LUDIC LOG

It's Thursday, and that means it's time for another trip through the mid-'80s comic book geekcyclopedia known as DC Who's Who. This is issue #9 (Volume IX), and it's chock full of morons in green outfits. But before we get to the entries, this issue leads off with an exciting letter from a nerd!

The nerd in question is David Bedard of St. Brieux, Saskatchewan, Canada, and he apparently spent several months in a cave stuffing himself full of Smarties and doing "a bit of research". His letter is full of geeky 'mistakes' he found in previous issues of Who's Who -- not major stuff like a character being dead, or having fought Batman when he was actually a Congorilla villain, but stuff like a character having been accidentally left off the cover of an issue, or someone being listed as a character's uncle instead of the character's great-uncle. He actually cites the flagrantly jokey comic Ambush Bug as a source in two of his 'mistakes', and chastises the writers for listing the height and weight of A.B. and giving names to Baron Bedlam's parents when they'd never been mentioned in the comic. He writes, outrage dripping from his pen, "Do you guys just make those up as you go or what?" To their credit, the editors are too nice to respond "YES, THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT WE DO, YOU RIDICULOUS SQUEAKER."

Let's get on with it.

GENTLEMAN GHOST. This was a pretty decent Hawkman villain, who was the ghost of a British highwayman from the early part of the 19th century. The odd thing about this entry is that, in the fine Joe Kubert background art, his execution is shown, and he's dangling from the gallows -- wearing his supervillain clothes. Now, I'm no expert on Georgian-era Britain, but I'm pretty sure when they hung a notorious armed robber, they didn't dress him in a top hat, tails, a monocle, bow tie, stirruped trousers, and a ruffled shirt to do it.

GHOST. A run-of-the-mill, generic super-scientist villain, the Ghost, through a chain of circumstance that I am in no way equipped to relate, came to be worshipped by an ancient hidden civilization consisting entirely of women. The denizens of this mysterious kingdom, which I reiterate consisted entirely of women, believed he was the reincarnation of their god and invited him to rule over them. So what did he do? He went off to fight Captain Atom some more. Is it any wonder we all turned into such sexually dysfunctional losers, growing up reading nonsense like this?

GHOST PATROL. As I have mentioned before, comic books seemed to save their most demented concepts for war titles. The Ghost Patrol is one such demented concept. These were three schmucks -- a stud named Fred, a smoothie named Pedro, and a fatso named Slim -- who were in the French Foreign Legion. For some reason, their commanding officer was a Nazi (yes, yes, I know, I don't get it either) who ordered them to drop bombs on north African villages. Luckily, or unluckily -- it's really kind of hard to tell -- some other Foreign Legion schmuck named Henri put a bomb in their plane and they all blew up and died. Only they came back as ghosts and fought the Germans as: the Ghost Patrol! It seems impossible that a more idiotic concept was ever committed to newsprint, and yet, only one page later, we find...

G.I. ROBOT. That's right: G.I. Robot. Astonishingly, there were actually two G.I. Robots, J.A.K.E. and J.A.K.E. 2. (Jungle Automatic Killer -- Experimental, if you absolutely must know.) In case you were thinking that this character wasn't quite stupid enough, I would like to point out that not only did he wear pants for no discernible reason, he was accompanied by Cap the robot dog, and a robot cat. A robot cat. In the middle of a wartime economy, we are asked to believe that the US government would spend money developing a robot cat. I don't know if I can go on.

GIZMO. This is one of the chumps who joined the Fearsome Five by answering an ad in the supervillain paper, the Underworld Star. He's "a scientific prodigy and ill-mannered dwarf", just like Stephen Hawking. Apparently, villainous dwarves who invent superweapons are as thick as leaves in autumn in the DC universe. Gizmo (whose difficult-to-swallow real name is "Mikron O'Jeneus"), according to the copy, is able to transform "an ordinary vacuum cleaner" into a "a deadly, unstoppable tank". I'd like to try this myself, but unfortunately, no details are forthcoming.

GLOBAL GUARDIANS. Best known for supplying the hot lesbian Green Fury (later known as Fire) to the Giffen-era Justice League, the Global Guardians were a mysterious team of superheroes from all over the world. There were Africans, Europeans, North and South Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. Yes, all peoples and ethnic groups were represented in the Global Guardians, from Native Americans to Zulus and everyone in between. Except for those filthy ragheads, ha ha!

GOLDEN GLIDER. This Flash villainess with vintage 1960s Dolly Parton hair was the sister of Captain Cold and the ex-girlfriend of the Top. Blaming the Scarlet Speedster for her lover's death (Christ, I'm actually starting to write like the goddamn Who's Who), she became the Golden Glider in order to exact her revenge. Her main power: "She wears ice skates that create their own ice, which emits antigravity radiation." Designing skates that create ice that defies gravity has to be one of the oddest things a person could do, but you gotta love that hair.

GORILLA GRODD. In another of a seemingly endless series of testaments to how pitiful Flash's Rogues Gallery was, let's stop to remember that aside from Professor Zoom, his most fearsome foe was a talking ape. One of the curious events of Grodd's past is when he "used an evolution accelerator to transform himself into a human being". How changing from a huge 600-pound gorilla with superhuman strength, genius-level intelligence, and vast mental powers into a chrome-domed schmuck named Drew Drowden represents an acceleration of evolution is one of many reasons we do not rely on comic books to learn science. This entry is drawn by the seriously confusing combination of Carmine Infantino and Bill Sienkiewicz.

GRAVEDIGGER. Someone made a serious, serious coloring blunder on this one, by making the shirt of this WWII-era black character who fought against Nazis abroad and racial discrimination at home appear to be Caucasian pink instead of white. The sort of minor techincal mistake that happens constantly; just poor timing in this case. Little-known fact: Gravedigger survived World War Two and teamed up with several lesser-known black heroes -- Prince Paul, Fruikwan, and Too Poetic.

GREEN LANTERN I. I always really liked the Golden Age GL. It's easy to forget after 60 years and endless retconning how all this got started, but there was a brief period where the old DC comics were like the original Grimm fairy tales before they got cleaned up: still for kids, to be sure, but with a dark, scary, sinister, quite violent tone to them. I'm thinking in particular of the first Batman stories, the original Dr. Fate, Hourman and Hawkman, and, of course, the original Green Lantern, with the "first to bring death, second to bring life, third to bring power" stuff. Not bad. And all gone, now.

GREEN LANTERN II. There's not much to say about the Silver Age GL that hasn't already been said, and I'll leave off the often-made observations about how someone with a rain slicker and a school bus could kill one of the most powerful heroes in the universe. One observation I might make is that the criterion for becoming a Green Lantern -- that one is "utterly honest and born without fear" -- is something you probably find less among test pilots than, say, retarded people.

GREEN LANTERN III. Before John Stewart was the wildly popular host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, he was a black architect from Detroit who was chosen to become the new Green Lantern of Earth when Hal Jordan fucked off to make out with his rich girlfriend Carol Ferris. He wasn't very interesting, especially compared to the guy who succeeded him, but he was downright thrilling when compared with the...

GREEN LANTERN CORPS. Featuring such timeless and well-thought-out characters as The Bug Green Lantern, the Glass Green Lantern, the Plant Green Lantern, the Gross Pink Pickle-Headed Green Lantern, The Blob Green Lantern, the Chipmunk Green Lantern, the Eyeball Green Lantern, the Robot Green Lantern, the Seriously Fucking Ugly Green Lantern, the Green Lantern with a Mohawk, and the Freaky Webbed Bird-Thing Green Lantern, the Green Lantern Corps was responsible for making my life utterly miserable for several painful months until I made the amazing discovery that I didn't have to read, or buy, the goddamn book.