in DC their own version of Identity Crisis.
Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew are the heroic defenders of Earth-26 in the current DC Multiverse. In their reality, anthropomorphized talking animals exist as the primary form of sentient life. Originally known as Earth-C, this world was one of the few left undestroyed over the course of Crisis on Infinite Earths. The silly cast of characters was led by Captain Carrot and included the mystical Alley-Kat-Abra, the steel-skinned Pig-Iron, the shape-shifting Rubberduck, the energy controller Yankee Poodle, the superfast turtle Fastback, and the size-changing mouse Little Cheese. They’ve recently gained renewed prominence in the multiverse thanks to the modern incarnation of Captian Carrot, who has been one of the more prominent members of the multiversal Justice Incarnate.
In the Post-Crisis DC Universe, the characters had a surprising reappearance in the pages of Teen Titans, appearing as a comic book story within the DC Universe shortly before the events of Infinite Crisis. In this tale — titled “Whatever Happened To Captain Carrot?” — things have taken a dark turn on Earth-C. Serving as an extended parody of the darker DC stories of the time, the arc reintroduces audiences into a world where the Zoo Crew had disbanded. Captain Carrot was in self-imposed exile following the death of his partner, akin to Superman’s own exile in Kingdom Come. Heroes are largely outlawed, with Pig-Iron and Rubberduck operating in secret. Yankee Poodle was on the run after being framed for an assassination attempt against the President, Fastback going missing, and Abra publicly retiring.
The latter trio found themselves reunited after the shocking murder of Little Cheese in a riff on Identity Crisis — which hints at the involvement of a fellow hero. Their investigation is monitored by a new hero, the right-wing gadgeteer known as American Eagle. Tracking down the hero in his civilian identity of Rodney Rabbit, Eagle forces him to become Captain Carrot once more and formally reassemble the Zoo Crew. Together, the group discovered the truth — President Fillmore had seemingly bribed Alley-Kat-Abra to expose her identity and reveal secrets of the team to the government. After discovering the truth, Abra hid her actions by forcing Fastback into the distant future, framed Yankee Poodle for an assassination attempt, and ultimately killed Little Cheese when he got too close to the cover-up.
The story ultimately ended with Abra exposed and arrested, with the remainder of the team (alongside American Eagle as their newest recruit) venturing into the future to save Fastback. It’s a bizarre and memorable turn for the animal characters, giving them the same dark stylings that had become the regular for that period of superhero comics. The team later appeared in Captain Carrot and the Final Ark — which escalated the stakes even further and even revealed that it had been an evil duplicate of Alley-Kat-Abra who had betrayed the team while the original heroic one was trapped within a hellish dimension. That story even ended more tragically, with the Zoo Crew briefly trapped in regular animal bodies and unable to communicate until the events of Final Crisis restored them.
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