“Yesterday’s” Comic> Speed Racer: Chronicles Of The Racer #4

Yes, that is a cyborg man with trains on his feet. NOT as cool as being a race car combiner.

Speed Racer: Chronicles Of The Racer #4

FINAL ISSUE

IDW (April, 2008)

Race Car Voltron can’t get past the force field Speed can now generate with the half-amulet, so he breaks out the trump card..robot slot machines that have his parents hostage. Then he spills his evil plan like an idiot. See, had Carfax…oh, yeah, we learn his name is Carfax. I know that virtual fox puppet wasn’t trustworthy! Anyway, had Carfax simply stopped at “it keeps me young and without it I’ve been shunned by everyone because I made wood, metal, and cybernetics to keep me alive all these centuries (are you surprised Carfax is the same guy? I still say the rest of the Racers are just Speed and friends reincarnated…if only because the word “car” is in there), he might have gotten what he wanted. He also want to turn all technology into his army to conquer the world and expects Speed to join him, and telling him all that makes him completely resistant to joining him, even at the cost of his parents. What a shock.

For some reason Carfax goes to explain why he wants to take over the world, and we get our final Racer story, this time in the Old West. I’ll just run through this. We have Sleek Raven and his horse, Five Mockingbirds, Spirit and his dog, Howl-Howl (easily winning the award for the laziest Chim-Chim stand-in name of the whole story–the worst still being Chim-Chim-Cheree the bunny), Li’l Trixie Sureshot, and the Sheriff, Tex. And there’s an automobile with the classic “M” that somehow has also managed to show up every time. Sparky has a counterpart but if he’s named I missed it.

We aren’t told what Sleek did exactly to get kicked out of the town of Mahfoon, but he left Tex with a scar that forces him to wear a Lone Ranger mask because of course it did. Still, Sleek snuck back into town to see Trixie. He also seems to understand how to use the amulet to make his horse go fast. There’s a fair in town, where Sleek sees the automobile and brushes it off as a “fool contraption” that he’ll never be in. Oh, you know what’s going to happen.

Tex catches Sleek before he can make smootchy-time with Trixie and he chases him out of town. They come across Carfax, now calling himself Professor Ignatius Steamhausen, and claiming he invented the automobile, but that Reginald Krenz is taking the credit, knowing that nobody would take a patchwork man seriously. Now he wants revenge. Somehow he’s managed, in the time he punched out Sleek and Tex, to kidnap Krenz, stick him onto a train driven by a suicide bomber robot, and send the train speeding into Mahfoon, thus blowing up the car and anyone who saw it. Then he sees the Racer half of the amulet and Sleek uses the distraction to break everyone free. Using the automobile…which I thought was back in the town and their horses were chased off and Ignatius only had the plans…the boys catch up to the train and rescue Krenz, after Sleek telekinetically switches tracks because the amulet, as you recall, can control machinery. This amulet was created at least in the BC days, so how this works is beyond me. Oh, and somehow Ignatius told them about overhearing Sleek and Tex’s parents saying that they don’t know they’re brothers. I don’t know how he heard that or why he told Speed about that, which he finds hilarious and Rex…I mean Racer X finds uncomfortable.

Back in the present, Speed agrees to give the amulet to Carfax but as he lets go of Speed’s parents, Spridle takes it away, secretly sticking chewing gun on there, which does…something to the amulet that causes Carfax’s race car robot body to fall apart. Racer X brings him to the authorities, Speed apologizes to Trixie to for blowing off her help earlier, and goes to read more of the chronicles. Thankfully, I’m done reading this comic. These reviews have been far longer than normal. I’m starting to think I should have made this a Scanning My Collection feature instead.

Look, these aren’t bad tales, and the concept of Speed and friends in different time period is amusing. The problem is the framing device. The whole idea of Racer powers and magic amulets over developed skills and natural talents kind of ruins Speed Racer’s achievements over other racers we’ve seen in this franchise. Furthermore, the idea that every Racer had the exact same people in his life, right down to some histories and a little boy with a double-named pet is just ridiculous. They might have been better off using no framing device at all and just have fun with it…or having the gang imagine what their lives would have been like in other time periods rather than this uniting story of magical powers that are more in line with the Fred Wolf Speed Racer than the classic series. This is a comic I just cannot recommend to fans or anybody else.

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