LUDIC LOG

Hey, Ludic Log fans! Don't forget to e-mail me and tell me why I am better than Jesus Christ for my birthday August 7th. Give up the love! I'll be famous someday, if only for killing a shitload of people, and you'll want to get in on the ground floor!

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As I was preparing this, the nineteenth installment of the Ludic Log's weekly glimpse at the comic book encyclopedias that were all the rage in the 1980s, I once again had the occasion to wonder who, exactly, my audience for these things are.

After all, while I realize that my general readership consists entirely of six of my friends and seventy people looking for Benzino lyrics or naked pictures of Tigra, I do at least operate under the pretense that I'm writing for an audience. But with these recaps -- well, look at it this way. In order to even remotely understand the point of them, you have to (a) have owned them and read them at some point, or at least owned and read the comics in which the characters featured in them first appeared; (b) think that there's something funny about cracking jokes at the expense of comic books that were published over 15 years ago; and (c) since I am too cheap to buy a new scanner, actually have the comics sitting right in front of you at the moment you read these. I can't imagine that there is more than one person in the universe, let alone in my miniscule readership, who fits those qualifications.

In light of this, you can see how, when I am about to make a joke like "Whatever else you might think about Martian Manhunter, you have to admit, he was always up for a game of Trivial Pursuit", I am assuming that my theoretical reader knows who Martian Manhunter is, is familiar enough with his costume to remember that his belt buckle looked like a game piece from Trivial Pursuit, and is lame enough to think this is a funny joke. That's a pretty ridiculous assumption, so you can probably see why the prospect of doing another twenty or so installments of this series fills me with dread. However, a commitment is a commitment, and I have been assured that some of my readers find these things entertaining despite having no familiarity whatsoever with the comics in question. So who am I to argue? No one.

Let's get busy with Who's Who in the DC Universe, volume XIV.

LUTHOR I. The Golden Age Superman's arch-nemesis was not only possessed of a full head of bright read hair, but he wasn't even American: Alexei Luthor was some sort of indeterminate foreigner who first ran afoul of Supes by trying to sabotage a peace conference and plunge the world into a futile, bloody war. Nowadays, of course, when you do this they elect you president. OH HA HA! THE TOPICAL HUMOR. Anyway, sexy Alexei was the first guy to figure out that Kryptonite made Superman all jittery, but a fat lot of good it did him when Crisis on Infinite Earths rolled around: Brainiac killed him for no other reason than mathematical efficiency.

LUTHOR II. The more familiar Silver Age Luthor -- bald, bitter, rich and sidled with an unfortunate purple costume -- has been retconned so many times, he makes the Legion of Superheroes look like a model of stability. He started out as the childhood chum of Superboy (an angle that Smallville turned into the most homoerotic superhero story arc since "Batman & Robin: The Heart Wants What It Wants"); he evolved into an all-around super-nemesis and finally into the armored archfoe of the mid-'80s; the Superman movies made him into a a clown, or at least Gene Hackman playing a clown; Man of Steel turned him into an arrogant corporate gasbag with no powers other than a whole lot of money and a bad attitude, sort of a super-Donald Trump; and recently, through a turn of events which I am at a loss to describe, he has become President of the United States in the DC universe. I would make a joke about the similarity between his career path and that of George W. Bush, but I already used up my quota for high-larious political references in the previous paragraph.

LUTHOR III. Speaking of reprehensible presidential policies, someone explain to me how Prez doesn't get a goddamn Who's Who entry, and the Earth-3 Luthor -- who appeared in exactly two comics -- DC Comics Presents Annual #1 and Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 -- before snuffing it gets an entire page. It's a fucking crime.

LUTHOR IV. The son of the third Luthor, the flamboyantly gay Alexander Luthor (whose occupation is listed as "World Savior") played the insufferable, pure, innocent martyr throughout Crisis on Infinite Earths and then disappeared, hopefully forever. His art is proof that even George Perez can't save every character, and we are infomred that "his power was eliminated upon opening the final door into that unknown limbo, and that door can never be reopened without the complete and utter destruction of all life anywhere". Which, you know, makes you wonder why he has an entry at all, until you realize that if gives the writers an easy out for when they want to destroy the entire DC universe.

MADAME ROUGE. A foxy dame who used to be the headmistress of a girl's school in Paris, Laura DeMille (no relation) got into a car accident which made her schizophrenic. She was then kidnapped by a giant ape who was also a skilled surgeon and the giant ape's boss, a brain floating inside a giant metal chess piece. They zapped her with a ray that gave her the power to change shape and then they all moved back to the girl's school and started a group called the Brotherhood of Evil. I SWEAR THIS IS REALLY WHAT HAPPENED. Anyway, she is called Madame Rouge, which is "Mrs. Red" in French. So does she have red hair? Or a red costume? Of course not.

MADAME XANADU. This was a mystic character from the 1970s golden age of bullshit spooky-ooky pseudo-occult comics. Basically, she was a fortune teller who was really good at reading the Tarot cards, and people would come to her and, after relieving them of a hundred bucks, she would feed them some line of crap. At least, that's what she would do if she were a real fortuneteller. But since this is comics, her powers really worked. Eventually the editors of Doorway to Nightmare, the ludicrously named series in which she first appeared, realized that comics fans couldn't give a shit about her, so they started having a bunch of superheroes show up and she would read their fortunes instead. It didn't help. Note that in the art here, Mike Kaluta, forgetting that he's illustrating a character from Doorway to Nightmare, gives himself the highfalutin moniker "Michael William Kaluta".

MADEMOISELLE MARIE. A lead character in Star-Spangled War Comics, Mme. Marie was a French resistance fighter (note the red beret, which was a total giveaway to anyone but the thickheaded comic book Nazis). An attempt was made to tie her into modern continuity, and to make mainstream comics fans care about her, by introducing to the Batman mythos a woman who claimed to be her daughter by way of Alfred Pennyworth. Frankly, I find the notion of Alfred having sex with anyone profoundly gross, and Andy Kubert, who did the art for this entry, apparently agrees, since it's a real sleepwalk job.

MAN-BAT. Man-Bat was, aside from a desperate attempt to make Batman more relevent during the post-'60s doldrums, was a zoologist who, just for the fuck of it, "hoped to give himself a natural sonar power like a bat's by taking increasing doses of a compout he extracted from a gland in bats". Unfortunately for this colossal dipshit, "the compound also turned him into a grotesque bat-like creature". Man! Haven't these fools ever heard of guinea pigs? You can get five of them for twenty bucks out of a lab supply catalog. A whole bunch of other stuff happened with him -- in particular, he forced his wife to take the bat gland serum so they could mate, and then, AFTER ALL THAT, she got bitten by a mutant bat and turned into a vampire -- but nothing DC ever did or ever will do could make me care about Man-Bat.

MANHAWKS. Despite their idiotic name and "giant bird with the head of a Star Trek villain" appearance, the Manhawks were actually pretty good enemies. Which just goes to show you, er, something.

MANHUNTER I, MANHUNTER II, MANHUNTER III. The first: named Donald, called Dan; generic tough-guy cop/superhero from "a great city"; appeared in Police Comics; crappy Tom Mandrake art; has dog named "Thor the Thunderdog". The second: confusingly, was in the All-Star Squadron alongside the first Manhunter, even though the two had no connection whatsoever; bad-ass martial arts vigilante from Empire City; appeared in Detective Comics; groovy Walt Simonson art; wore shurikens clipped to his oversized shoulder pads. The third: unnamed robots created by the Guardians of Oa as predecessors to the Green Lantern Corps; went nuts and rebelled, having never been exposed to Isaac Asimov; appeared in Green Lantern comics; perfunctory Kevin O'Neill art; inspired the name and costume of Manhunter II in one of the more convoluted pieces of continuity I've ever seen.

MANTIS. The most powerful being on Apokalips other than Darkseid, he's drawn to look totally batshit crazy by Jolly Jack. He organized the "bug colonies" on New Genesis, is an "energy vampire", uses a "power pod" to store awesome amounts of energy, can use his "thermal touch" or "frigi-block" to destroy an opponent, and has a bunch of other insane Kirby gimmicks as well. Eventually, he got much, much stronger, changed his costume so that it had a huge, symmetrical yellow chestplate, and started calling himself "Mantits".

MARTIAN MANHUNTER. Always an interesting character, always a mishandled one, Martian Manhunter was afraid of fire, led the lamest incarnation of the Justice League, and had "Martian breath". Keith Giffen at least knew when he was licked, and decided to go for laughs, making J'Onn J'Onzz a subtle teaser and giving him an inexplicable addiction to Oreos. There's a great Martian Manhunter story out there waiting to be written, but unfortunately the recent MM mini wasn't it. Keep trying, guys.

MARVEL FAMILY. As if being called the "Big Red Cheese" wasn't enough...as if having a 70-pound bald dwarf with an overbite as your arch-enemy wasn't enough...as if having a giant tiger in a green leisure suit named "Mr. Tawky Tawny" for a best friend wasn't enough...Captain Marvel had to hang out with these dingbats on a regular basis. There was Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, Uncle Marvel, and, going from bad to worse, Fat Marvel (FAT MARVEL! If you can rip a guy's lungs out and play them like bagpipes, do you let people call you "Fat Marvel"?), Freckles Marvel, Hill Billy Marvel, and, representing the exact moment when the Fawcett writers said "fuck it", Tall Marvel. That's right: Tall Marvel. But is that all? Hell, no, that's not all. They also hosted a talk show called "The Marvel Family Round Table". Who wouldn't watch this brilliant piece of television? "Thanks, Fat Marvel, for that enlightening segment on pork futures. Now, it's Foreign Policy Corner with Freckles Marvel." To top it all off there was...are you ready? No, you aren't, but I'm going to tell you anyway: HOPPY THE MARVEL BUNNY. With all this asinine baggage, is it any wonder that every writer who gets a crack at reinterpreting Captain Marvel turns him into a deranged, murderous sex maniac?