LUDIC LOG

Installment #4 of my free-form memory trip through 1985's mind-bending funnybook reference series The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. We're up to the fourth issue, which is too bad for the hundreds of fans of this series, because for some reason I only have the first five issues. However, this will come as good news for the thousands of non-fans of this series. I warn you, however: a single positive response could provoke me into doing the same for DC Who's Who, and I got all 25 of those motherfuckers. Let's get seriously bizz-zay!

SPECIAL NERD BONUS: The staff of OHOTMU get their own entries in this issue, taking self-indulgent in-jokery to new heights. We learn through these entries that uber-nerd Mark Gruenwald "can play rhythm guitar (a second-level adept on a five-level scale)", subordinate nerd Peter Sanderson's weight is "classified" and he acquired a graduate degree in English literature before deciding to waste his life telling us the Forgotten One's marital status, and technical drawing nerd Eliot R. Brown is not only a member of the Young Tom Edison Club but is unashamed to admit it. Moving on:

DOCTOR STRANGE. Great Paul Smith art on the main picture, one of his best. Almost no Ditko in the incidental art, shoring up my belief that Objectivist loonball Steve was probably suing Marvel around this time. In the origin section, it mentions that after his auto accident, Stephen Strange "swiftly degenerated from recluse to drifter to drunken derelict", which, in addition to pretty accurately describing my own personal career arc, raises some interesting questions: when, exactly, can you tell that you've stopped being a drifter and become a drunken derelict? Is it the increase in booze? Or do you just get tired of drifting around, look at whatever street corner you've settled down on, and go, well, this is it: I'm a derelict now. Yeah, I used to be a drifter, but I got tired of all the travel.

DR. STRANGE'S SANCTUM SANCTORUM: It's at 177A Bleecker Street in NYC. Is this a real address? Is it the bodega across the street from Jim Shooter's place? I don't know. I'm not from New York. The important thing is, it contains "Wong's Storage Cellar". BROTHER YOU KNOW YOU'RE IN FOR A GOOD TIME WHEN YOU SPEND AN EVENING IN WONG'S STORAGE CELLAR.

DORMAMMU: According to the incidental art, back before Dormammu's head was made of fire, he had a rather magnificent specimen of a mullet. I never really pictured the Lord of the Dark Dimension as a business-in-the-front-party-in-the-back type, but I guess Paul Smith knows best.

DRAGON MAN: "Dragon Man has the intellectual capacity of a domestic dog". Sure, but what kind of domestic dog?

DREADNOUGHT: This is two pages of wall-to-wall incomprehensible Eliot R. Brown technical drawings. My favorites: "Gauntlet nozzles shoot hydrazine and liquid oxygen which is ignited by herpergolic reaction". Herpergolic? What the jumpin' Christmas are you talking about, Eliot R. Brown?

JESSICA DREW: Marvel vainly attempted to keep people interested in Jessica Drew after she stopped being Spider-Woman. It didn't work. By this point they'd given her this ludicrously overcomplicated origin ("Drew returned to Wundagore years later possessed by the ghost of the Sixth Century magician Magus, who had sensed Drew's troubled thoughts about Wundagore and recognized the place as the site where he had helped entrap the demon Chthon centuries before"). We do get the detail that teenaged Jess rogered some poor Slav hunk to death, which is fun.

D'SPAYRE: D'Spayre (get it? WHOO) is a demon, and his marital status is listed as "probably inapplicable". Probably. Just leaving open the possibility that there might be a Mrs. D'Spayre somewhere, with a necrotic rolling pin and a fine line of nagging about how he spent too much time fighting Man-Thing and not enough with the kids.

EGO, THE LIVING PLANET: I always sort of liked Ego, because I have a weakness for gigantic pink globs 4000 miles across with a face like Charlton Heston's. But as I've mentioned before, he was hard to take seriously, because he was an entire fucking planet and he still couldn't beat the Fantastic Four. By the end, he was losing to third-rate toy-inspired weaklings like Rom, Space Knight. It was like watching Michael Jordan getting punked by Bimbo Coles.

ELDERS OF THE UNIVERSE: Once again, I hate the Elders of the Universe. The technique of OHOTMU was to present a series of boxes featuring the faces of a given group, and since (thankfully) there were only 7 Elders at the time, we get three empty boxes with a question mark in them. Not only is this lame beyond description, it constituted something of an ominous threat: that someday there might be three more Elders of the Universe.

ELECTRO: Hey, I liked Electro, okay? He was, you know, electric and shit. And he had a dopey costume. He and Mysterio rocked the funky beat with both hands.

ELEKTRA: Bill Sienkiewicz got handed this sweet plum, but he was already into the artsy stuff (Stray Toasters started around this time) and he pretty much sleepwalked through the drawing. Contrary to what you might have learned from recent movies, Elektra did not talk with a Valley-trash accent.

ENCHANTRESS. The Enchantress-Executioner plot arc in Thor was one of my very favorites of the era, and Walt Simonson hands in a fine piece of artwork for this entry. "She has enchanted her lips so that a single kiss is sufficienty to make virtually any man a slave to her will", which is pretty much how Maybelline got started.

ENERGIZER: She's named after a battery! She's six! She "has the normal human strength of a girl her age, height and build who engages in a normal amount of exercise from her age (mostly through playing)"! She's totally fucking retarded! The Power Pack sucked beyond belief.

FALCON: Boy, remember "Snap" Wilson? Remember the junkie story arc of the 1970s? Good times, good times. We are told that "Wilson underwent an identity crisis while running for Congress", much like Zell Miller. We are also told that "the Falcon is one of Harlem's staunchest crimefighters", right up there with...um...you know, that one guy, uh...

FENRIS: Hot blond(e) Nazi twins! Drawn by John Romita Jr.! They're "citizens of Madripoor, a Pacific Island haven for criminals". Why isn't there a place like this in real life? Other than the Phillipines, I mean.

FIRELORD: Man, do I love it when a character has a real name that means something related to his superhuman identity. Really takes the edge off of wondering what to be when you grow up. Firelord's real name is "Pyreus Kril", which indicates that it was his destiny to become either a flame-wielding herald of Galactus or a whale feeder.

FIRESTAR: Which came first, the lame character from "Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends" or the lame character from The X-Men/The New Mutants? I'm sure I don't remember, but I do know that she's 5'1" and 101 pounds, and judging from the disturbing Mary Wilshire drawing, she's soon to be starring in Professor XXX's Barely Legal Mutants XVII.

FLAG-SMASHER: A weak, weak Capitan America villain, his deranged anti-nationalist propaganda would nonetheless come in handy right about now. His occupation is listed as "former student, now terrorist", a life journey that becomes all too obvious when you discover he went to Columbia. He also speaks Esperanto, which must really wow them in the nerd wing of Supervillain State Pen.

FORGE: Another of the low points of Chris Claremont's personal crusade to ruin Marvel Comics, which very nearly succeeded in the late 1980s, Forge, like the abysmal and useless Doug "Cypher" Ramsey, was a character who was arbitrarily turned into a mutant for no other reason that Claremont and Shooter decided that everybody in the universe was going to be a mutant starting in 1985. Also like Cypher, he had a perfectly normal human aptitude that they turned into a mutant power, thus rendering him completely uninteresting (Cypher wasn't just a guy who was good with languages; he had a mutant power to be good with languages! Forge wasn't just a skilled inventor; he had a mutant power to invent things!). Luckily, he, like Ego the Living Planet, eventually landed in the dregs of the Marvel Universe: hanging around with Rom, Space Knight. A Rom tie-in was the comics equivalent of appearing on "Hollywood Squares".

DOMINIC FORTUNE: Boy, Howard Chaykin will just draw anyone, provided they have a big chin, a retro outfit, and a handgun that hasn't been in production since before the Second World War.

NICK FURY: You know, I always thought Nick Fury was boring, and I don't really have anything to say about him. I really only included him because I figured, what with fighting AIM all the time, he might have a MODOK Bonus, but he doesn't. In fact, The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #4 contains not a single, solitary reference to everyone's favorite mental organism designed only for killing. What a rip.

GALACTUS: On the other hand, it does have Galactus. Show me a person who doesn't dig on Galactus and I will show you a person with no soul. Galactus fucking ruled. Not only did he have heralds (come on! who doesn't want a herald?); not only did he have Kirby Magic coming out his ears, or at least those big tuning fork tines that covered his ears; the motherfucker ate planets. He ATE PLANETS. Think about that, why don't you.