LUDIC LOG

All right, fair-weather geeks. I know why you come sniffing around here on Thursdays: you want the heady blend of nostalgia, self-hatred and scorn that only comes from absurd 1980s comic book encyclopedia recaps. (Remember, the archive of previous installments of this inexplicably popular series can be found here.) Today we'll take a look at issue #14 of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, issue #14.

This is the penultimate issue -- or, at least, it is for me. There are a couple of "Books of the Dead", but I don't have them, so I've been sprinkling the characters that appear within in the regular recaps, on the theory that every comic book character worth his or her sodium chloride has died and come back to life at least six times. There's also a couple of expansion editions, a second series, and all kinds of horseshit that I hope none of y'all are expecting me to shell out a hundred bucks for. I intend to keep doing vaguely comics-related entries every stinking Thursday, and eventually I'm going to revise, expand and make funnier all these geekcyclopedia entries, but for the time being, I'm glad it's winding down, because I'm running out of funny things to say about the West Coast Avengers (although, when you think about it, "West Coast Avengers" is pretty funny just by itself). Plus, issue #14 has Wolverine in it, and I anticipate lots of angry letters behind this one. Let's get it on.

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UNICORN. I've never been entirely sure about why some people would choose to take on a particular super-persona. With the case of this guy, maybe it's because he was a foreigner, and had problems with the language or the culture. Or maybe he was so low-ranking that he didn't carry any clout in the decision-making process. But somewhere along the line, did it never occur to him to put his laser-beam gun in, say, his glove, where it would be easier to aim than on top of his head? And even if he was forced to use a coconut-mounted weapon, why would he name himself -- or allow himself to be named -- after a mythical animal known less for its association with fierceness and slaughter than for its association with posters in the bedrooms of, and stickers on the Trapper Keepers, of teenage girls?

UNLIMITED CLASS WRESTLING FEDERATION. Have you ever wondered what Vince McMahon's WWE would look like if all the wrestlers gave themselves retarded superhero names and dressed in stupid costumes? Okay, not that different, admittedly. But what if you pumped them full of wierd chemicals to increase their strength, endurance and resistance to injury? All right, still pretty much the same. But what if you hired some untalented hacks to write crummy dialogue for them? I forget what point I was trying to make here.

UNUS THE UNTOUCHABLE. One of the more forgettable members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (there's a reason he's not in the movies, you know), Unus met his end when the force field around his body that gave him his powers actually pushed the air away from him and he suffocated. I always appreciate the effort to explore the implications of super-powers, but it would have been a lot more effective if we'd have cared about him in the first place. Unus (who inexplicably changed his real name from the vividly Italian Angelo Unuscione to the vividly German Gunther Bain) was a professional wrestler, and the fact that he had a career even though people must have noticed that no one could actually get within three feet of him just goes to show you how fixed pro wrestling is.

URSA MAJOR. His real name was "Ursus", he was Russian, he was a major, and he could turn into a bear. I don't think Chris Claremont was even trying sometimes. No, wait, not sometimes. Constantly.

VALKYRIE. I guess Asgardian gods got nothing better to do than pal around on Earth fighting pickpockets. Valkyrie was easy to like -- Nordic blonde ice queen demeanor, bad-ass Dungeons & Dragons powers, platemail bra. On the other hand, she had the ability to sense when someone was about to die, which must have put a damper on the Defenders Christmas parties.

THE VANISHER. Generally inoffensive X-Men villain with teleportation powers, the Vanisher was notable for only two things: his absolutely asinine name-as-destiny secret identity ("Telford Porter", haw haw), and his appearance, which seems to indicate that he picked up spare money on the side doing performance art and moving sets at community theatres.

VERMIN. An evil were-rat sort of doohickey created by everyone's favorite crazy-geneticist-with-a-TV-in-his-chest, Arnim Zola, Vermin is misidentified as "cannibalistic". If he were a cannibal, he would only eat other were-rats, but in fact, what he eats is people. This doesn't make him a cannibal; it makes him an anthrovore. Or something. He was also the leader of the Protoids, which you can collect and turn in for valuable prizes.

VIPER. Aw, yeah! The Originoo Bloody Mama of the Marvel Universe, Viper (alias Madame Hydra) was strutting around going all nutball Aileen Wournos on people long before trendy flavas-of-the-month like Typhoid Mary drank their first pint of bile. She was so psychotic that it's pretty easy to believe that when she was around, even MODOK was all about being a Mental Organism Designed Only for Backing Out of the Room Quietly.

VISION. All right. Seriously. Explain to me again how the Vision and the Scarlet Witch had children. He's not even a cyborg, man! He's an android! He doesn't have any genetic material! He's made of spare parts! I know, I know, the book says that Wanda "used a combination of magic and mutant powers" to allow them to have kids. But how does this work? Am I expected to believe that sometime, somewhere, somebody wrote a spell that allowed inorganic machines to somehow develop, and then pass on, their genetic codes, just in case it ever came up? Or that Wanda somehow was born with the mutant ability to cause machines to produce semen, which really came in handy when she married one? Gaaaah.

WARLOCK. Some people like this incomprehensible "techno-organic" thingamajig because he was really powerful and had a wacky space-opera origin and was drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz. But sadly, these people are fools. Why are they fools? Because Warlock was inextricably linked with Doug fucking Ramsey (they even merged for a time and were called "Douglock", for Christ's sake), and being linked with Doug Ramsey is like being linked with Hitler: no matter what positive qualities you might otherwise possess, you will be forever tainted by the association. Warlock is the Leni Riefenstahl of the New Mutants.

WARRIORS THREE. Also known as Fandral the Dashing (the blond guy), Volstagg the Enormous (the fat guy), and Hogun the Grim (the unexplainably Chinese guy), these Asgardian heroes were trotted out every so often as comic relief in Thor stories. They were basically the Scandinavian Three Stooges, only funny.

WASP. Janet van Dyne suffered from what might be called Kitty Pryde Syndrome. No, not the condition where millions of teenaged nerds are compelled to masturbate at the mere thought of you; that's Yeoman Rand Syndrome. Kitty Pryde Syndrome is where you introduce a female character, and then make her a major part of the storyline so you can't just get rid of her, only to realize that the way you've written her, she's really ditzy and ineffectual and no one takes her seriously in the least. So you try over and over to establish that in fact, she's a genuine hellraiser, but no one buys it for even a second. Aside from a lifetime of suffering from this all-too-common disease, Wasp was sort of an offensive racial caricature: having a rich, upper-class white heiress call herself "WASP" isn't all that different from having a black southerner call himself "Rastus". In The Ultimates, the Wasp has been retconned into a rich, upper-class Asian heiress who's still called "WASP", and oddly enough, she's just as offensive. Possibly because of the scenes where they imply that she stuffs Hank Pym up her cooter.

WHIZZER. Hey, if your superhero name is going to evoke images of urination, you might as well give yourself a yellow costume, right?

WOLVERINE. All right, I couldn't think of anything particularly funny or interesting to say about him, other than the fact that he's short, he has terrible taste in clothing and hairstyles, and once he became the most popular hero in the history of funnybooks, the writers sort of went apeshit and gave him a waaaaaay too convoluted backstory instead of keeping him enigmatic. It's not the character's fault that he eventually became a cartoon (well, even for a cartoon, I mean), or that he inspired a million shitty imitators and helped kicked off the lamentable "grim, murderous anti-hero" trend of the late '80s and early '90s. But really, when you look at it objectively (and how often do you hear someone say "look at it objectively" about an imaginary mutatnt with a metal skeleton?), you could have seen it coming. The only reason a generation of comic fans embraced Wolvie so warmly, despite the obvious fact that he's a complete ass and that no one in their right mind would want him to be part of their team, is because they were so used to bland, big-chinned, whitebread nonentities like Cyclops that they were ready to bend over for the first character that had a personality, even if it was a really obnoxious one. Wolverine was (and, sometimes, still is) a fascinating character, and you can't really hold it against him that he was the catalyst for one of the most depressingly awful periods in comic book history. Still, that "Kitty Pryde & Wolverine" mini-series sucked moth shit, seen?