Orson Cart

Orson Cart appeared in a few Viz issues of the mid-1990s, written and drawn by Steve Donald. The full title of his strip was "Orson Cart, He Comes Apart". The character's name -- a pun on "horse and cart" -- was completely arbitrary, chosen only so that the full title would rhyme.

Orson Cart is a teenaged English boy, apparently blond, who lives with his parents. Orson's remarkable talent is that he can any or all of his body's organs and limbs can detach themselves and function independently, then rejoin the whole. In typical comic-book fashion, he acquired this ability after a bizarre accident involving a radioactive lawnmower (possibly a reference to Spider-Man's abilities being derived from the bite of a radioactive spider), the lawnmower running him over and the attempts by the professor who owned it to put him back together with a special glue leaving him with the ability to take himself apart.

Orson would use this ability to, for example, attempt to evade a boring family meal with his parents and his aunt, and watch TV instead, to which end he employed various subterfuges such as leaving his eyes in front of the TV and disguising his body's at-table eyelessness with household items ("The old hard-boiled egg trick won't work", admonishes his father) or simply abandoning subtlety, sitting in front of the TV and sending his disembodied digestive tract to sit at the table and eat the meal, to his aunt's horrified disgust. Other examples of this ability's use in more dangerous situations include escaping after his feet were sealed in cement by leaving his feet behind and walking on his hands- his handless arms in his pockets- until he could find help.

"Orson Cart" ran in Viz' only briefly, but Steve Donald later wrote and illustrated eight Orson Cart adventures published in paperback.

The 1927 novel The Gnome King of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson featured a character named Kuma Party (a pun on "come apart"-y) who had precisely the same ability as Orson Cart, with the additional ability to send selected components of his body airborne for extreme distances on remote missions. There is no evidence that anyone at Viz was familiar with this earlier character.