LUDIC LOG

If it's Thursday, this must be Gotham City. Yes, it's time once again for another stroll through the dangerously confusic comic document known as DC Who's Who. Today is issue #5 (or Volume V, as the heads at 666 5th Avenue would have it), and it's got some pretty limp characters in it, believe you me. By the way, I didn't notice this before, possibly because the DC encyclopedia doesn't call conspicuous attention to its writing staff like OHOTMU inexplicably did, but one reason Who's Who is better than its Marvel counterpart is the writers. While OHOTMU was written by professional mediocrity Mark Gruenwald and amateur nonentity Peter Sanderson, Who's Who is by legitimate heavy hitters Len Wein and Marv Wolfman -- the creators, respectively, of the new X-Men and the new Teen Titans, which were at the time Marvel and DC's best-selling books. I don't wanna sound like I'm slagging on Stan Lee's outfit here; honestly, nobody was a bigger Marvel geek than me back in the '80s. But DC just seemed to want to do it right.

Of course, that didn't stop them from occasionally doing it wrong, as we shall see.

CHRONOS. Theme villains, like theme parties, are tricky. Sometimes, like the Riddler or a Halloween costume party, they can be a lot of fun, but more often, like charades parties or this hapless schmuck, they're just tedious and painful to watch. Gifted with a lame concept and a lamer costume, this timekeeping twit couldn't even manage to pull one over on the Atom, which is a bit like going 0-12 on the season against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

CINNAMON. She was a western hero (or, more specifically, a Weird Western hero) named after her fiery red hair. She was hot, she was interesting (she worked a pretty intriguing revenge angle as her backstory), and, foreshadowing the Shaft remake of decades later, she used a sheriff's badge as a shuriken. Unfortunately, all that couldn't save her from being a laughingstock, because let's face it: no matter how much of a bad-ass you are, you're not going to intimidate anyone with the name "Cinnamon". That's like being named Kitten or Peppermint or Cuteypie. It's not really gonna make the Dalton gang run away in terror when they hear Cinnamon's coming to town.

CLAYFACE. There was not one, not two, but three Clayfaces. Why three different guys would pick such an unflattering name is beyond me, but I learned long ago not to second-guess funnybook writers. The first Clayface, with the subtle name Basil Karlo, was a run-of-the-mill crazed horror movie actor; the second, Matt Hagen, was a shapechanging schmuck made of "synthetic protoplasm"; and the third, Preston Payne, was a gross mostrosity who could melt people into liquid wax by touching them. All in all a pretty unpleasant trio, but nothing we can't pester Batman about every 9 issues or so.

CLOCK KING. What's that? You say one stupid-ass supervillain with a "telling time" theme is enough? You say we wouldn't be able to top someone as retarded as Chronos even if we tried? Well, let me tell you, buddy: you are mis fucking taken. Clock king has a stupider name (Chronos is downright menacing compared to 'Clock King'), a much, much stupider costume (green and blue tights covered with little white clocks that look like polka-dots and a big Timex right over his face), and an even lamer arch-enemy (Green Arrow, who unlike the Atom, doesn't even have superpowers). And, to top it all off, his name, William Tockman, is one of the limpest name-as-destiny monikers in funnybook history. Just looking at Clock King's entry is like eating too many bad deviled eggs.

COLONEL COMPUTRON. Yet another "who gives a shit" character from Flash's Rogues' Gallery. Seriously, people. What does it say about the Flash's standing as a major DC superhero that the most impressive of all his enemies is named Professor Zoom? Anyway, I remember pretty clearly that this character was either a fat ugly woman, a skinny ugly woman, or an old ugly man. The Flash creative team tried to keep you in suspense as to which one it was, but this didn't really work out because no one cared which one it was.

COMPOSITE SUPERMAN. This guy had the combined powers of nineteen members of the Legion of Super-heroes, including Supergirl, and yet he still got his ass handed to him by Batman. Someone explain this to me.

CONGO BILL & CONGORILLA. I have spoken elsewhere of my love for comics that involve superhuman or gifted apes, monkeys, chimps or gorillas who decide to fight crime for some reason instead of just kicking the asses of all the local silverbacks and stealing their banana hoards, so I won't belabor the point here. I will, however, mention that this entry has an awesome (well, awesome for Chuck Patton) picture of Congorilla wielding a big nasty M60 machinegun, Rambo-style.

COSMIC BOY. Rokk Krinn had to be one of the limpest of all the Legionnaires; even his nifty magnetic power was overshadowed by his stupid pink costume and his irritating personality. What the superfly Night Girl saw in this tool is a mystery to me.

CREATURE COMMANDOS. Yes, it's another stock character pick 'n' mix war-comics team, with one slight difference: they're completely fucking insane. You see, instead of being a team of pilots, or children, or losers, or criminals, the Creature Commandos are a team of monsters. In addition to the requisite lantern-jawed whitebread commander (Matt Shrieve), there was Taylor, a Frankenstein monster; Myrna Rhodes, a serpend-headed Medusa; Griffith, a werewolf; and a vampire named, uh, Sgt. Vincent Velcro. Yes, that's right, Sgt. Vincent Velcro, the vampire. I am not making this up.

CREEPER. I always dug the Creeper, because his gimmick was he was batshit crazy. Also, his secret identity was Jack Ryder, an obnoxious proto-Bill-O'Reilly television talk show host. He was fun to watch in his original Ditko manifestation, in his excellent Dave Gibbons days, and in the Giffen JLA incarnation. Strangely, in the just-released Vertigo reboot Beware the Creeper, he has been transformed into a woman in Paris in the 1920s who seems to fight rapists and surrealists. The whole thing is terribly confusing.

CROC. Croc was a great Batman villain because he took zero shit from anyone. He didn't have a gimmick or a theme or a good line of quips; he just pounded the living snot out of anyone who got in his way. He was a big ugly freaky jerk named Waylon who had a loathesome skin condition and hated everyone on earth. If Carl Panzram had ever become a supervillain, he would have been Croc.

CYBORG. The least explicitly 90210ish of the new Teen Titans, Victor Stone was always good for a break from the soap opera shenanigans of Marv Wolfman's answer to the X-Men. Despite being black and coming from the inner city (and being written by the superhumanly non-black Marv Wolfman), Cyborg was credibly urban at a time when black heroes in DC titles were as rare as Flash villains who didn't suck. He even managed to avoid being named Black Cyborg. Now, if only I could figure out why he palled around with a mega-nerd like Changeling, I could sleep easier at night.