The Rocketeers were four different teams of operatives who all used the Rocket-Suits from which their team name was derived. The differences between the groups were significant, ranging from who employed them to the species who were wearing the combat armor. Three of the four teams were assembled for the specific purpose of acquiring the prototype Torpedo Armor.[1]
History
Origin[]
Several years ago, members of the shape-changing alien race known as the Dire Wraiths who had secretly infiltrated human society decided to try to create combat suits that would make Wraithkind the equal of their enemies, the Spaceknights of Galador.[2] These Wraiths allied themselves with Senator Eugene Stivak, a corrupt American politician who, as Kligger, was also one of the leaders of the criminal organization known as the Corporation, and provided him with the design for what would later be known as the Torpedo suit.[3] The senator recruited his nephew, Yugoslavian scientist Michael Stivak, to develop the battlesuit, supposedly for national defense. However, after discovering his uncle's true intentions, the younger Stivak designed an inferior rocket-suit and gave the plans for it to his uncle.[4] After his uncle acquired the plans for the original suit, Michael Stivak constructed a prototype[5] which he used as the Torpedo to destroy any and all copies of those original plans. When Stivak was fatally injured after a building collapsed on him during a battle with Daredevil, a former professional football player turned insurance executive named Brock Jones tried to help him. Knowing it was too late for him, Stivak told Jones some of the background of the Torpedo suit and asked him to use the armored battlesuit to stop his family. Jones agreed and put on the suit to become the Torpedo.[6]
First Team[]
These Rocketeers were agents of the Corporation who were working for Senator Stivak. Wearing green costumes and using a Rocket-Car, they posed as a group of robbers in an attempt to attract the attention of the Torpedo.[1] Unfortunately, they were spotted by Daredevil first and this led to a series of encounters that ended when Daredevil defeated them and turned them over to the police.[7]
Stivak had a number of the inferior Rocket-Suits created and gave them to the Rocketeers to continue their attempt to draw out the Torpedo. This time, the plan succeeded[1] and after several encounters they managed to capture the Torpedo and bring him to the senator's mansion in Westchester in order to remove the costume from him. However, the Torpedo was able to break free from his bonds but soon accidentally activated a destruct sequence. The Torpedo managed to escape from the mansion but Stivak and the Rocketeers were still inside when it exploded. Although Stivak is known to have survived, the fate of the Rocketeers has never been revealed.[4]
The Dire Wraiths had allowed their unwitting human pawns to use the Rocket-Suits in order to test them in battle.[3]
Second Team[]
Some months later, the arrival of their arch-enemy Rom on Earth motivated the Dire Wraiths into renewing their attempt to acquire the Torpedo suit. After discovering the Torpedo's secret identity as Brock Jones, a small team of Wraiths wearing Rocket-Suits was sent to attack the Jones home. However, Jones heard them coming and was able to don the Torpedo armor in time to prevent them from entering his home. Fighting to protect his family, the Torpedo struck them with all the power of his costume's jet-punch, unintentionally inflicting fatal injuries. The dead Rocketeers and their costumes dissolved into ash, and Jones decided that he had to take his family and move to a safer location without leaving any trail for the Rocketeers to follow. Coincidentally, the town where Jones chose to relocate his family was Clairton, West Virginia, where Rom had been based since arriving on Earth. On his first night in Clairton, Jones (as the Torpedo) encountered Rom and, after a battle caused by a misunderstanding, the two of them talked. During their conversation, Jones realized that Senator Stivak had been working for the Dire Wraiths and that the Torpedo suit was based on a Wraith design.
A few days later, Wraiths working at the Delmar Insurance offices in New York City discovered where Jones was hiding from them. The local leader, the Dire Wraith who had replaced company president Byron Benjamin, ordered a number of his subordinates to don Rocket-Suits and go to Clairton as Rocketeers to kill Brock Jones and retrieve the Torpedo suit.[3]
Early the following morning, these Wraith Rocketeers arrived in Clairton and began their search. Within minutes, the Torpedo and Rom both flew to meet them, surprising the Wraiths who had not been told to expect the Spaceknight. Although outnumbering their foes at least thirteen-to-two, the Rocketeers were unable to overcome their foes and they were all either killed or banished to Limbo. Learning of the complete failure of the mission he had authorized, "Benjamin" committed suicide in order to escape paying the price that he knew his masters who exact from him.[2]
Third Team[]
Some months later, the female Dire Wraiths on Earth, unhappy with the lack of progress that their brothers had made in their planned conquest of the planet, slew all the male Wraiths and took over.[8] However, at least five male Science Wraiths survived in hiding in Florida, close to the Kennedy Space Center where their leader, Dr. Woodrow Cather, worked as the Cape's highest ranking civilian scientist. Hoping to escape from the Sisterhood, these Wraith began sabotaging rival projects on the base, sometimes using circuitry stolen from those projects in their effort to build a working star-drive which they secretly installed in the experimental Ion-drive rocket that was Cather's project. Eventually, as the Sisterhood closed in on them, the male Wraiths abandoned covert sabotage that could be mistaken for accidents and four of them donned Rocket-Suits in order to attack the base as Rocketeers. However, they were opposed by a team of Avengers who had been called in to investigate the possible sabotage, and the human heroes swiftly defeated the four Rocketeers. For reasons of her own, one of the female Wraiths intervened and sent the mystical Mists of the Dark Nebula to disable the Avengers long enough for the Rocketeers to escape.[9] Within a day, all eight of the Wraiths in the area were dead: the four Wraith who had been the Rocketeers were killed by the Sisterhood, Cather killed himself in space to avoid falling into the Sisterhood's hands, and the three female Wraiths who had been attacking the males all perished in battle with the Avengers.[10]
Fourth Team[]
At some point, five human technicians who had worked at the lab where the original Torpedo and Rocketeer armors had been constructed decided to build some Rocket-Suits for themselves. Knowing of the Torpedo armor and being unable to recreate it, they instead created a tracking device that would be able to locate the Torpedo suit once it was activated. After years of waiting, that suit was finally reactivated when Michael "Mike" Jeffries found the suit in storage in the attic of his family's home and, unaware of what it truly was, gave it to his friend Michiko "Mickey" Musashi to use as a Halloween costume to wear to a party at Long Island University. After tracking the armor to the party, the five Rocketeers entered the campus ballroom and used their scanner to locate where the armor was. Once that was done, they opened fire on Mike and Mickey. When Mickey was blown back and out through a window, they assumed that the fact Mike had survived meant that he was the one wearing the armor and demanded that he remove his costume. Seconds later, they discovere how wrong they had been when Mickey flew back into the ballroom and swiftly defeated all five of them. Once in custody, the five revealed who they were, how they had learned about the Torpedo and Rocketeer suits, and how they had tracked the Torpedo armor.[11]Paraphernalia
Equipment
- Rocket-Suits (combat armor)[1]
Weapons
Transportation
Notes
- When created by Marv Wolfman, the Rocketeers were just supposed to be an example of the type of foes that super-heroes faced in between the adventures chronicled in their monthly comics. These first Rocketeers, led by a man named Wescott, were intended to be a normal group of costumed robbers who had clashed with and been defeated by Daredevil. They were known as the Rocketeers because of the Rocket-Car that they used in their crimes.[7]
- Wolfman himself retconned the Rocketeers when he revealed that they had really been agents working for Senator Stivak and that they had only committed those robberies in an attempt to draw out the new hero, the Torpedo, who was wearing the prototype costume that Stivak wanted. The Rocket-Suits that they later wore were revealed to have been designed by the same person who had designed the Torpedo suit but were not as powerful.[1]
- In the original backstory of the Torpedo suit, Senator Stivak was supposedly an international agent of a foreign power who had been planted in the United States years earlier in order to amass political power and weaken the country. His plan was supposedly to use multiple copies of the Torpedo suit designed by his unwitting nephew to outfit an army of super-soldiers who would then be used to conquer the country from within.[1]
- Senator Stivak was later revealed to also be Kligger, a leader of the criminal Corporation. in Incredible Hulk #231.
- The secret involvement of the Dire Wraiths was only revealed, as a retcon, in Rom #21.
See Also
- 8 appearance(s) of Rocketeers (Earth-616)
- 2 appearance(s) in handbook(s) of Rocketeers (Earth-616)
- 3 mention(s) in handbook(s) of Rocketeers (Earth-616)
- 2 image(s) of Rocketeers (Earth-616)
- 1 member(s) of Rocketeers (Earth-616)