LUDIC LOG

It's time once again for a look at the 1980s comic book encyclopedia known as Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe. Issue #12 is a bit dull, as evidenced by the fact that a snoozeworthy character like Killer Frost is the most prominent character on the cover. There's nothing really happening in the letter column either aside from a note from T.M. Maple. Who the fuck is T.M. Maple, you ask? Well, what you're really asking is, "how geeky are comic books?" The answer is, "so geeky that a fat nerd from Ontario who called himself 'the Mad Maple' and was famous for doing nothing more than writing a bunch of letters to every comic book published from 1977 to 1990 became some kind of microcelebrity, that's how geeky". T.M. Maple apparently died recently, and the fact that I'm sad about that shows you how geeky I am.

For more evidence of my geekiness, let's jump right into Volume XII of DC Who's Who.

JONNY DOUBLE. Usually, when someone in comics was a Jonny or a Jonni instead of a Johnny, this meant they were (a) female or (b) wacky. Jonny Double is apparently the latter. Decked out in a macho white turtleneck, Jonathan Sebastian Double was some kind of a hard-luck private dick who palled around with Supergirl as well as the typical assortment of noir stock characters. Check out this third-rate Daishell Hammett imitation from head writer Len Wein: "Jonny Double remains a downbeat Don Quixote in a society that frowns on windmills, searching for that one last dragon to slay, a once-white knight in rusty armor, the poor man's Peter Pan." This highfalutin nonsense is known in the world of literary theory as pseudoreference -- the use of grand-sounding signifiers that seem really meaningful but in fact make no sense at all . If you're wondering what someone who knows about the pseudoreferent is doing writing a lengthy entry about Jonny Double, well, I must admit, I'm wondering that myself.

JOR-EL. I briefly considered boycotting Jor-El, because as Calamity Jon pointed out in his excellent guest stint in this space, the sexist pigfuckers at DC included Superman's father, but not his mother. But, in the end, I couldn't do it, because there's enough goofy shit in Jor-El's entry to fill an entire book. For example, did you know:

- the Wayne Boring art (yes, that's right, Wayne Boring, haw haw) makes Jor-El look hydrocephalic?

- Jor-El was born on Norzec 1st, 9979? And Superman was born in Eorx 35, 9998? And that since one Kryptonian year is equal to 1.4 Earth years, this means that Jor-El was a mere 25 years old when he knocked up Lara Lor-Van? Way to hustle, stud!

- Lara, Superman's mother, was an astronaut, and that all Kryptonian astronauts were female? Sexy!

- Jor-El not only discovered the Phantom Zone and got criminals banished to it, he also had the bright idea of launching criminals into orbit and playing hypnotic tapes at them non-stop in order to "reform" them, which, when combined with his endless experiments on animals and children, makes him seem less of a kind and loving father than an extraterrestrial Josef Mengele?

- he was originally going to save a bunch of people by building a "space ark" in the city of Kandor, but just as he was about to finish it, Braniac happened to come along and shrink the whole goddamn city down to nothing? What a lousy stroke of luck!

JUDOMASTER. White guy, trained by grateful Japanese man (who later becomes a supervillain) as master of martial arts, uses powers to kill other Japanese men in WWII. Judomaster, whose real name was the rock-starry "Rip Jagger", had a boy sidekick named "Tiger", which is disturbing for any number of reasons. In the typically twisted logic of people who don't know what the hell they're talking about, Rip's "new philosophy, derived from his teaching under the Sensei, allows him to avoid using guns in battle". I'm sure all the Japanese soldiers whose necks and skulls he cracked like a stick of celery were real grateful for that.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA. This issue came out during the dismal years when the JLA, the most famous super-team in history, consisted of pitiable ding-dongs like Gypsy and Vibe and were headquartered in a run-down piece-of-shit abandoned factory in Detroit called "The Bunker". They arrived at this sorry state because the perennially moody Aquaman, in a fit of pique, disbanded the League when the team members didn't show up in time and his sorry aquatic ass had to fight a bunch of Martians by himself. Proving, once again, that Aquaman is a dick.

J.L.A. HEADQUARTERS/J.S.A. HEADQUARTERS. The JLA headquarters entry has a super-detailed blueprint of the entire space satellite once maintained by the most famous super-team in history, right down to the Arts/Crafts Room, the Amphibian Life Support Chamber, and the withered husk of Starro's corpse danging from wires in the Souvenir Room. The HQ of the Justice Society of America, conversely, is represented as a crappy Todd McFarlane drawing of a brownstone, with two underachieving cutaway bubbles illustrating the "armory" and the "meeting room". Maybe there was a game on.

KALIBAK. Man, a classic Kirby villain here. The brutish, monstrously strong, bullheaded, unreasonable monster, the dark side of Orion, the Scourge of Apokalips, Kalibak the Cruel. It's stuff like this that reminds me why I wasted so much time reading these goddamn comic books in the first place. Also, if anyone had to ink Jack Kirby -- I'm of the opinion the best Kirby inker was Kirby -- then it was Greg Theakston. Unaccomplished on his own, he did a generally fine job touching up Jack's stuff. Go treat yourselves...read New Gods again. Or for the first time.

KAMANDI, THE LAST BOY ON EARTH! Then again, sometimes we see Jack Kirby: the Dark Side. Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth! (yes, that's how they write it) was a demented, if enjoyable, bit of Kirby Magic, the plot of which was some ridiculous combination of Thundarr the Barbarian, Dondi, Animal Farm, and a really long session of "Gamma World". Kamandi was a blond waif who capered around the ruined remains of a radioactive America after something called the Great Disaster, aided by his friend, "the scientist dog Doctor Canus", and a bunch of other assholes. For some reason, intelligent animals have taken over the world, and Kamandi spends a lot of time running away from groups like the Wolf-Men, the Killer Whales, and NAMBLA: the Last Boy-Lovers on Earth.

KANDOR. Back in the day, my man Brainiac used to cruise around the universe shrinking cities to microscopic size, sticking them in bottles, and doing bizarre experiments on their inhabitants. Eventually, this brought him into conflict with Superman, when if he'd just waited a few decades, he could have avoided all the trouble by just buying a copy of The Sims. Anyway, the Kryptonian metropolis of Kandor was one of his most famous conquests, and its entry reveals a rather amazing fact about the history of Krypton: it seems that 150 years before Superman was born, the people of Krypton decided they were going to have a democratic form of government. But rather than deciding on what form that government would take by, for example, putting it to a vote, they decided to pick their leader by having the head of each of the political parties stand around in the middle of a thunderstorm holding a lightning rod. Whichever one didn't get struck by lightning would be the new ruling party of Krypton. The scientific party won by using a rod made of non-conductive material. When you think about this fact, it's not hard to see why no one listened to Jor-El when he told them the planet was going to explode: it's because THE PEOPLE OF KRYPTON ARE FUCKING MORONS.

KARATE KID. No, not Ralph Macchio, though the Steve Lightle art makes it look a little like him. This is the member of the Legion of Super-Heroes who fought alongside people like Mon-El and Colossal Boy and Saturn Girl even though he didn't have any super-powers. They were always trying to convince people that KK was a real bad-ass; even in his Who's Who entry it says "he was able to fight Superboy to a standstill". Whatever you say, man.

KEY. Yet another of the innumerable "theme" supervillains who was probably dreamed up by Curt Swan while rummaging through his junk drawer. The Key was trying to find the "key" to conquering the universe, and he kidnapped "key" government officials by controlling them with his "keyboard". He did some other "key" crimes, too, but I shoved a "key" in my eye so I wouldn't have to read about them. It mentions here that he "injected himself with various psycho-chemicals", which oddly enough, is also how I write these entries.

KHUNDS. These were a bunch of Bluto-ish aliens who were always perpetratin' on the Legion of Superheroes. For reasons that are probably obvious, they are not included in the Pronunciation Glossary at the beginning of the comic.

KID ETERNITY. This is another Golden Age hero with a somewhat dark and disturbing origin. He was actually Captain Marvel Jr.'s brother, and he was crossing the Atlantic with his grandfather when their ship was torpedoed by the Nazis, who then, being Nazis and all, machinegunned the wreckage just to make sure they were dead. Unfortunately, some fat yutz named Mr. Keeper, who was in charge of the whole operation from Heaven, fucked up -- the kid wasn't supposed to die. So, to cover his mistake, he gave the unfortunate corpse ("he looked so natural -- as if he wasn't meant to die! Ain't it strange I should say that...but the kid looks as though he should still be alive") a bunch of super-powers. It really went downhill from there; Kid Eternity wore a ridiculous outfit (purple slacks, a red sash, and a white turtleneck), had stupid powers (he could summon the spirits of other dead people like Abe Lincoln to help him fight crime), and was shabbily written (at various times, he not only summoned the spirits of people who were still alive, like Blackhawk and Plastic Man, but also of fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes); plus, he had to hang out with that fat yutz Mr. Keeper all the time. Still, this was one Fawcett character I'd like to see revived by someone good one day.

KID FLASH. Wally West was the Flash's biggest fan! So much so that the Flash's girlfriend Iris, who was also a reporter and Wally West's aunt, arranged for him to meet his hero! And by an incredible coincidence, just as the Flash was explaining how "he got his powers through an unusual accident", the exact same thing happened to Wally! And then, he hit the Powerball six times in a row! And then the guys who wrote all this shit laughed at what a bunch of dumbasses we must have been to believe such a shoddy origin story!

KILLER MOTH. This was actually a great idea for a supervillain. Sort of the anti-Christ to Batman's Jesus, he was originally an anonymous convict who decided that there was no reason that innocent people should be the only ones with a Batman to protect them; so, when he got out of jail, he used the millions he'd stolen to create a bogus identity (socialite Cameron van Cleer) and to become a masked vigilante who protected Gotham City's criminal element from the cops who would prey on them! He became Batman's opposite number, aiding crooks by protecting them from the ravenous appetite of the law. He even aped Batman's gear, his sinster attitude, his double life, his intimidating demeanor and his techniques. Unfortunately, he was completely sunk by having the stupidest name ever. And as if being named "Killer Moth", and having a "Mothmobile" and a "Moth-signal", weren't bad enough, he also had a totally retarded costume, with a lime green mask, a purple shirt (remember the Rule of Purple: it means someone's napping in the design department), and these absolutely hideous orange-and-green-striped tights. It's a shame, really.

KNIGHTS OF THE GALAXY. To be perfectly honest with you people, I have nothing to say about the Knights of the Galaxy. There's only so many groups of white guys with good hair and perfect teeth and big rugged square jaws that I can take before I start to need some sleep. There's also a token woman, and they first appeared in Mystery in Space, and they're drawn by Carmine Infantino, none of which distinguishes them one iota from about a billion other groups in the late '50s and early '60s. Sorry about that.

KONG THE UNTAMED. Another smooth-chested, blond-haired, angel-faced teenage boy who ran around in a pair of short-shorts, Kong the Untamed was last seen clinging tightly to Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth! in a recent centerfold of Pederastic Comics Enthusiast Monthly.