Bob Burden: Flaming Carrot is a strange little character I dreamed up over 15 years ago. He was a "throw-away" character that survived. He actually flourished with lack of care and cavalier treatment. He's like a literary weed.
He's a simple, child-like hero with a great carrot on his head, flames coming out the top, and flippers. He is "Zen stupid," whatever that is, and solves his crimes with violence, fun, and completely illogical deductions. He has no super powers. When he's in a spot he blasts his way out in a hail of gunfire and destruction.
Bruce Costa: Not many creators would spend a career on a character that looks so bizarre, has no super powers, is stupid, carnal, and crazy...
Burden: I mean, it was a dumb idea, yes, and so I ran with it. He was ridiculous, preposterous... a cultural monstrosity. I liked the character because I felt a freedom to do almost anything with him. What I lacked in the super power department I was able to compensate for in the story and character department.
Costa: These are not your normal stories, that is, stories that would fit into the lexicon and formula of most entertainment mediums.
Burden: The star of any Flaming Carrot story is the story itself. The stories are a lot more fun to write for this character than one with a story predicated by the super powers, secret identity, and do-gooder formula of most comics.
Costa: But it isn't really a satire on super heroes.
Burden: No. I would not say satire. Early on some critics got really bent out of shape because they thought it was a satire. They thought I was making fun of their super heroes. Satire is Mad magazine.
The Flaming Carrot really goes beyond satire. At first glance it looks like a super hero. At second glance it looks like a satire of the super hero. Look three times at it and it looks like someone really screwed things up. He is, perhaps, the worlds first surrealist super hero. He is inexplicable. His very existence is inexplicable.
When you say crimefighter or comic character, then next they will ask, "What are his powers? What is his origin? What does he do?" That is mostly left undefined. There is no proper explanation for his appearance.
Most superheroes are all reason and motivation. Batman's parents were killed by criminals. His bat costume is designed to scare criminals. On the other hand, FC's costume means nothing. It is Kafka-esque. The Flaming Carrot image, the persona, is something out of a Bob Dylan song.
Costa: Kafka-esque, Dylan-esque... perhaps someday they will say "Carrot-esque."
Burden: Flaming Carrot is more like a spirit, a face from a totem pole come alive, an image torn from an old lost manuscript. An image from a dream that would lose its meaning if interpreted or explained.
Costa: He is abstract.
Burden: Abstract! Yes! Of course, all these years, no one has concluded that. But yes, he is an abstract character, not just surreal but abstract. Like modern art or scat singing.
Costa: And beyond the image, you have Flaming Carrot's personality...
Burden: When I started out, I was not the best artist so I had to make up for it with the writing. My mother is the only person I know who believes I'm the best artist and should be hung in museums. There are some out there who feel I should be hung -- from the nearest tree. But a writer must orchestrate. After Flaming Carrot's initial, outre appearance we next encounter his personality. Here we now get into the formula, the mix, the orchestration that makes it all work. The personality, combined with the setting, action, and the other characters... we have a strange mix. We have this far out image: a man with a giant carrot on his head and flippers. The carrot is on fire. His fierce eyes glare through the mask.
But this is no sage guru, Wizard of Oz, card carrying philosopher. He's actually an idiot. The fool on the hill. He's simple. Simple, candid, crazed, and madcap. His childlike personality and state of pure, crystalline Zen stupidity are his trademarks. Who else climbs walls with a toilet plunger? Who else chases gangsters on a pogo-stick? Who else uses a stink bomb? Who else throws a banana peel in front of an escaping criminal causing him to fall down and die? Flaming Carrot is the only superhero that believes that 100 pounds of lead is heavier than 100 pounds of feathers. He's a cull, a reject, a lost soul that wants to stay lost and happy.
Now we take this character and can go nuts with it, because he doesn't matter. He's not Superman, where you have well-defined story parameters and character limitations.
Costa: Everyone knows what Superman will do in a given situation, but they are curious to see what Flaming Carrot will do because you never know...
Burden: Yes. If I have Flaming Carrot throwing a pot roast at a monster and then running away, or picking up a waitress at the Waffle House, or walking peacefully along and then suddenly screaming for no reason, people aren't surprised. He looks so weird to begin with. If I want him to battle a flying golf course? No problem. Put out a villain's eye with a pencil? There it is.
One of my most popular characters is the dried up dead dog they found in an old suitcase when they were cleaning out the back room at the laundromat.
Costa: A dead dog?
Burden: They opened the suitcase and there was this dead dog, all dried up like paper mache. Suddenly it leaps up and flys around the room. Who knows why it's flying, but it flies all over town causing all kinds of mayhem. It likes to eat mail. You know, letters.
They try everything to kill it. It's scaring kids, disrupting traffic, knocking over postmen and running off with the mail bags. They shoot it, fight it, blast it with a death ray, but can't kill it. The dead dog is already dead. The dead dog even ambushes Flaming Carrot in the Red Lobster while he's eating lunch.
Costa: Of all the nerve...
Burden: Flaming Carrot finally tracks the nasty creature to a cave on Monster Mountain and kills it.
Costa: But if it's dead, how does Flaming Carrot kill it?
Burden: He wacks it to pieces with a two by four. Then he gathers up the pieces and puts them all in jars. The jars float, but as long as the pieces stay apart, the dead dog is neutralized. Flaming Carrot ties strings to the jars and walks along with them like they were helium balloons.
Costa: I notice that the setting is totally blue collar, the mill town, the odd characters, the debris-strewn streets, cracked pavement...
Burden: There's the twist. We have taken this abstract, avant-garde image and we put him in the blue-collar, rust-belt town of Iron City. Is he jet-setting to the Riviera? Drinking champagne on a yacht in the Bahamas? Emcee-ing the Saturday summer bash on MTV? No. Flaming Carrot hangs out in bowling alleys, pool halls, and strip joints. He has some small income from a laundromat he owns on the corner of Euclid Avenue and 3rd Street in the run-down Palookaville district.
Costa: The smokestacks of the mills, the power lines, the trash in the street are the glamour of Iron City. You live in Atlanta, Georgia, but you seem all too familiar with the Northeastern American rust belt where I'm from.
Burden: I grew up in those towns; Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Akron, Milwaukee. Sharon, Pennsylvania is where I spent my high-school years and there's a lot of Sharon in my Iron City.
Costa: So this new abstract, avant-garde, blue-collar, Zen-stupid super hero Flaming Carrot is your revamped, revolutionary version of the superhero.
Burden: Revolutionary. If it was any revolution, I haven't seen it. Devo-lutionary is more like it... Perhaps "revisionist" is the right word. I did the blue-collar thing. I did the surreal angle. The retro angle. Where Marvel usurped DC Comics in the early sixties with a revisionist "middle class" version of the superhero -- Peter Parker, the hero with "problems" -- Flaming Carrot and now the new Mysterymen series are lower-class, working-class super heroes. "Hill Street Blues" was a blue-collar version of the cop show. Compare it to "Miami Vice."
Costa: And The Unforgiven was a "revisionist" western.
Burden:... and "Lonesome Dove." Blue Velvet was a "revisionist" version of Tom Brown's School Days or a Hardy Boys Mystery.
The gritty realism is an element of Flaming Carrot, a background element, but the new Mysterymen series will delve into the human condition a lot further.
Costa: The Mysterymen are going beyond the Carrot?
Burden: Mysterymen is a lot more like the stories we just mentioned. Also, maybe a little Willy Loman, Holden Caulfield, and Glass Menagerie come to comics. Revisionist? Definitely. Revolutionary? I hope so. I'd like to think they're visionary. I've been writing and revising the first ten stories for two years.
Costa: The 14-page Mysterymen story that appears in the annual is a super story. It's very well-drawn, too.
Burden: Don't blame it on me. Steve Sadowski did the pencils. I only inked it. He did a great job. I was amazed.
Costa: And you wrote it.
Burden: I've been writing a lot of diverse stuff lately. It's kind of realistic, kind of harsh. It's like the Naked City thing. A grim ending.
Costa: Will all the Mysterymen stories be so grim?
Burden: Mysterymen will be a departure from even the Carrot. There will still be humorous Mysterymen stories, but the new series will provide an opportunity to do things that would never fit in Flaming Carrot Comics. I don't want to damage the integrity of Flaming Carrot. I want to keep Flaming Carrot Comics the feel-good, spirit-raising, hangover-curing, leap-before-you-look, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants venue that it is. It's my answer to a nation suffocating in the swill of its own mediocrity. I will just leave well enough alone, preserve the Carrot's integrity, and go nuts in another way with the Mysterymen. Some Flaming Carrot stories will appear in the Mysterymen.
You see, with The Mysterymen series, the story is the star, not the characters. The characters are often interchangeable between stories. It's like Alfred Hitchcock or "Tales From The Crypt." Some stories will be horror, some will be whimsical, some will be character studies, some will be surreal, some will be bleak... hopefully all will be included in the series because they are interesting. I'm hoping we can use different artists for different stories and still preserve the viability.
Costa: And you're just writing the Mysterymen series.
Burden: There's no other way. We're talking about a monthly book; eventually three monthly books. Mysterymen will be the flagship title. Then there's two sister titles: All Villain Comics and a Secret Origins title. We'll come out with three #1s in a row, one each month, so by the time the dealer's ordering #2 of Mysterymen for the fourth month, he'll have gotten in #1 on the racks. The first eight or ten stories will be complete in each issue.
Costa: That's important. So readers can pick up any issue without having to wait for the earlier issues to be reprinted or compiled into a trade paperback. Many series are hampered by the continued story.
Burden: There's not going to be any second printings. And there won't be any trade paperback collections for a while -- a year or two. And we will not have any premium price back-issue sales. The last copy goes out at cover price same as the first. Let the dealers and the collectors deal with back issue sales. No mini series either.
Costa: You used to sell the early Carrot issues for premium prices.
Burden: In the early days I did that to survive. They paid for convention appearances, ads, plane tickets, health insurance. Also, I stocked up on my back issues when nobody else would. I bought all the early, unsold issues from the publishers. It was fun back then but I'm sick of mail order and dealing comics and trading. I'm quite happy to just write and draw.
Costa: What do new readers need to know about the Carrot's history before buying the Annual?
Burden: The Annual contains a 40-page, self-contained story that stands on its own and doesn't conclude or continue any previous storyline. I like to avoid "continuity." That is the long, unending, soap-opera stories like in most Marvels. It's a lot harder to write complete stories.
Costa: Why is that?
Burden: I'd rather write ten issues of continuity than three self-contained stories. I think an ending, a good ending, is hard to come up with. A picture's worth a thousand words but a good ending is worth a million.
Costa: Flaming Carrot Comics does have an interesting 15-year history in the Direct Market.
Burden: Well, the Flaming Carrot first saw publication in Visions #1 back in 1979. It was really limited. I've heard it called the Detective #27 or the Amazing Fantasy #15 of the direct market. It was pretty primitive.
But yeah, I suppose Cerebus #1 could be called the Action #1 of the Direct Market era and Visions #1 was way back there in 1979 during the birth of the direct market. There were 1,000 copies of Visions #1, signed and numbered. 200 of those were burned in a fire. It's a truly scarce book, and copies still go for really high prices. I'll tell you one thing -- when it was published no one expected it to be valuable someday for the little eight-page Carrot story. Visions #1 had Steranko and Neal Adams and Rudy Nebres in it, and then there's this crude little Carrot story. I didn't really know how to draw as well as I do now. I've often said that the Carrot series is a visual history of someone learning how to draw. Still, I gave it my all. The writing carried the art early on.
Costa: Then you went with Aardvark-Vanahiem in 1983.
Burden: Yeah, coming out just in time for a crash in the market. But things picked up the next year, better than ever. The stories I did in the first three Visions were easy, because I didn't know it was hard, but the first Aardvark-Vanahiem issue took a while because people were depending on me -- the readers, the publisher. I remember that first one taking a long time. Then I got into stride with the later issues. I was bi-monthly for a while.
Costa: Tell about some of those stories.
Burden: Flaming Carrot #1 had Flaming Carrot making his comeback. That avoided an origin story for the first issue. The story was called "Road Hogs from Outer Space." Instead of blowing up the White House and zapping everyone with death rays, the aliens stole cars and drove around, knocking people off the road, creating big wrecks and heckling pedestrians. It was a switcheroo on the old "land sale on Mars" scam. The alien invaders had been sold land on our Earth years ago before they had developed space travel. They came down to settle. The aliens could swim through the ground like it was water.
In issue #2, "Death Gets Dunk," Death shows up looking for a gang leader called Mel Toupee. The Toupee gang tries to rub out Death, but they can't kill him. They give him enough strychnine to kill a horse but it only makes him tipsy. Death orders more of the same and gets drunk. He kinda goes nuts, turns people into bugs and things like that. It has a great ending, one of my best twists, but I won't spoil it for anyone if they haven't read it.
Issue #3 was one of my favorite issues -- "The Artless Dodger." He's this odd criminal who causes all kind of damage, mayhem, and death when he strikes. But he only steals worthless things. Vanilla wafers, worn-out tires, confederate money...
Then, with issue #4, the series got into a long story that rambles on to #11. Death shows up again and goes bar hopping with the Carrot. Governor Slugwell turns into a baby head. Flaming Carrot dies and is revived. Communists take over Iron City. Things like that.
Probably the best stories in the teens were issue #12, the "Dead Dog" story; issue #13, the first "Bikini Teens" story; and issue #18, the first Dark Horse issue.
Costa: Issue #18 -- "Uncle Billy."
Burden: Yes. Uncle Billy gets a mail-order bride. Uncle Billy is one of Flaming Carrot's friends. He's like a John Candy character, a loveable used-car salesman with a bow tie. His big deals and bargains are always getting him in trouble. Anyway, the bride arrives in a cage and is a wild woman from the jungle. She howls at the moon, buries bones in the back yard, and upsets all the other women in town.
Costa: Please titillate us with a suspenseful and incomplete story synopsis of Flaming Carrot Annual #1.
Burden: It's a 40-page story and it's an Arbor Day story. There's holiday stories for almost every holiday but none for Arbor Day. Pretty big coup, eh?
Costa: What's Arbor Day?
Burden: Ah, they plant trees or something...
Costa: Right. It was a popular holiday in the first half of this century but I don't think people do it much anymore.
Burden: But now, I got it. Christmas has A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life.
Costa: Judy Garland in Easter Parade...
Burden: And now Independence Day has the 4th of July. Flaming Carrot has dibs on Arbor Day.
Costa: What's this story got to do with Arbor Day?
Burden: Not much, really. They're having an Arbor Day celebration at the end of the story. Alright, ya got me. I didn't start out with the idea of doing an Arbor Day story. It just occured to me half-way through the story and I stuck it in, pasted over a few word balloons and almost added a page where they plant a tree. I mean, maybe Arbor Day's kind of a crummy holiday, sure. You don't get any presents or candy. But maybe it's a good idea, planting trees and all.
It's a neat story. People that have read it say it reminds them of the early stories. It's probably better-drawn than the early stories, but it's just as whimsical as the early stories. The Carrot has a treasure map that he bought at the flea market. It's a treasure map to a pork chop mine.
Costa: Yes, I wanted to ask you about that. What the hell is a pork chop mine?!
Burden: He goes looking for the pork chop mine up in the hills. He's walking along, thinking about the delicious pork chops -- he thinks about them served with mashed potatoes and peas -- but he never finds the pork chop mine. Instead he finds a miniature Abe Lincoln, a tiny, little fellow. Where does this miniature Abe come from? Who knows?
Costa: It's abstract.
Burden: Exactly. It doesn't matter. It's better off unexplained. He just appears. They found him in the woods.
Costa: And there's a dream sequence...
Burden: Flaming Carrot Dreams about standing on the shore and finding some pies. The pies are floating in the water and are all soggy and disgusting when he picks them up. Waterlogged pies.
Costa: More abstract...
Burden: Abstract images... I use them to create a feeling, like a painter uses color tones or texture to create a feeling in the picture. That's surrealism. It's the orchestration of images and feelings to create an overall effect. It's not just putting in a lot of nonsense, confusion, and disjointed things.
Dali draws giraffes, burning giraffes in a desert, and it's perfect. It works as an image. You see, there's no guide to surrealism, there's no rule of thumb. It's all from the heart. It's an instinct. Pies floating in the water works for me. When it works for me, I find that it works for others, too. Sometimes it backfires and there are a few people who are horrified, bored, or repelled.
Costa: Is Crowbone based on anyone you know? He seems based on some people I know...
Burden: Crowbone? What an odd name, eh? I don't think that Crowbone is anyone specific in my life. But he represents an aspect of everyone's personality or a stage of maturity.
Costa:... or immaturity.
Burden: He's a little like Cramer on "Sienfeld," not as developed. He was going to have his own stories. Maybe someday. I have a few in mind. Who knows? He might be more popular than the Carrot someday.
Costa: Why did you pick comics to work in?
Burden: I love the medium. I love the freedom. I think I would get lost in the restrictions inherent to other mediums. The corporation mentality hasn't killed the freedom of the independent comics. Probably more than anything, I like to do something that will make people happy. I like to reach out and push a button that makes someone laugh.
Costa: Here is perhaps an impossible question. Who is the average Flaming Carrot reader?
Burden: Over the years, I've had some surprises. You'd be surprised. Little kids that hardly could understand all of the jokes. Adults. College presidents, jet pilots, plumbers... a lot of college kids. It's more a type of mind rather than any kind of age group or profession. And the book has traveled into some of most unexpected hands and the strangest places. Someday, I'll be shipwrecked and about to be eaten by cannibals when the witch doctor recognizes me from the comic and lets me go. Of course they have a big banquet for me and the chief offers me two or three of his daughters.
Costa: And you wouldn't turn it down!
Burden: Well sometimes you have to respect the various and diverse cultural differences of other peoples and societies. When an American is overseas, he's an ambassador for all of us.
Costa: What are your thoughts on the current state of the industry?
Burden: I have a whole treatise on that that would be too long to go into here. Maybe a later interview. Overall, I think the hobby will survive. What I'm doing with The Mysterymen is aimed at keeping it going. I mean, I never thought I would be doing superheroes this far into my career, but I think the market depends on them.
I'm still hanging in there, I love this thing of ours, this wacky Direct Market comic thing, and I'm in for the count. I want to give it a fight. I guess I'll go down with all barrels blasting if that's the way things go. I mean, I'm committed. There's a Mysterymen movie deal in the works through Dark Horse (another story for later) but I'm not sitting in a lawn chair whistling Dixie. Until the Hollywood sky hook yanks me out of the seat, I'm going to stay at the helm here.
Costa: Go down with the ship, eh?
Burden: Look, we all go down with some ship eventually. As Frank Booth said, "Do it for Van Gogh..."
The Flaming Carrot Annual #1 is written and drawn by Bob Burden with a full-color cover by Burden. The 64-page black-and-white one-shot is suggested for mature readers (partial nudity and adult language) and retails for $5.00. Included is a Mysterymen preview written by Burden and illustrated by Steve Sadowski.