LUDIC LOG

Free at last, free at last, thank Jim Shooter almighty I'm free at last! Free from having to write any more of these idiotic comic book encyclopedia recaps, that is. Yes, this week's installment of our weekly review of the asinine mumbo-jumbo to be found between the tedious John Byrne covers of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe -- covering as it does issue #15 -- is our very last. The last one I own (for now), the last one I'll write (for now), and the last one in the series (other than the Books of the Dead, which I don't have). But never fear, nerds, dorks and geeks: there's more comic book fun to come. Although the geekcyclopedia entries are done for the moment, next week I'll start doing some random recaps of other dumb-ass comics from the gloriously insulting history of this properly underappreciated medium, so that you won't have to forsake me for Seanbaby.

In the meantime, however, I've had about as much 1980s Marvel characters as I can stomach, so let's get right on to OHOTMU #15 and learn the straight dope on these straight dopes.

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WONDER MAN. Wonder Man (whose early years were chronicled in a classic Tenacious D song) was notable mainly for having a particularly incomprehensible origin and a particularly ludicrous name. Despite of, or perhaps because of, these handicaps, he got to pal around with the Avengers. What was his super-power? Well, I'll let Peter Sanderson explain in the direct, simple, easy-to-understand prose the series was famous for: he was a guy whose body "fully metaporphosed into an unspecified superhuman flesh-like substance nourished by ionic energy." You know, one of those guys.

WONG. Ha ha ha! Get it? WONG! Haw haw haw! He was Dr. Strange's manservant! Get it? A "manservant" named Wong! Look, folks, if I don't make with the dick jokes, all I got is how deeply racially offensive this character is. Your call.

WOODGOD. Speaking of dick jokes, this guy was a super-satyr with 'wood' in his name. Fill in your own joke here. The House of Ideas used this guy as a Hulk villain a number of times considering how lame he was, but his origin is so enjoyably nuts it's worth taking a look at: you see, it happened there was this husband-and-wife team of scientists living in the New Mexico desert, and they were under contract to make nerve gas for the government. Which they did out of their home for some reason, instead of a high-security Defense Department laboratory like you might expect. Oh, yeah, and in their spare time from making nerve gas, they just happened to create a horrible misshapen genetic monstrosity that was as strong as the Hulk. Hey, everyone needs a hobby, right? Anyway, not surprisingly, some of the nerve gas leaked out of whatever container behind the toilet these two geniuses where keeping it in and killed a bunch of children, so the local townspeople come running and naturally assumed it was the work of poor Woodgod instead of his imbecile creators. You know, we say we've come so far in this country with race relations, but then you see how quick people are to automatically blame the hideous goat-man when things go wrong.

WRECKER. This guy (whose purple costume and slack-jawed, moronic appearance seem to guarantee that he has said the word "daar" at least a hundred times in his life) was just a violent moron with a prediliction to yell a lot and smash things with a crowbar, until he robbed a hotel room where, by a total coincidence, Loki, the Norse god of evil and Thor's arch-enemy, was staying. He happened to absorb some powers that were meant for the trickster, thus becomeing a violent moron with a prediliction to yell a lot and smash things with a magical crowbar. The thing that really troubles me about the Wrecker is, why does Loki need a hotel room? He's a god. What, is he trying to rack up a bunch of frequent flyer miles? Also, the Wrecker's real name is Dirk Garthwaite, which is not a name commonly encountered among construction workers.

X. Okay, I am obviously skipping over a lot in this issue, because there are approximately (by my count) six hundred and forty-two entries beginning with 'X'. They are all mutants, and they all suck. Hate on me if you must, but you know what? Screw these guys. You can absolutely pinpoint the moment that Marvel became a big, pungent sewage tank: it was that moment in the mid-1980s when the X-titles were selling in such gargantuan numbers that they made two incredibly foolish decisions. The first was to turn pretty much every character in the Marvel Universe into a mutant; the other, far worse one, was to give Chris Claremont free reign to write whatever he wanted. And what was the result? Well, let's see: the X-Babies, the X-Corporation, the X-ecutioner (not the live turntablists, but the crappy villain), X-Factor, two incarnations of X-Force, X-Patriots, X-Statics, the X-Men, X-Man (two of him, too), the X-Terminators, X-Treme, the X-Ternals, and perhaps the stupidest idea ever in the history of mutant mania (and take a moment, won't you, to contemplate the weight of that declaration): a team of undead mutant zombies brought back from beyond the grave by an evil voodoo priest. The name of that team, which I am not making up, was the X-Humed. Ahem.

YELLOWJACKET. You know, considering that he's been Hank Pym, Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath, and Yellowjacket (and for all I know, Spider-Man and Magnus, Robot Fighter), Henry Pym has never been very interesting. Even when he crawls around in the Wasp's cooter. Yes, I realize I keep bringing that up, but it's very disturbing, damn it. I need to work through the pain.

ZABU. Yes! I am writing about Ka-Zar's pet tiger. Look, there just ain't a lot happening in issue #15 of OHOTMU, and if you think I'm capable of bringing the funny about snoreworthy material like the alien races or the fifteen different incarnations of the Zodiac Cartel, you're giving me a lot more credit than I deserve. Anyway, you know what I just remembered about Ka-Zar, the white guy who, like Tarzan, exerts total authority over a lost continent of unspoiled, primitive savages? His real name is Lord Kevin Plunder. Nice one, Marvel.

ZOMBIE. As advertised, he's a zombie. We're told that he's the reanimated corpse of a tyrannical factory owner, but it looks more like he's the reanimated corpse of a guy who used to go to a bunch of Skynyrd concerts. Say what you will about the Zombie, at least he was spared the indignity of having to hook up with the X-Humed.

ZZZAX. The last entry in our Marvel Universe recaps is also the last character in the alphabet, at least until DC tries to one-up them by creating someone called Zzzzzango or something. This glowing whatsis is described as a 40-foot-tall "semi-sentient electromagnetic construct of psionic energy", but I don't know who they're trying to fool: he's obviously the glowing lava-monster from the old Scooby-Doo cartoons.