Meet the man behind Flaming Carrot

By Mark Woolsey

The living was easy for Bob Burden in 1970s-era Atlanta. The UGA journalism graduate was supporting himself by buying and selling comics, movie posters and other collectibles. He worked just a handful of days each month while he weighed several business ideas and soaked up life experiences that he planned to employ in his writing. Coming home one night after loading up on a happy-hour

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buffet, he saw his roommate laboring over a comic book project. He’d been at it for weeks and had finished a grand total of three pages.

“I’ll show you how to do a comic,” Burden told him, drawing upon a nearly lifelong bent for storytelling and drawing. He brought to life a character he’d been tossing around in his head.

“I sat down and wrote the first eight-page Flaming Carrot story,” Burden recalled. “Then I penciled it all and inked the first two pages that night before I went to sleep.”

That marked his initial foray into the thendeveloping “new wave” comic movement.

The character became a cult favorite. Up until then, superheroes were, in Burden’s words “wellheeled and elitist,” with special powers and secret identities. Flaming Carrot ditched that model for a character who was-quite literally-a flaming carrot perched atop a human frame. He had no special powers or secrets and hailed from a blue-collar, milltown background. His sometimes whacked-out humor was of the David LettermanSaturday Night Live school. The character also abandoned the Boy Scout-like personal code of heroes such as Superman. Instead, he was, ahem, an out-front ladies’ man.

“His appeal to women was preposterous,” Burden said, “considering that he was so goofylooking, sort of like Kramer in

Seinfeld.”

And he had a distinctive, unusual exclamation in “ut!” Burden says that came about after the Beatles played Shea Stadium in the 60s, with a group of female fans jumping onto the field. Most were caught but one got away. “And George Harrison was up there going ‘ut, ut, look at her go,’” said Burden “The problem is they don’t have a Flaming Carrot TV show, so people don’t know how to pronounce ‘ut.’”

Other equally preposterous and surrealistic superheroes followed, including “Mr. Furious,” who would get so mad that he became bulletproof. His selfdescribed series of second-string heroes continued with “Mystery Men,” which eventually became a big-screen production.

After the character Gumby became an “SNL” staple, Burden cranked out an authorized Gumby comic. “The story was good, and the artwork was good, and it was a real fun thing for me to do.”

Burden said the Gumby story won several awards including best single issue of the year. Capturing that honor in a competition usually dominated

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by superhero comics was “kind of like entering an alligator with its tail cut off and painted yellow into a dog show and winning.”

Burden considers himself more of a storyteller than a comic artist and satirist. Drawing came naturally to him with no formal training. Storytelling, he said. is key in his work.

Overall, Burden said, he’s never worked a day job and has called his own tune.

All these years later, he’s still drawing “Flaming Carrot” and is working on new projects like ‘Hit Man for the Dead,” a novel he’s shopping. He’s also publishing a book of poetry he wrote when he was younger.

Burden says he hopes to attend and present his work at Dragon Con this year. That will continue his longtime involvement dating back to his having helped establish the long-gone Atlanta Fantasy Fair in the 1970s. He seems excited that Dragon Con is back in-person this year.

His take on the annual event: “It’s become almost like a Mardi Gras or Burning Man-type event. It’s taken on a life of its own. All of a sudden, instead of it just being about comic books or science fiction, it’s about the people.”

Despite having arrived at his late 60s, Burden has no plan to mothball his pencils and brushes. Behind that decision lies some sound older-adult reasoning, that ties in with a decidedly healthier lifestyle in recent years.

“To me, creativity is the closest thing to eternal youth I can imagine. And it’s all about having fun. If it ain’t fun, consider me done.”