LUDIC LOG

It's nearly 1AM, and I've been up working on a project for a friend of mine, so I'm going to skip a full entry today. Thursday is the day I normally do the DC Who's Who roundup, but I promise you I'll get it to you on Monday. Instead, tonight, I want to focus on one particular character in Volume IV. A character who I love almost as much as I love MODOK. A character called...Chemo.

No, not "keemo", as in "chemotherapy". His (its?) name is pronounced "kim-o", like in, uh, "chemical" with an "o" at the end instead of an "ical". And he is one of the most truly, desperately insane characters in the history of funnybooks.

Chemo, you see, is not just your ordinary supervillain. You can tell just by looking at his occupation: he's not a stockbroker or a safecracker or a sprinkler fitter. He's a "walking weapon". And how'd he get to be that? Therein lies a tale.

It seems like some complete fuck-knuckles of a scientist named Professor Ramsey Norton wanted to "conquer disease, famine, all the ills of mankind". Way to set realistic goals, Norton, you shithead. So he spent all his time fucking around with chemicals, I guess in the hopes that someday he would discover a chemical that cured hunger or something. The only problem is, Professor Norton was incredibly goddamned incompetent. How incompetent was he, you ask? I'll tell you. You see, Professor Moron fucked up so often than he build a giant man-shaped hollow plastic molded figure to pour his failed experiments into. (Why did he do such an odd thing, in defiance of logic, reason and innumerable OSHA and environmental laws? Because he was insane.) Every time he would make another failed chemical cocktail, he would pour it into the big hollow plastic man, which he called Chemo, to remind him of his failure.

Well, apparently he needed a whole lot of reminding, because Chemo is twenty-five feet tall and weighs three tons. How fucking incompetent a chemist do you have to be that you can fill up a twenty-five-foot-tall, three-ton container with your screw-ups? You would have to be the worst scientist in the world. Is it any wonder that Chemo came to life for some reason and killed his mind-bogglingly wasteful and inept creator?

No. But it is sort of curious that Chemo then turned evil. It seems like every time someone creates some monster like this, it's malevolent. I mean, aren't the odds equally good that Chemo would have turned out to be nice, or benevolent, or at least harmless? Was there something about that combination of chemicals that not only made hime alive and capable of spewing dangerous corrosive acids, but made him sinister as well? Is he filled with the formula for evil? Why is it that these sorts of things never work out well? Mathematically, it seems equally probably that Chemo would have turned out to be quite benign.

Lucky for us he didn't, though. Because he went on to fight heavy hitters like Superman and low-rent losers like the Metal Men, scowling in a plasticene way and dripping deadly chemicals all over everyone. It has been pointed out, of course, that a lot of the really marginal heroes probably jumped at the chance to fight Chemo, in the hopes that he might spew out some entertaining new chemical combination that would result in a quick high. He was probably the most popular villain on Skid Row, because fighting him was the equivalent of drinking paint thinner or licking a toad.

Cheap highs aside, the best thing about Chemo wasn't his awkward name or his unbelievable origin or his goofy powers or his wildly fluctuating size or his dumb robot enemies or the fact that he was a giant green plastic man. No, it was definitely what he said. He had a catch-phrase of sorts, you see -- a catch-phrase that puts "It's clobberin' time!" and "Up, up, and away!" to shame. What did Chemo say? Get this:

"SSSSSSS! Gurgle".

That's right: "SSSSSSS! Gurgle".

Sorry about the non-entry. Who's Who #4 recap tomorrow evening.