LUDIC LOG

I am sad to report that I have no more issues of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe to comb through. However, I do have shitloads of DC Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, so let's get right to Volume I.

The first thing you notice about Who's Who, aside from the absolutely stellar covers by George Perez, is what it doesn't have in comparison to OHOTMU: it doesn't have 64 pages in an issue, coming in at a lean 32. It doesn't have three-page descriptions of a character who appeared in two issues of "Giant-Size Man-Thing". It doesn't have a thousand pieces of incidental art, all drawn by John Byrne. It doesn't have covers where it looks like a superhero cattle drive at the Lazy X Dude Ranch. It doesn't have endless cod-academic jargon about how, exactly, Dr. Strange makes the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak work. It doesn't have boring appendices, bogus explanations and self-indulgent crap from the creators. It doesn't have any goddamn Eliot R. Brown technical drawings. What it does have, however, is lots of dopey superheroes to make fun of, so let's forget about all the really good things about it and jump into the garbage.

ABEL. Poor Abel gets no respect even in his Who's Who entry. He is described as a "devout coward" and his weight is listed as "396 1/4" pounds, the fat boy from Kentucky apparently being unable to shed that last pesky quarter-pound. And yes, there's a mention of his "invisible, imaginary companion named Goldie"! If this was a Marvel book, we'd get some stats on Goldie's throw weight or something.

ABRA KADABRA. Before you start to get the impression that DC was actually a better company than Marvel in '86 just because it put out better books, keep in mind that it produced with numbing regularity characters like "Abra Kadabra", who in addition to having an extremely retarded name was a stage magician from the 64th century who went back in time to turn the Flash into a wooden puppet for some reason.

ADAM STRANGE. Adam Strange was one of those Julie Schwartz adventures-in-space characters from the '50s that no one cared about until Alan Moore started retconning them in the '80s. AS always bored me -- come to think of it, even Moore's take on him was pretty boring, except the amusing gag of him having to track down the Zeta Beam in a toilet -- but the drawing here is proof that master-of-gangliness Carmine Infantino can make people look like meaty Curt Swan characters with the right inker (in this case, Swan-clone Murphy Anderson). Note: I realize how totally incomprehensible this paragraph is if you don't know comics really well. And I'm sorry for that. Just quit reading now, is all I can tell you, because it's only going to get worse.

ALLEY-KAT-ABRA. Yes, it's the second dumb-ass variant on "abracadabra" within six pages, this time as a member of the funny-animal/superhero abortion Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew. Would it surprise you to learn that I actually once spent real money to buy a comic book called Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew? God knows it surprises me. Alley-Kat-Abra has big tits for a funny animal, as drawn by Scott Shaw!. Yes, he spells his name with an exclamation point. I wish this had caught on with other artists, so we could have had "Jerry Ordway." and "John Byrne?" and "Bill Sienkiewicz?!?!?"

AMAZING-MAN. Speaking of Jerry Ordway. Okay, Jerry wasn't bad. He was just kind of boring. Unlike the name of this minor member of the All-Star Squadron, which is incredibly lame and stupid, but not boring. Will Everett was a janitor at a lab, and one evening he was "kidnapped by gun-wielding minions of the villainous Ultra-Humanite and taken to a hidden lair where he was subjected to the power of an electro-generator" which gave him super-powers. This sort of thing happens all the time in comic books.

AMAZO. Worst. Name. Ever.

AMBUSH BUG. Man, oh, man, was the Ambush Bug comic book funny. I mean, seriously. Even going back and reading it today, it's some good shit, especially if you are a geek. The entry isn't all that funny, but it has a decent piece of Giffen art, and his marital status is given as "incompatible", which is a good gag.

AMETHYST, PRICESS OF GEMWORLD. Marvel either couldn't or didn't want to get the rights to all their toy properties to stick in OHOTMU, so the reader is spared crap like the Micronauts, the Shogun Warriors and ROM, Space Knight. This is one of its few advantages over Who's Who, which is stuffed to the gills with nonsense like Amethyst and Atari Force. Bleah.

ANGLE MAN. Angle Man is a perfect example early on of the name-as-destiny syndrome that plagues comic book characters -- the unfortunate tendency with people who have particularly suggestive, albeit very unlikely, names to grow up to be superhumans with powers that somehow reflect those names. Angle Man, for example, is named "Angelo Bend", which should have tipped off the juvenile authorities right away that he was going to grow up to be an angle-wielding supervillain. He's the first name-as-destiny character in Who's Who, but best believe he's not the last.

ANIMAL-MAN. Since Who's Who was written before the impressive retconning of Animal Man in a memorable maxi-series in the late 1990s, he only gets half a page, which, really, is all he deserved at that time, because he was a big snore. Good Gil Kane art, though. I love Gil Kane.

AQUAMAN. Aqualad and Aquagirl get * GEORGE PEREZ * art. What does Aquaman get? Chuck Patton and Dick Giordano. I would be outraged about this if Aquaman was not the superhero equivalent of a long, enervating yawn. Aquaman is to DC what Ant-Man is to Marvel: a really, really dull creation that for some reason is considered a major character in the canon.

ARCANE Sizzlin' Bissette/Totleben art; "uses no weaponry save perhaps for his loyal Un-Men". If you were an Un-Man, I guess you'd pretty much have to be loyal, wouldn't you? There's probably not a lot of other career options open to Un-Men other than henchman. No mention made in the entry of how Arcane fucked his own niece.

ARKHAM ASYLUM. DC occasionally got fancy and included a floor plan, like they do here; again, they save the wicked excess for Marvel, who would have given Arkham a six-page entry with technical drawings of the Joker's crapper. Again, nice Bissette/Totleben art here.

ATARI FORCE. Atari force gets two fucking pages. Batman gets one. Another reason why Ambush Bug rocked? He spent several pages killing off the Atari Force. I'm not even going to dignify this ridiculous marketing gimmick with an entry.

ATOM. The Golden Age atom was 5'1" and weight 96 pounds, so even with super-strength no one took him seriously. The Silver Age Atom was another shrinking character; someday comic writers will learn that no one likes shrinking characters because they are boring. Ray Palmer (fun little in-joke name there for sci-fi nerds), the SA Atom, went from dull to beyond dull when they turned him into some sort of alien jungle mutant in South America, but the great Frank Miller was able to make even this snoozer briefly interesting in the recent DK2 mini.

ATOMIC KNIGHT. This has to be one of the most fucked-up characters ever. The Army takes a typical grunt, whacks him full of drugs, and sticks him in a sensory deprivation tank, where they feed him computer images that make him think that there's been a nuclear holocaust and that everyone but a handful of people are dead. He develops a mental persona of the Atomic Knight, a stand-up dude who goes around helping the survivors while wearing a boss-jock robotic exoskeleton with a mushroom cloud on the front of the shield, which has to be one of the more tasteless artistic choices ever. Then, just when things are going good in his fantasy world, they yank him out of it and say "hey, dude! Good job. The last few years of your life have been a nightmarish fantasy, but we got a lot of decent data out of it. Thanks." Amazingly, this is presented as a wild, fun fantasy adventure instead of a horrible exercise in psychological torture.

ATOMIC SKULL. I don't know anything about this guy -- he's a minor Superman villain from back in the day -- but not only is he called "Atomic Skull", but he may have the best costume of all time. I wanna BE the Atomic Skull. Plus, he's got "a neural pacemaker made of radium in his brain". Who wouldn't like that?