It’s no secret that Gerard Way, writer and former frontman of My Chemical Romance, is a fan of the more obscure characters of comic book lore. At DC’s Meet the Publishers panel at New York Comic Con, publisher Dan DiDio described the process of bringing Gerard Way aboard: Way approached DC, but said he didn’t want to write blockbuster characters like Batman or Superman. He wanted to tackle the lost characters, the esoteric ones that people had all but forgotten about.
Turns out, that includes DC themselves. When flipping through an encyclopedia of DC characters, Gerard came across Cave Carson and this extremely brief description: "Adventurer, spelunker, has a cynbernetic eye." Intrigued by the last descriptor, he started asking around to find out why Cave Carson had a cybernetic eye. Funnily enough he had stumped DC themselves: DiDio revealed that no one in the company had any idea why Cave Carson had a cybernetic eye.
"Six to eight months later," DiDio explained, they approached the writer who first gave Carson the now infamous bionic attachment and asked what the deal was. His explanation? He was doing a story where present-day Carson met future Carson, and to show that time had passed and Carson had aged, he gave him a futuristic looking flourish. That was it. "The level of thought [that goes into this]…" DiDio joked.
Many writers would likely be scared off or disinterested in such a flimsy origin, but Way saw it as an opportunity. Way, whose Young Animal imprint within DC is focused on the passion of a few creators and exploring the corners of the DC Universe, jumped at the idea. "I can make a story out of that," Way said, according to DiDio.
So there you have it. What drew Gerard Way to Cave Carson is that he had a cybernetic eye. And naturally, because of that, we now have Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye.
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