LUDIC LOG

Yes, it's time for another DC Who's Who update, but first, a little shameless self-promotion!

Two weeks from today -- Thursday, August 7th -- is my birthday. Last year in this space, I didn't make a big deal about it. This year, in hopes of encouraging reader participation and getting out of writing another entry, I'm making a big deal about it! What kind of a deal? A CONTEST kind of a deal! This August 7th, I will officially have outlived our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Your task: send me another way, or several other ways, in which I am superior to Jesus. The best entries will be printed right here on the Ludic Log in two weeks! What do you win? Jack fucking diddly, is what. Unless you consider all that fame and glory a prize. Look at it this way: it excuses you from buying me a present. So e-mail me and tell me why I am better than Jesus Christ. It's blasphemous fun for the whole family!

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Okay, now that that frivolity is behind us, let's move on to the serious business of making fun of comic books. Welcome to the lucky 13th installment of our still-unnamed, still-pointless tour of the 1980s comic book encyclopedia known as DC Who's Who: the Definitive Directory of the DC Universe. Our look at Volume XIII is also known as "The One That Calamity Jon Has Already Done Better". However, I made a commitment; I shall soldier on.

Dated March 1986 (please take a moment to contemplate what a loser you were back then), this issue of Who's Who marks the halfway point of the series. (Christ. Only half done! I'm already out of jokes.) To celebrate, the editors dumped the snore-inducing cover team of Paris Cullens and Dick Giordano and brought back George Perez; of course, the cover is a gorgeous piece of busywork. Once you open the front cover, though, the degragation begins: in the letters page, some South Carolingian dork named "M." makes a whole raft of suggestions, including this: "Don't use so much Jack Kirby artwork. There's just too much of it." Sure, M.! Let's use less of one of the most brilliant, talented creators in comic book history, and more of, say, Jim Aparo. "M." also complains that Batman only got one page, while the Flash, an "unpopular" hero, got two. I think he's confusing "unpopular" with "lame". HA HA! No, Flash, I kid because I love. Go fight Abra Kadabra some more, why don't you.

Let's move on.

KRYPTO. Krypto, of course, is Superman's dog. In a way, he's sort of a microcosm of the stupid appeal of DC Comics: his origin is incomprehensible, his entire concept is ridiculous, and yet I like him just the same. But that doesn't mean he's getting off the hook so easily! Not with all the questions raised by his Who's Who entry. Like, why would Jor-El buy an full-grown dog for an infant? What kind of a sadistic fuck uses his own pet in a scientific experiment? How did Jor-El expect to come out ahead on this one, given that if Krypton was doomed his son would always wonder why his dog disappeared three months earlier, and if Krypton survived he would have to explain to the kid that he'd used his pet as a guinea pig? Why did Krypto need a secret identity? What are we supposed to do with the information that his progenitors are named Zypto, Nypto and Vypto? The Doghouse of Solitude -- what the fuck? So many questions, so few answers, and in the end: nothing but a dog in a cape.

KRYPTON. Superman's home planet is a pretty odd place. Right off the bat, the fact that the Science Council wouldn't listen to Jor-El is pretty wierd. I mean, after all, here's a planet created by a race of sentient gas-clouds; a planet that was once inundated by a great flood from which the people were saved by the intervention of flying monsters; a planet that had been attacked by a giant space creature named Zazura who permantently turned the sky red; and a planet which had only recently seen its colonized moon blown to smithereens by a super-criminal and its capital shrunken, put in a bottle and stolen by another super-criminal. And you're telling me that these people wouldn't believe their greatest scientist when he told them that there was a big natural disaster coming? Anyway, when you consider that the fact that the Kryptonians threw over the moon-goddess Yuda in favor of a male sky-god, and that the whole planet was racially segregated (all the blacks lived on one island called Vathlo), maybe it's not much of a loss.

KRYPTONITE. I'll leave aside the oft-made observation that there's enough kryptonite on Earth to have rebuilt the entirety of Argo City from the ground up. What I would do, were I a supervillain with access to the millions of tons of K in and around the city of Metropolis, is take all kinds of different colors of Kryptonite and mix them up just to fuck with Superman. Like, I'd tape a bit of X-Kryptonite to the inside of his cape right before a charity event and watch him try to cope as everybody in the joint got super-strength and heat vision. Or I'd sneak into the Fortress of Solitude and paint a couple of pieces of White Kryptonite blue, and watch him get the snot beaten out of him next time he went to the Bizarro World. Or I'd expose him to Gold K so he'd lose his powers and then expose him to X-K so he'd get them back and then expose him to Red K so he'd turn into a ballerina or something. Yeah, that's what I'd do.

LADY QUARK. Introduced during Crisis on Infinite Earths, Lady Quark disappeared soon after when it was discovered that no one was particularly interested in seeing an extradimensional, super-powered version of Susan Powter.

LEGION ACADEMY. These were a bunch of do-nothing yokels who hung around waiting for one or the other of the Legion of Super-heroes to die so they could get called up to the big club. Consisting of never-weres like Crystal Kid, Lamprey and Jediah Rikane, they do score points for the introduction of the deeply sexy descendenct of Superman named Laurel Kent. Keith Giffen won the devotion of a generation of sex-starved comics nerds by drawing her wearing nothing but a big red hanky with the "S" logo on it.

LEGION OF SUBSTITUTE HEROES. Another concept brought to life by the twisted, brilliant Keith Giffen -- of whom it can be said that he was always better than the material he was working with -- these were a collection of dimwits too dangerous, wimpy or stupid to go up to the LSH. A couple of them, like Polar Boy and Night Girl, went on to the big club, but most of them were designed for oblivion. Evidence that Giffen enjoyed fucking with the mythos can be seen in such ludicrous characters as Stone Boy (whose power was to become a big, heavy, immovable statue) and the deeply disturbing Infectious Lass. The difference between these and the regular, though equally ridiculous, Legionnaires created by the teenaged Jim Shooter is that Keith Giffen was kidding.

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES. Man, did I love the LSH. Loved the shit out of them. Loved the goofy originals. Loved the Shooter years. Loved the Levitz/LaRocque years. Even loved the stupid fucking reboot. You know why the LSH was so successful? Because they took a sure-fire recipe for geek success -- a big, unwieldy super-team -- and added not one, but two great twists. First, they were not just superheroes, they were superheroes from the future! Superheroes in space! And if that wasn't enough, they blended in a whole teenagers-in-love narrative, which hooked all the people who would later become known as "relationshippers". (Haw! You fuckin' nerds.) With all this going for it, who cares that the characters ranged from indistiguishable to deeply irritating? When you've got, basically, Beverly Hills 90210, in space, in the future, WITH SUPERPOWERS, who's not going to love that?

LEGION OF SUPER-PETS. Look, forget it. I'm not even going to try. Just go read this, which is better than everything I've ever written about comics put together. Damn you, Morris.

LEGION OF SUPER-VILLAINS. All the Legion, none of the character development. Actually, the LSV was a pretty cool group with a lot of interesting members. Their leader, Tarik the Mute, had a geniunely intriguing background (he'd been an innocent bystander who was hit in the throat by police fire, which embittered him against law enforcement), and aside from the characters that were just evil versions of the LSH, there were a few nifty originals like Terrus, Tyr, Esper Lass, and Nemesis Kid. Unfortunately, with this many characters, you're going to get a lot of unfortunate design choices, such as the Hunter, who looks like Pippi Longstocking if she had an eyepatch and a stick-on mustache; Micro Lad, who had Bill Walton's giant red Afro from 1974; and Zymyr, who is best described as a huge turd floating inside a crystal ball.

LIBERTY BELLE. I've talked about her before, largely because she's got a ridiculous name-as-destiny alter ego (Libby Belle Lawrence) and always strikes me as mildly pornographic (the fact that she first appeared in Boy Commandos doesn't do much to dispel this notion). Anyway, she does provide a good example of why the comic universe is inherently super-stupid. In her civilian identity, Libby Lawrence was a championship college athlete. Then she became an international celebrity when escaping Nazi-occupied Europe after the death of her father in an air raid by swimming across the English Channel. Then she became a famous radio and newspaper columnist who advocated American intervention in Europe. And yet, she still had a secret identity as a superheroine, which she -- one of the most famous people in America -- protected by wearing a tiny little black harlequin mask that didn't even cover her eyes. Why didn't anyone notice who she was? Because people in comic books, like people who read them, are deeply stupid.

LITTLE BOY BLUE AND THE BLUE BOYS. Speaking of pornography.

LITTLE CHEESE THE MICRO-MOUSE. That's right: my fingers just typed the words "Little Cheese the Micro-Mouse". They're further going to be used to inform you that he was created by Scott Shaw(!), first appeared in Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! #12, is a mouse who can shrink to microscopic size, and has a father named Edam and an aunt named Chedda. Who liked this? Who?!? Why did I throw my money away on this goddamn comic? Man. I'm beginning to think I've wasted my life even more than Comic Book Guy. At least he got some action from Agnes Skinner.

LOIS LANE. Lois Lane, Lucy Lane, Lana Lang, Lori Lemaris...I'm sure I'm forgetting someone. Lois has always come across, in her various incarnations, as sort of pushy and annoying. I realized this is supposed to allow her to play off of Clark Kent's nebbishy persona, but I still secretly hope he'll dump her ass and hook up with Wonder Woman instead. Or at least that Lana Lang goes all Insect Queen on Lois someday. I guess I should like her, because she comes from the era when it was something of a political statement not to be blonde, but I don't.

LOOKER. Looker, yet another profoundly annoying member of the Outsiders, was a psionic character with a pointlessly overcomplicated origin. Aside from her stupid name, confusing origin, and stereotypical "vapid, selfish supermodel" personality, she's annoying because, prior to her becoming a superheroine, we are told she grew up with a "massive inferiority complex due to her plain appearance". So, you might assume she was fat, or ugly, or at least nominally unattractive, right? No way, Jack. Comic book ugly is only slightly less ridiculous a concept than Hollywood ugly. Looker was, of course, merely a perfectly beautiful woman who wore her hair in a bun, had a pair of glasses, and rocked some dowdy clothes. Way to build up the self-esteem of your nerdy readers, DC. Her superpowers manifest themselves as a blue glow aroudn her eyes that greatly resembled too much mascara.

LOSERS. The Losers were a much-loved WWII team that consisted of a handful of soldiers who had experienced nothing but defeat, tragedy and misfortune. Banding together, they considered themselves outcasts with "nothing to lose anymore", and so dubbed themselves the Losers. They consisted of Captain Storm, a devoted Star Trek fan; Johnny Cloud, a live-action role-player; Gunner and Sarge, who collected model trains and superhero action figures, respectively; and Ona, who wrote "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" slash fiction.