LUDIC LOG

Holy crap! It's Thursday, and that can only mean one thing: I'm out of ideas for the week! Ha ha. No, what it really means is that it's time for this week's installment of the Grand Tour of Funnybook Encyclopedias (or, as it is known to our legions of fans in the former Soviet republic of East Germany -- shout out to my homies in Unbounded! -- "die großartige Tour der lustigbuchenzyklopädien"). In other words, it's like when I run out of ideas, but with a built-in excuse. Today we'll be moving on to issue #3 (or "Volume III", for those of you aren't driven into a rage by the irritating, pretentious use of Roman numerals) of DC Who's Who. The full title of the series, by the way, is DC Who's Who: the Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, but if you think I'm typing that shit out every week, you're insane.

This should be a fun issue, since it contains some exceptionally lame characters. The editors seemed to realize this, since for the first time they saddled George Perez with an inker -- the competent but less-than-Perezian Dick Giordano. Let's not keep this collection of losers waiting one second longer than we have to!

BLACK LIGHTNING. Black Lightning was a groundbreaking black superhero created by non-groundbreaking non-black Tony Isabella. If you are familiar with his proto-weblog Tony's Tips, or his innumerable postings on the SAGA e-mail list, you will know that Tony will never, ever let you forget that he created Black Lightning, like it's goddamn As I Lay Dying or something. Black Lightning followed the tradition, started in the 1960s, that every black superhero has the word "black" in his name. The less said about this dopey tradition the better, aside from the memorable line spoken by Black Vulcan in an episode of the sporadically amusing Harvey Birdman: "You think I wanted to be called Black Vulcan? That was Aquaman's idea. I said, well, maybe we oughta call you Whitefish."

BLACK MANTA. Probably the only interesting villain Aquaman ever had, Black Manta was -- guess what? -- a black guy! He had a pretty neat origin, though: he got sick and tired of Whitey fucking everything up for him on the surface world, so he decided to take shit over down below. Fat lot of good this did him, since that blond blue-eyed cracker muthafucka Aquaman kept showing up to rain on his parade. Even 20,000 leagues under the sea, if whitey can't play, there's no goddamn game.

BLACK RACER. Hey, you'll never guess the ethnic origin of Black Racer. Go on, try and guess. Will you ever be surprised. Do you need a hint? His real name is Willie Walker. Aw! You guessed it. It's hard to dislike him, though, because hey -- Kirby magic. And not just any Kirby magic, but the Black Racer is an OG with the New Gods. Only Jack Kirby, or possibly a crazy hippie, could have come up with the idea of making the material personification of Death itself a quadraplegic black guy who cruises around on flying skis, but thank goodness he did.

BLACK SPIDER. This is going to totally blow you away, but Black Spider is -- yes, that's right -- a black guy. Specifically, a black guy who became a professional assassin for some reason and killed time mixing it up with Batman. According to his origin story, "since he intended to prey on criminal 'super-flies', Needham took the name Black Spider." Right on! Tell it like it is, brother!

BLACKSTARR. No, not the rap supergroup composed of Mos Def and Talib Kweli. This is a Supergirl villainess who is, well, pretty fucked up is how I would describe her. She's a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who went crazy and decided Hitler was right -- sure! happens all the time, doesn't it? -- and started a neo-Nazi organization called the Party for Social Reform. Then, in her spare time, she discovered a Unified Field Theory and used to to give herself crazy-ass superpowers. There's something deeply disturbing about a self-annihilating Jewish supervillainess, isn't there? Especially one drawn by Carmine Infantino.

BLUE BEETLE. Some people dug on Blue Beetle, but I always thought of him as annoying and pointless; Keith Giffen obviously agreed with me, since he and the equally annoying and pointless Booster Gold were mercifully relegated to comic relief during the Justice League International days. His entry does have some nifty Steve Rude art, but it's not enough to make me forget that his main weapon was a hair dryer.

BLUE DEVIL. Blue Devil's comic always sort of confused me. He had dumb powers and a bewildering concept, but the book was generally pretty funny and boasted some keen artwork by Paris Cullens (another fallen-off-the-face-of-the-earth guy). The Blue Devil was a stuntman who was attacked by a demon while wearing a super-powered devil costume on a Hollywood movie set; the demon's eye beams grafted the suit to his skin, thus severely hindering his love life. I bet the union raised a big stink about this.

BOUNCING BOY. Oh, man. The Legion of Superheroes. I loved them, even though they were completely retarded. Jim Shooter created a lot of these characters when he was literally a teenager, and it shows; BB may not have been one of his, but he may as well have been. Basically, he was a fat guy who could get even fatter and bounce around like a ball. No, really. His bio says he was the "morale officer" of the Legion, which apparently is Interlac for "useless sack of shit". And yet, this worthless tub of inflatable guts was married to Duo Damsel! Some guys have all the luck; here I am stuck writing this entry, while an obese moron gets a threesome every night.

BOY COMMANDOS. Pretty much all war comics feature an ensemble cast straight out of the Central Casting stereotype pool (see the Blackhawks in the last installment), but the Kirby-created Boy Commandos really take the cake. You have the requisite lantern-jawed, heroic, whitebread commander (here, an oaf with the perfect name of "Rip Carter"), the suave, handsome French ladies' man (Andre, of course), the spunky blond Nordic pretty-boy (the Dondi-like Jan), the bespectacled, nerdy sissy-boy with the high IQ (Percy), the big-talkin' cowboy (Tex), the gregarious, corpulent, jolly Englisman (Alfy), and, naturally, the tough-talking, street-smart kid from New York (Brooklyn, probably the only person in the history of the world to wear a bright red bowler with a yellow hatband). I think Jolly Jack wrote this stuff in his sleep.

THE BRAIN. I know nothing about the character, since I didn't read Doom Patrol, but man oh man is there some nice Bill Sienkeiwicz art here. DC gave him a freer hand than Marvel had, and he takes full advantage of it. The Brain is, well, a brain, who lives in a giant metal chesspiece. He doesn't appear to be able to move. Think of him as a cross between MODOK and Davros, only without the active lifestyle.

BRAINIAC. This is the metal one, not the green one, but he still fuckin' rocks. Brainiac is, to my knowledge, the only supervillain whose name has entered the popular culture as a term for a nerd. Which is sort of too bad. Wouldn't you love to hear a high school bully slap some A/V geek in the back of the head and say "Hey, Doc Ock! Clear the aisle!" or "Hurry up, Sivana! We got a game to go to!"

BRAINIAC 5. Brainy was a total tool. He had a shot at Supergirl, and he fucked it up because he was always too busy dicking around with spores in the multi-lab. Not all that fuckin' brainy, now, was he?

BREATHTAKER. Breathtaker was (a) an albino (b) a dwarf and (c) a dude in a robot exoskeleton. With all those problems, no wonder he became a supervillain. He was affiliated with both the Assassination Bureau and the 2000 Commitee, both of which sound vaguely like Republican PACs. He couldn't beat Firestorm, but then again, who could? Firestorm sucked.

BRONZE TIGER. Bronze Tiger was another black guy who tried to beat up on Batman. How he escaped being called Black Tiger I'll never know, but they were kind enough to call him Bronze Tiger, just so we know 100% for sure that he's not a white guy. Whew!

BROTHER POWER. There's just no way that I can do justice to this character. Funnier people than me have tread these lands before. I will simply repeat his origin and leave you to bask in his total awesomeness. Brother Power (a.k.a. Brother Power the Geek) was a tailor's dummy. A bunch of smelly hippies who lived in a tailor shop for some reason dressed him up in a ridiculous outfit and put a mop on his head. Then they shoved him behind a radiator for a year and he soaked up dust and rain and oil and sunshine. And then he got hit by lightning and came to life and he had super-strength and then I killed myself.

BUG-EYED BANDIT. Okay, so you're a brilliant entomologist (who, in a particularly gross example of the Name-As-Destiny concept, is named Bertram Larvan). And you're also a superhumanly gifted inventor. And you're bitter and hate the world, probably because your name is Larvan and you have a molester mustache and everyone laughs at you because you study the sex organs of stag beetles all day long. So you build a huge army of lethal, nearly indestructible robot insects who can tear people to shreds and chew through solid steel. So what do you call yourself? Hey, I know! How about...Bug-Eyed Bandit? That's got slightly more dignity than the other ideas you came up with, Fat-Assed Fuckface, Pencil-Dicked Perpetrator and The Ridiculous, Retarded Rhino-Beetle Recidivist.

BYTH. Reason #587 why I'm sorry I'm too broke and lazy to get a decent scanner: the fact that I cannot show you the Joe Kubert illustration for this fairly cool Hawkman villain. Why is this a cause for regret? Because it makes Byth look really, really, really, really gay.