Well I never knew that: Snapper Carr is named after George Lucas

How do readers relate to beings with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men? Well, the recieved wisdom prior to the Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) was that you couldn’t! Ergo, the hero could need some sort of whitty teenage sidekick that the young reader could identify with. That was the thinking that gave us Robin the Boy Wonder, Jimmy Olsen, Speedy, Bucky, and a slew of other Golden Age hostage fodder. 

Stan Lee changed all that with Spider-Man – or at least duplicated Billy Baston’s magic – when he realised that the relatiable teen character could actually be the alter ego of the hero and didn’t have to be religated to the supporting case role. However, that was 1962 and a full two years after the first appearance of the Justice League. The management at Lee’s Distinguish Competition still thought that they needed an anchor character in the League – somebody for the kids to identify with. 

[Julius] Schwartz [the JLA Editor] was told to pattern the JLA’s mascot after Edd Byrnes‘ finger-snapping character from TV’s 77 Sunset Strip: “And [Schwartz's boss] Whit Ellsworth said, ‘his name is Snapper Carr.’” [Michael Eury, Justice League Companion v1, pg 14]

Thus we were introduced to the oddly named Snapper Carr — a young “hipster” from Happy Harbour whose inadvertently clued the Flash into Starro’s weakness and was rewarded with honorary League membership for his troubles. (As a random aside: one of the leads in 77 Sunset Strip was Efrem Zimbalist, the voice of Batman’s butler Alfred Pennyworth in Batman: The Animated Series. )

Gardner Fox may have been mandated to include Snapper, but he didn’t exactly do much to flesh him out. In fact Fox didn’t really do much in the way of characterisation at all (it wasn’t really his thing). However, it’s ironic that Snapper probably recieved the most characterisation of any character in the early League adventures. That’s if you can call snapping your fingers characterisation.

Why this digression on Snapper Carr? Well Brian Cronin’s Comic Book Urban Legends #127 has answered a question I never knew I didn’t know – the origin of Snapper Carr’s first name. Ya’ see he didn’t have one at the start – Snapper is just a nickname – and it wasn’t until the 1970s that it was sorted out. By that time Snapper had been ignominously dumped from the League for betraying them. Brian then takes up the story…

For the next decade plus, Snapper made extremely rare appearances in DC Comics, but in one of them, they finally addressed something odd – no one had ever actually given Snapper’s real name!!

So in Superman Family #195, in the Supergirl story in the issue (where Snapper had been appearing for a few issues), Jack C. Harris was tasked by Julie Schwartz to come up with a name for Snapper.

This being the late 70s and Harris being a comic book writer, he decided to pay homage to George Lucas, of Star Wars fame.

So from then on, it was Lucas “Snapper” Carr.

Since then Snapper’s become something like the DC Universe’s version of Will Wheaton – a fellow who is a hell of a lot cooler outside of the team that gave him fame than he was in it.  Snapper was the best friend of the android Hourman, he was Young Justice’s mentor, and even went travelling around space with his own group called the Blasters for a while before the Khund’s cut his hands off – something I’m sure some fans have wanted to go for years!