Well well well!  It's about time for another tour through the interminable All-New Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.  I know all of you geeks out there look forward to this, so I'm sure it will be terribly disappointing that we're skipping a few issues and settling right in to issue #6.  Where are issues #4 and #5, you ask?  Apparently they came out while my life was going to shit, and I somehow neglected to pick them up.  Anyway, let's jump right into this, since these things are huge, and I'm determined to make this one funny even if it gives me cancer.  Forward!

JUSTICE.  Hey!  What better way to start off this endless slog than with a New Universe entry?  That thing was really awesome.  I'm sure that Warren Ellis will do a great job with it.  Anyway, this guy was a total tool who, all his life, wanted to be "the man in the white hat".  He was an unpopular teen after beating the shit out of some guys who offered him free weed, earning him the nickname "Narc", which he considered a compliment.  This sort of stuff was supposed to really inspire us back in the 1980s.  When he grew up to be a narco, he battled a trafficker with the unlikely name of Daedalus Darquill, and darn the luck!  They both got superpowers, and ended fighting each other endlessly in a fantasy world called the Far Side, which was populated by thick-torsoed dimwits and snakes wearing hoop skirts and cat's-eye glasses.

KANE.  Garrison Kane was one of about thirty-five people known as Weapon X, which was a secret program where scientists imbued test subjects with superhuman powers in a desperate attempt to make Canada seem like a relevant world power.  Essentially the Six Million Dollar Man given an even more ridiculous costume and forced to contend with the X-Continuity, a far more intimidating opponent than Bigfoot, Kane's first major encounter was with the M.L.F., which isn't what you think.

KANGAROO.  Now, let me ask you this:  if you had become fixated on super-villainy and decided to pattern yourself after a famous arch-criminal, wouldn't you pick, I dunno, Doom?  Magneto?  Dr. Octopus?  How about, maybe, anyone but the Kangaroo?  I'd sooner copy Frogman than I would that fifth-stringer, but that's why I don't have my own OHOTMU entry. According to his entry, he tried to reform and became a professional baseball player named "Billy Bob Jenks", who if you'll recall helped lead the Chicago White Sox to the World Series in 2005.

KA-ZAR THE GREAT.  This is the Golden Age Ka-Zar, who appeared in the very first comic to bear the name Marvel way back in 1939 -- and even then, he was three years old, having first appeared in the pulp Ka-Zar, Lord of Fang and Claw, which just goes to prove that they've been giving these things pretentious titles way, way before the 1970s.  GA Ka-Zar was pretty much identical to the Silver Age reboot, except for he didn't have fruity hippie hair.

KA-ZAR THE SAVAGE.  In 1965, Stan and Jack rebooted one of Marvel's oldest properties, giving him a fresh new post-imperialist twist:  he was "savage" instead of "great", he had the freshly minted surname "Plunder", and judging from his haircut, he had spent several years playing bass for Black Sabbath.  Otherwise, he was the same ol' white man who had to protect the Savage Land for many, many, many pages.  He got some gratuitous Shanna action, at least, and lately he's taken to wearing a natty sweater-vest if the incidental art is any indicator.

SEN. ROBERT KELLY.  You know, they never get around to saying what party Kelly, the mutant-hating Bostonian, belonged to, but judging from his tough anti-drug stance and excessive deployment of bunting, I think it's safe to say that he was an elephant.  Oddly enough considering that he's a character that's been around for 27 years and is involved in the X-Continuity, he has a short, easy-to-understand history that ends with his assassination, not unlike William McKinley.  Only with mutants.

ERIK KILLMONGER.  Not his real name!  Of course, if you're a black African named N'Jadaka who moves to Harlem and wants to fit in, you'll want to give yourself a nice unassuming name like Erik Killmonger.  He once teamed up with Salamander K'ruell, who was an echinodermoid, and if you know what that is, you're really wasting your time reading this website.  The inkwork on the horridly overmuscled Sal Velluto art is inked by one Billy Graham, who I guess was looking to pick up some cigarette money between moral crusades.

KILLPOWER.  I've never even heard of Motormouth, the early-'90s title in which this character first appeared, so I have no way of knowing whether or not it was intended as a joke, but I hope so, because otherwise, he's too stupid to believe.  He was a "transgenic human" made from the mixed DNA of a man, an orangutan, a lemur, a bat, a gorilla, and a rhino, which indicates that he not only had kill power, but also stink power, in abundance.

KISMET.  Back in the 1970s, Marvel was all about creating cosmic virgins whose job it was to get knocked up with a cosmic baby who would save mankind.  It was that kind of decade, because if the ready availability of bongs.  Kismet was one of them, and what distinguished her from Mantis, the Celestial Madonna, was her endless string of dingaling nicknames:  she was originally known as Paragon, and transitioned to Kismet, Ayesha, and She Who Must be Obeyed, but then she started being called "J'Ridia Stardusters, She Whose Trail Dusts Hope", which makes a lot of sense if you don't crawl out from under your desk much.  Still, it was better than her later nicknames, "Her" and "She", which indicate that even the writers got tired of trying to remember what to call her.

KLAATU.  Missing out on a great chance to be sued three times for copyright infringement, Marvel chose not to give Klaatu a couple of sidekicks named Barada and Nikto, but they did go ahead and make him a pretty generic space monster who screwed around with the Hulk back in the Sal Buscema years and finally got buried in a sandstorm during the bizarre Crossroads story arc.  No one has asked for his return, but we'll probably get it anyway at some point.

KORVAC.  Unquestionably the most complicated character to ever appear in Giant-Size Defenders, Korvac's backstory crosses so many alternate worlds, parallel universes, future timelines and cosmic story arcs that I become drowsy after only three paragraphs.  Perhaps I am letting you down in this regard, but consider this:  The first sentence in Korvac's entry is "Born in the year 2977 AD of the alternate timeline Earth-691, Michael Korvac would be reborn in many forms, all of them powerful and dangerous."  The last sentence in Korvac's entry is "Multiple inherent differences mark Earth-82432 as an alternate, rather than divergent, reality, unless the divergence occurred much earlier."  And there are twelve paragraphs in between those sentences.  Anyone who wants to is welcome to wade through all that crap, but it ain't gonna be me.

ALYOSHA KRAVINOFF.  The Marvel Universe needed another Kraven the Hunter after the first one committed suicide, because there were several dozen pair of leopard-print hot pants lying around the Bullpen unworn by anyone other than Mike Carlin.  Hence we get Alyosha, Kraven's illegitimate son, who is also a mutant, because, why not?  There aren't enough mutants.  He turned out to be sort of a superhero version of...well, I was trying to think of a famous animal trainer, but there aren't any other than Siegfried and Roy, and Alyosha is about .0054% less gay.

THE KREE.  There was one -- one black Kree.  He had an Afro.

KYLUN.  Apparently a refugee from one of the Planet of the Apes films, Kylun had the highly useful power of being able to precisely reproduce any sound he hears, thus distracting his opponents with high-larious fart noises.  "Back with Excalibur, he helped the extra-dimensional warrior Khaos defeat the evil Ghath", for which I'm sure we're all very grateful.

LACUNA.  Lacuna (one of the X-Statix, which I promise I'll get around to reading one of these days) is drawn by Mike Allred, who is interviewed on today's front page of SuicideGirls.com.  I know that for no reason!  Ha ha ha.  Anyway, she's a mutant talk show hose who once had to interview a mutant Europop star who had recently returned from the dead.   That sort of thing happens to Conan O'Brien all the time, but you don't see him wearing skintight dancer's tights, except on holidays and birthdays.

LIVEWIRES.  You know how I can tell that these are recently created characters?  Okay, yeah, from looking at the 2005 date in their "First Appearance" box.  But also, because of their names!  There's Stem Cell, and Hollowpoint Ninja, and Cornfed, and Gothic Lolita, who is just as awful as her name implies and quite in keeping with Marvel's 21st-century pederast demographic.  No one in their right mind would even use these as screen names in a manga weaponry chat room, let alone use them as their superhero names.  What do you do if you make it to 35 and you're still calling yourself "Gothic Lolita"?

THE LIVING ERASERS.  These guys first appeared back in the '60s, when Stan had to come up with dipshit aliens to throw up against Ant-Man ten times a month.  John Byrne brought them back in the 1980s and threw them up against the Fantastic Four so he'd have an excuse not to have to draw She-Hulk's breasts for a couple of panels, and there you have the sentence that will result in more hits on this site than anything else I've ever written.

THE LIVING TRIBUNAL.  I get why they call the Living Laser or the Living Erasers or even the Living Colossus living, because those are usually non-living things.  But why the Living Tribunal?  Tribunals are always living, consisting as they do of judges, who are usually less than able to perform their duties after their deaths.  It's why we have a Supreme Court, people!  Why this three-faced, urine-covered dolt can't just be called the Tribunal is beyond me. 

LOCKDOWN.  Are...are there still entries in this book?  Can I still be alive?  Are you there, Stan Lee?  Do flowers still grow, does the sun still shine?  Is there the laughter of children?  I'm so cold.

LOCUST.  This was a pretty generic costumed supervillain, an embittered scientist fired for his crackpot theories about how "ionic bombardment could make insects gigantic, posing a potential threat to humanity".  To avenge his detractors, he put on a great jumper and, well, used ionic bombardment to make insects gigantic.  I've asked it before and I'll ask it again:  why would a guy like this be fired?  How could any scientist, in the comics multiverse, be considered a crackpot?  If you lived in the Marvel universe, where every 12 hours some cosmic-power-wielding jerkoff threatens to wrap Manhattan in glowing goo, and a professor told you he had found a way to create caterpillars the size of a subway train, on what possible logical grounds would you disbelieve him?  There are enough scientists in the MU who can create giant mutant animals to fill the Cleveland phone book, and this guy gets fired?

LOKI.  I'm not quite sure what this guy is doing in here.  The new OHOTMU is, as you can see from every single entry in this edition so far, supposed to be a dumping ground for the third-rate, the second-string, the sorts of characters who showed up once or twice, failed to catch on with anyone possessing a single functioning taste bud, and then never appeared again except in OHOTMU for reasons of misguided completism.  So what is the main villain of Thor, and one of the most memorable characters in Marvel Comics, doing here?  Among the things I learn from his entry is that he once empowered a serial killer named Knut Caine, who was nicknamed "the Mad Viking" for his murderous ways, although I would think that would just earn him the nickname "the Regular Viking", giving that they all enjoyed the occasional murder.  Also, for quite some time, he posed as a Chinese person named Tso Zhung, which really threw people off his trail, and allowed him to invent a perennially popular chicken dish.

LOOTER.  One of the original intentionally crappy super-villains, Norton Fester went around pestering Spider-Man and Nighthawk (if you end up being a part of Nighthawk's Rogue's Gallery, that's a pretty sure indicator that you've made some really bad career moves along the lines and may want to consider barber college) before being hipped up in the 1990s and given that most universal symbol of villainous bad-assery, a cookie-duster goatee.  Scary!

LUPHOMOIDS.  I was hoping these guys were a toy tie-in so I would't have to write about them, but, sadly, they are some kind of alien fuck-knuckles who originally appeared in Nova.  (Note:  being part of Nova's Rogue's Gallery is an even further step down from being in Nighthawk's Rogue's Gallery.  There are really only two of them, Kraa and Zorr, who should not be mistaken for Xorr the God-Jewel, and let me just say at this point that once you have said someone should not be mistaken for Xorr the God-Jewel, there is no way the next thing you say can possibly be useful or interesting, so I'm just going to let this one die like a gutted fish.

LYNX.  Lynx is some kind of Nazi wolf-girl who fell in love with Wolverine, only to discover, as so many comics fans were much slower to do, that he was a total douchebag.  He dragged her out to the woods and abandoned her there like a misbehaving puppy and went on to say "bub" a lot while she presumably starved to death or died of a broken heart.  Nice.  According to the Dennis Jensen art, she had the most solid set of Davids since Pink.

M.  Once again, I am disappointed:  I though this would be a character based on Peter Lorre, but instead it's a generic Eurotrash mutant who was once nicknamed "Stinky".  Yes, she's French.  I don't write these, people, I just report them.  She was affiliated with the X-Men, Generation X, the X-Corps, the X-Corporation, X-Factor, X-Factor Investigations, and Emma Frost's Massachussets Academy, which pretty much guarantees that I have zero interest in finding out any more about her.

GIDEON MACE.  Gideon Mace had a mace for a hand.  Ulysses Klaw, curiously enough, did not have a claw (or a klaw) for a hand.  He was a minor -- as if there were any other kind -- Power Man villain, and according to his origin story, he was dishonorably discharged from Army service in Viet Nam on the orders of "General William Westmoorland".  Now, I'm not quite sure -- I need to do about 20, 30 hours of research on the internet and buy some rare comics from the 1970s to confirm this -- but I think this might be Marvel's secret code name for General William Westmoreland.

MACH-4.  This is actually the Beetle.  Why take a cool name like the Beetle and "hip it up" to be MACH-4?  Do "the kids" think it's cool?  Is that why Gothic Lolita is the name on every teenager's lips? 

MACHINE MAN.  Another inexplicably major character to get tossed into this junkheap, Machine Man has come a long way from his Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko creation in the pages of 2001:  A Space Odyssey:  the Comic Book Series.  Yes, that's right:  there's only one degree of Kevin Bacon between this ridiculously stupid comic book I am reading right now and Stanley Kubrick.  Anyway, Machine Man's ability to repair himself using whatever parts are to hand is described as "kit-bashing", which must give all the geeks reading it a hard-on, and according to his history, his most recent escapade was to blackmail an evil general named Dirk Anger by threatening to steal his favorite dress.  No, really. 

MACHINESMITH.  Not Machine Smith:  Machinesmith.  Formerly Mr. Fear, formerly a minor Daredevil villan, formerly third runner-up, the 7th Annual Astoria, Queens Thaddeus Venture Lookalike Contest.

MACHINE TEEN.   What if  Machine Man was a teenager?  Like, a teenage robot?  And he was, like, on the run from an evil corporation who wanted to use him for their own nefarious purposes?  And he tried to be like a total regular teenager, even though he was a super-powered robot?  And then we gave him his own series?  I bet it would be pretty stupid!  His entry concludes:  "When the mutant Scarlet Witch used her reality-warping powers to transform Earth into a mutant-dominated society, Machine Teen and Isaacson worked with AIM to overthrow Australia's fascist mutant government."  Well, that certainly makes up for this being a comic book version of Small Wonder! 

MAD JACK.  I guess there's something extremely terrifying about flaming pumpkins, because Mad Jack (younger cross-dressing cousin of the original Mysterio) joins Jack O'Lantern, the Green Goblin, the Hobgoblin, and for all I know the Sinister Squash among the ranks of people who made Spider-Man shit his pants by setting a gourd on fire and throwing it at him.  Mad Jack's best friend was a robot cat, which frankly comes as no surprise.

THE MAD THINKER.  An old Fantastic Four villain I've always really liked despite his ridiculous name (which I'll just refer you to my previous entry on the guy, rather than rehash it all again), so I'm glad he's been getting more play lately, even if it's in service of the rotten-to-the-core Civil War event.  He created the Awesome Android, who is awesome, and usually when he shows up it's to tell Reed Richards that he's a jackass, so he's okay in my book.

MADAME MASQUE.  The smokin' hot heir to the Nefaria crime family of the Maggia (Marvel's soup-mix pseudonym for the Mafia, invented so that they wouldn't get sued by the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League) has managed to become a pretty respectable villainess over the years, even if she has so many "bio-duplicates" that I have no idea who she actually is anymore.  She dodges a whisky-soaked bullet by refusing to marry Tony Stark, but look where it got her:  at last glance, she was being considered for Thunderbolts membership, the latter-day Marvel equivalent of being in the Forgotten Villains.

MAELSTROM.  I don't think I had anything to say about this guy last time around, and I don't have anything to say about him now, particularly since his history has an extra twenty years on it but he's still wearing the same wack-ass purple costume.  Give it up, Maelstrom.

MAGDALENE.  You may have noticed that it's around this point in every All-New Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe recap that I've completely run out of steam.  I basically don't have anything to say about the characters anymore, especially pointless alternate-Earths ones like this, and I've used up my two good jokes already, so I'm really just skipping ahead and thinking "How many more goddamn entries are there in this issue, anyway?" (Answer:  eight.)  I'd love to think that you don't notice my little padding techniques -- like, for instance, up there where I wrote out "All-New Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe" instead of just typing "OHOTMU" to make it look like this entry actually has some substance -- but sadly, I am fully aware that a bunch of you nerds, who never bother to read my humor, fiction, political writing, or criticism, are still hanging on my every word about fucking Magdalene, as if I or anyone else can possibly have anything worthwhile to say about a woman who can open "Slash/Way" portals with her "power lance".  Well, keep hoping, you knuckle-draggers.

MOSES MAGNUM.  Moses Magnum was originally a Spider-Man villain, but he became better known as a member of Luke Cage's Rogues Gallery, on account of they are both black and belong to the Negro Club.  He is called the "Arms Dealer to the World", which coincidentally is also what the United States is called, and is purported to be an Ethiopian, although I would bet that there are no other people named "Moses" or "Magnum" in the Addis Abeba telephone directory.

MAGUS.  I'm going to recap for you, briefly, the Rule of Purple.  Purple is the color of Bad Evil -- not in the sense of moral malevolence, but in the sense of incompetence and buffoonery.  Any time a hero or a villain is rocking a purple costume, it is an indicator that whoever did the character design was hung over or had an early tee time and just turned in something that fell off the end of his knuckles.  It's one of the most steadfast rules in comics.  Hence, the evil alternate future version (and "evil alternate future version" should already be enough of a tipper that you're in for some heavy wind-sucking) of Adam Warlock, a character who isn't that great to begin with and only gets worse when you give him a Jew-fro and color his skin and his costume lavender.

MAJOR MAPLELEAF.  I paid even less attention to the 2004 Alpha Flight reboot than I did to the boring John Byrne original, but this guy is just batshit enough to interest me:  a former Mountie who stepped into the shoes of his legendary Nucker superhero father, married a female Chinese version of hairy midget kung fu acrobat Puck, and gets his super powers from harnessing the "internally generated bio-centric powers" of his pet horse Thunder, by whispering in its ear.  And people say comics have gotten better!

MALICE.  This was one of the Black Panther's crazy ninja arranged-marriage wives, and she appeared in the 1998 Black Panther series that was actually pretty good.  Therefore, this entry won't be as good, or as bad depending on your perspective, as it would be if we were discussing the other Black Panther villainess named Malice, who chummed it up with our ol' pal Eric "It Was Either This or Rufus Williams" Killmonger.  Pity.

MAN-BEAST.  It's really hard to tell the difference between Man-Bat, Man-Ape, Man-Wolf, Man-Thing and Man-Beast, largely because they all suck.  This is the one who looks like Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy and who was so selective in his plans for world domination that he teamed up with the astoundingly stupid Bi-Beast.  To further complicate matters, he was also known as the Hate-Monger, but not the Hate-Monger who fought the Fantastic Four or the Hate-Monger who was an evil clone of Adolf Hitler.  Someday, when I am dying alone on a park bench, I will consider that I spent the time I could have been playing with children, feeding the needy or healing the sick sitting on my ass in front of a computer and reminding my imaginary readers that the Man-Beast Hate-Monger was not the same Hate-Monger who was a clone of Hitler.

KHAOS.  Hey, remember this guy?  He's the guy that Kylun teamed up with to defeat the evil Ghath with the help of Excalibur!  YOU REMEMBER, GODDAMNIT.  Anyway, here are some words from his entry I don't care about:  "Irth", "royal dark elf", "technowizards", "technomystical", "teknomagical monkey statue".  Yes, that's right, he got some of his magical power from a statue of a monkey.  Go ahead, go buy comics with this guy in them, I dare you.

MARVEL.  There's not much good I can say about this guy, the star of Marville, one of the biggest, runniest, smelliest, foulest heaps of shit ever foisted on the buying public, but I will say this about him:  he's the last character in this issue of OHOTMU, and for that I'll always be thankful.

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