LUDIC LOG

21 is a big year. Old enough to drink. And believe me, you're gonna want a real stiff belt to get through this one. It's time for a leisurely stroll through Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, Volume XXI, and it's going to be a tough one.

It's not that this issue is bad, really. Well, except for the Ernie Colon/Dick Giordano cover, which features Silent Knight looming in the foreground, his helmet roughly the size of a baseball diamond, and Solomon Grundy (who gets center stage for this issue, which should indicate how light on big names it is), who looks really pumped up. And I don't mean "pumped up" in the "very muscular" sense, I mean "pumped up" in the "has had an air compresser stuck up his butt and is about to explode like in a Warner Brothers cartoon" sense. So okay, the cover is bad. But the issue itself...it's just sort of uninspiring. There's no really great characters in it -- by a quirk of alphabetics, all the heavy hitters are in issue #22 -- but there's no really bad ones either. Even the token dipshit with a really ugly costume drawn by Carmine Infantino isn't that bad. It could be the fact that the writing chores had been handed down from people like Marv Wolfman and Len Wein to people like Bob Rozakis and Greg Weisman that contributes to the overall blah-ness of this issue, or it could be the preponderance of characters with "Space" in their names, but the fact is, this one's kind of a snore.

But I will soldier on and attempt to give you some entertainment value for your e-dollar. Let's jump on into DC Who's Who #21, also known as the 'I Need a Nap' issue.

SHRINKING VIOLET. Sweet, sweet Jaime Hernandez art here; seeing his take on the Legionnaires makes me wish he'd made a run on the series. It would have been fun to watch. At any rate, Violet (who shrank, fuckin' duh) was, for about five seconds, the only openly lesbian character in mainstream comics, and one of the first gay characters I can ever remember published by the Big Two. Naturally, according to the "That Fag's Gonna Die" rule of Hollywood (which, like the "No Coloreds After the Second Reel" rule, seems to transfer over to comics), she was unceremoniously vanished during the big Legion reboot a few years back, and as far as I know, she and her future-Sapphic ways just a pleasant memory.

SIGNALMAN. A perennial loser who wore an absurd costume, had a stupid gimmick (his crimes and gadgets were all inspired by signals) and lost his battles in particularly humiliating ways, Signalman, oddly enough, was not a Flash villain. He was a foe of Batman, having gotten his supervillain inspiration from seeing the Batsignal one night. I guess it's lucky he didn't see the Batarang, or else we'd have had two Captain Boomerangs, and frankly, one is too many. He was one of those guys like the Riddler who sent clues to Batman -- the world's greatest detective -- tipping him to his crimes, which is a bit like me going one on one against Shaquille O'Neal and deciding to spot him ten points. I mean, hey, Signalman, love the self-confidence, but come on. Anyway, his cape is covered with all kinds of little symbols, like a wizard's hat. One of them is a musical note. That's not a signal. I find the whole thing semiotically confusing.

SILENT KNIGHT. Ha ha ha! Oh, DC, you're so clever. Silent Knight was an Arthurian nobleman who fought a tyrannical lord; he was silent because he didn't want to give away his secret identity by people hearing his voice. I guess he sounded like Tom Waits or something. The bio tells me that he "became a symbol of freedom to those citizens who were oppressed". Strangely, the tyrannical lord was only the co-ruler of the fiefdom; he shared it with Brian Kent, Silent Knight's secret identity. It seems to me that a good way to help the oppressed citizens would be to just kill the tyrant and run the kingdom himself, but what do I know.

SILVER GHOST. Alias "Raphael van Zandt". This was a Nazi leader on Earth-X (don't ask) who traveled to Earth-1 (I said, don't ask), and as a result of the interdimensional trip, gained the power to transform objects and people into solid silver, which he could completely control. Now, if I got this power, I might, I dunno, use it to make myself a fuckin' millionaire. It always amazes me that in comics, no matter how useful a power someone gets, the best thing they can think to do with it is mix it up with some other hyperpituitary asshole in tights.

SINESTRO. Man, I loves me some Sinestro. He had a great look (exemplified here in a terrific Gil Kane drawing), he was very evil, and he was a renegade Green Lantern, with a yellow power ring! Way cool! (I'm not sure why he didn't wear a yellow costume, which would have helped him even more, but whatever.) He was originally a good GL until he went mad with power; he's the only person ever selected by the Guardians of Oa to serve as a Green Lantern who went bad. You would think that the name would be kind of a tip-off, but that's the language barrier for you. Besides, everything worked out okay with Evillo, Monsterga, and Wickedania.

SIVANA. Oh, Lord, the Kurt Schaffenberger art. I can't even talk about it. Anyway, when you think about it, Dr. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana (the Rightful Ruler of the Universe) kind of got a raw deal. He started out benign and helpful; but he was scorned by his peers, who didn't comprehend his brilliance, and he was quashed by industrialists, who feared his designs for cheaper, longer-lasting consumer goods. He was driven from country to country after WWI, and both of his wives died! He was totally put down by the Man! I guess to a six-year-old, this wouldn't matter, but to a relativist like me it makes him quite sympathetic. Some people would draw a lesson from this -- namely, that I should not be reading literature directed at six-year-olds -- but I choose to ignore that lesson.

SIVANA FAMILY. Just as there was a big, retarded Marvel Family, there was a Sivana Family -- the four children of Captain Marvel's arch-enemy. Now, as I said above, Sivana was twice married and twice widowed, but when you get a gander at these kids, you have to wonder what kind of fucked-up romantic life the guy must have had. Sivana, who can best be described as hideously unattractive, apparently hooked up with the most gorgeous woman in the entire universe in his first marriage, because the offspring of that union, Magnificus and Beautia, are Aryan honeypies, having managed to somehow completely overcome Sivana's damaged genetic donation. However, the second wife must have been something truly startling, because the fruits of that connubiality, Sivana Jr. and Georgia, look exactly like Dad, except that for some reason Sivana Jr. wears golf knickers. Geez, Sivana, don't you know your second wife is supposed to be better-looking? I did have a big rant prepared here about how the ugly kids are the evil ones while the gorgeous ones are as pure as the driven snow, but you can probably write it yourselves.

SKYMAN. Formerly known as the Star-Spangled Kid, Skyman was singular amongst Golden Age heroes in that he was a very young adventurer who had a dopey sidekick who was a fully grown adult. What the fuck kind of wierd psychosexual dynamic is at work there?

SNAPPER CARR. Speaking of lame teen sidekicks, Snapper was the Rick Jones of the Justice League of America. He was from 'Happy Harbor', which sounds a bit like a Sid & Marty Krafft show, and he snapped his fingers when he was happy. Instead of killing him, the JLA let him hang around and get into trouble. Snapper's bio contains both the phrase "graduate school" and the phrase "came under the mental control of one of Starro's giant starfish deputies", which, as far as I know, have never appeared together anywhere else.

SOLOMON GRUNDY. One of my all-time favorite villains, with a truly creepy and disturbing Golden Age origin, a wicked characterization, and even a great piece of retro Murphy Anderson art. Why'd Ernie Colon have to turn him into Bouncing Boy on the cover?

SPACE CABBIE. Okay, don't get it twisted: I love Julie Schwartz. He's funny, he wields a mean blue pencil, and he presided over one of the most fertile periods in DC's history. It's just that when allowed to write a comic book himself, he tends to take something that happened to him that day, stick jackboots, tights and a rocket exhaust on it, and pass it off as something you might actually want to read. Hence such unforgettable creations as the Space Ranger, the Space Museum, and Space Cabbie, which all appear right in a row in this issue of Who's Who. I'm trying to convince myself that this seemed less lame at one point, but I'm not having any success, especially when I remember the fakey futuristic language that Space Cabbie talked in (Julie would just write really banal dialogue and then stick made-up words in every so often: "Say, Grbag, what say we kramble on over to the donut skerb and glaff us up some crullers?"). What I want to know is, how did Space Cabbie get his own feature in Mystery in Space, while other brilliant Julie Schwartz creations like Space Meter Maid, Space Landlord and Space Guy at the Deli Counter lay fallow?

SPAWN OF FRANKENSTEIN. There's just one notable thing about this entry: in the Mike Kaluta art, SoF is seen in front of a bunch of lab equipment -- and at the bottom left of the picture, right by his foot, is an electrical socket. IT's the 18th century, Kaluta, you numbnuts.

SPECTRE. Another one I ain't messing with, because holy shit did the Spectre rock ass, especially the 1970s version who used to cut people in half with giant scissors. The Spectre of the '70s (essentially, God, only with a really bad temper and green booties) was an early exercise by DC in skirting the Comics Code Authority, and it had a profound influence on me as a young fella. If it hadn't been for the Neal Adams run on the Spectre and Vampirella comics, I might have grown up into a decent human being.

SPEEDY I & SPEEDY II. Speedy, both versions, was the teen sidekick (by now I'm assuming you know that when I say this I mean "catamite") of Green Arrow. The first, drawn here by the anonymous Eric Shanower to look about 8 years old, was eventually transformed into a centaur, which must have made Green Arrow I pretty happy. The second, drawn here by the anonymous Stan Woch to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger circa Pumping Iron, eventually became a heroin addict and fathered a bastard child by a Vietnamese assassin, which probably didn't do much for Green Arrow II.

SPELLBINDER. This is the abovementioned bad Infantino drawing of a minor supervillain with a stupid name (he's also called the "Monarch of Menace") and a really, really ugly costume. If every character ever drawn by Carmine Infantino and every character drawn by Steve Ditko had a big orgy in a funhouse, Spellbinder would be what was left behind.

SPORTSMASTER. Normally, this is the kind of character I would just shred, because of his bogus gimmick, his dumb name ("Crusher" Crock), and the fact that part of his costume is purple. But I always liked Sportmaster. He was well-characterized, he was married to the original (villainous) Huntress, and his costume was a really terrific piece of designwork: a face mask patterened after an outlaw's bandana, an understated padded and ribbed jacket, a pair of keen white tuxedo gloves, and wrestling boots. They're nicely illustrated here, too, by the normally uninspiring Chuck Beckum.

STARFINGER. A pesky scientist who attacked the Legion of Superheroes, the disturbingly named Starfinger gets a bit of a bum rap in his biography: "Starfinger is probably the most cowardly of the major villains of the thirtieth century," it says, "choosing to strike repeatedly at the Legionnaires through proxies". Now, I don't know about you, but if I was a guy with no super-powers, and I was trying to take out 24 people, every one of whom had super-powers, and who counted in their number such bad-ass motherfuckers as Element Lad, Mon-El, Star Boy, and Ultra Boy, you best fucking believe I'd get some help! What am I gonna do, walk up to Legion HQ and start punching Superboy in the face? They call him a coward because he doesn't want Sun Boy to incinerate him in a tenth of a second, but the people who gang up on him twenty-four to one are heroes. These are the kinds of moral lessons that contributed to all our downfalls, people.