LUDIC LOG

It's time once again for a peek at Who's Who in the DC Universe, the 1986 encyclopedia of everything in tights at 666 Fifth Avenue. I apologize for this one coming in late, but I was really, really drunk last night. While this actually makes Who's Who a lot more fun to read, it makes it a lot harder to write about, and since these entries normally have a couple of hundred typos as it is, I decided to wait until morning to crank it out. Is the Who's Who recap of a hung-over man superioir to the Who's Who recap of a drunken man? And are either preferable to no Who's Who recap at all? Only time and your attention span will tell. Let's jump right into Volume XVI.

MR. TERRIFIC. This guy is a favorite of ludicrous-Golden-Age-superhero fans, for any number of reasons: his swell-guy persona, his unmistakably 1940s character tag ("The Man of a Thousand Talents"), his ridiculously sincere name, his red tights, his devoted adolescent sidekick (named Billy!), and the fact that his costume had an emblem on the front of it that read "FAIR PLAY". It's hard to get more hokey than the original Mr. T. However, there's even more nuggets of nuttiness in his origin story: for one thing, he was "already famous at the age of ten as a child genius" and "completed his college studies when he was twelve", and eventually went on to become a professor of English literature. Despite this, he was neither a fat nerd with bad skin or a socially maladjusted beanpole with Coke-bottle glasses, but rather a big-chinned blonde pipe-smoking stud. (They did give him a bow tie, at least.) Also, his origin story is absurdly convoluted -- he was traipsing off to commit suicide, when he saw another peron about to kill herself, and instead of saying "Fuck it! What do I care?", he rescused her and then helped save her brother from a gangster. Nice mercurial mood swings you got there, Mr. Terrific. And why would a genius athlete with a self-made fortune possibly have wanted to kill himself in the first place? Because he "believed that success had come to him too easily". Cry me a fucking river, Little Lord Fauntleroy.

MON-EL. One of my very favorite members of the Legion of Super-heroes. He's a total badass, having basically the same powers as Superman; he's got a great costume; and he gets to work it with the deeply sexy Shadow Lass. The only trouble is, his origin is completely fucked up. Mon-El was originally Lar Gand, an astronaut from the planet Daxam, who was hanging out on Krypton just prior to its destruction. Jor-El, a.k.a. the Josef Mengele of Kandor, thought it would be hilarious to tell Gand to flee to Earth to escape Krypton's destruction, which sounds perfectly reasonable until you remember that Daxamites are vulnerable to lead the way Kryptonians are vulnerable to kryptonite. So, off goes Gand to Earth (after a brief period of suspended animation, which seems to effect everyone who takes the Krypton-to-Earth redeye) and, since lead is not particularly uncommon here on our planet, he immediately contracts a near-fatal dose of lead poisoning and falls into a coma. Thanks, Jor-El! Way to ruin another life. But wait....there's more! Superboy, who has mistaken Gand for a long lost brother (he names him Mon-El -- El for his family name and Mon for Monday, the day he arrived on Earth, which (a) makes you wonder why his name is prononced MAHN-El instead of MUNN-El and (b) makes you think he's pretty lucky not to be named Tues-El), shows that the sadistic motherfucking apple doesn't fall far from the deranged lunatic tree, and decided to "help" him with one of the El family's patented horribly cruel, tortuous medical experiments. Rather than consulting with one of the innumerable brilliant scientists with whom he was acquainted, or at least letting Mon-El die with a little goddamn dignity, Superboy decides to send him to the Phantom Zone until a cure for lead poisoning can be discovered. This takes a thousand years. So Mon-El sits in a timeless, ghostlike limbo with a bunch of criminal maniacs for a thousand fucking years, watching everyone he ever knew or cared about wither and die for a hundred generations. That Superboy! What a pal.

MONGUL. Mongul was a great supervillain. The physical equal of Superman, he was a ruthless, Genghis-Khanlike conquerer of worlds; he managed to defeat Martian Manhunter and fight Superman to a standstill a couple of times, and he appears in "For the Man Who Has Everything", perhaps the best Superman story ever written. And his Who's Who entry is drawn by Jim Starlin. But even all that can't save him from having a purple costume.

MONSIEUR MALLAH. Another evil giant ape with a machinegun! Boy, I can't get enough of huge gun-toting gorillas. Especially if they're French, and wearing headbands! M. Mallah is a member of the Brotherhood of Evil, and he has a 178 I.Q., which is nothing to sling feces at for a monkey. Bill Sienkiewicz does the art in this entry, and apparently he was in a pretty spirited mood, judging from the incidental art. Aside from a hilarious shot of him hucking the wheelchair-bound Chief like he was a shotput, there's also a drawing of him clouting Starfire across the face, and she's drawn with an expression that clearly says "Holy shit, I can't believe I'm getting my ass kicked by a goddamn giant ape!"

MORDRU. Came from the planet Zerox; insert photocopier or trademark-infringement lawsuit joke here. Met his end when he tried to fuck with Darkseid. Purple costume.

MOTHER BOX. This was a brilliantly named computerized doohickey carried around by the New Gods. (Could anyone other than Jack Kirby have come up with something named "Mother Box"? Well, the Dark Brothers, maybe.) Mother Boxes are powered by the Source, which is "the mysterious but benevolent intelligence that oversees the cosmos", but is co-owned by Benzino, so how benevolent or intelligent can it really be? Like a Windows box, a Mother Box "will not function if its possessor is somehow spiritually inadequate", and like a Mac, a Mother Box can perform mathematical calculations, project shock blasts, create electro-weds, and detect the presence of radiation. It also has a DVD burner and a Firewire-enabled webcam.

MULTI-MAN. Real name: Duncan Pramble. Group Affiliation: The League of Challenger-Haters (featuring Kra, King of the Alien Robots!). Base of Operations: "Allovahdeplaze". Jesus Christ, DC.

MULTIPLEX. A Firestorm villain, Multiplex had the ability to charge too much for admission, demand six bucks for a 32-ounce cup of soda, regulate temperature, focus and sound poorly, and make you sit uncomfortably for two hours watching Legally Blonde II. His name, following the standard comic book rule that only WASPs get superpowers, is "Danton Black".

NEMESIS KID. One of the best LSH super-villains, he was originally a member of the Legion with the power to instantly gain whatever power he needed to defeat a particular opponent. He turned out to be a traitor, selling out Earth to a Khund invasion and trying to frame Karate Kid for the deed. In fact, he's the guy who eventually killed the in-way-over-his-head Karate Kid, only to be killed himself by KK's grieving widow Queen Projectra. His artwork in this issue is done by the truly bizarre tandem of Curt Swan & Kyle Baker.

NEPTUNE PERKINS. "Neptune Perkins is an apparent mutant who was born in 1922 with both webbed feet and a severe deficiency of sodium stalts." So why not name him Neptune and throw him in the ocean, dad? Man. Comics.

NEWSBOY LEGION. Suppose you look at that name, "Newsboy Legion". Suppose I were to tell you that they were a bunch of preadolecent paperboys who nonetheless spent their free time fighting Darkseid. Suppose I were to tell you that they often appeared in Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. Suppose you further discovered that their names were Tommy, Scrapper, Gabby, Big Words and Flipper Dipper. Would I then really have to tell you they were created by Jack Kirby? I didn't think so.

NIGHT GIRL. A member of the Legion of Substitute heroes and later the big club, Night Girl was super-strong, but only in darkness. She was also, besides being sexy as hell, hooked up with the pathetically lame Cosmic Boy. Now, I know what you're asking yourself. You're asking yourself, "Can it possibly be that Leonard is jealous of a comic book character?" I think I should go get drunk again.

(PURPLE WATCH: there are eight supervillains in this issue of Who's Who that have purple costumes. Beware, friends: purple is the color of sucky evil.)