Because this is the internet, and the internet is Geek Paradise, one of the most popular features on the Ludic Log is the Geek Index, a bunch of entries where I read and make snotty comments about DC Who's Who and The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.  These 1980s comic books were basically superhero encyclopedias, but since superheroes are stupid, they were also very easy to make fun of.  And brother, if you combine snarky commentary with low nerd culture, the internet will beat a path to your door.

For a while now, I've been meaning to update these entries; incorporate new material, add graphics, include characters who were left out before, make it funny, that sort of things.  And so I shall, when the time is right.  Today, though, I'd like to tell you about The ALL-NEW Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.  Beginning in 2005, Marvel harnessed the cosmic power of internet geeks to create the Marvel Universe Appendix, a website where they convinced a bunch of schmucks to rewrite OHOTMU for them, basically for nothing.  To further prove their evil genius, Marvel then released a bunch of print versions of the material on the site and sold it back to the very schmucks who helped them write it in the first place!  Whether this proves how nefarious Marvel is or how stupid Marvel fans are is a matter best resolved elsewhere, but it certainly left me with a lot of grist for my mill.

There are a number of changes from the old OHOTMU.  Some things are unchanged; the bad covers, the bogus technical jargon, the determination to catalog meaningless minutiae of every poorly written character who appeared in a single issue of Journey into Mystery.  But the polished-to-a-dull-sheen technical drawings have been replaced by cod bar-graphs to pander to the gamers; the indices containing brief capsule descriptions of minor characters have been replaced by impenetrable, page-long histories no one will ever read; and, with the writing duties being farmed out to interent nerds no different from you or me, even the slight professionalism manifested by goons like Mark Gruenwald and Peter Sanderson has vanished in favor of unreadable off-brand academicese from no-name nerds.  The books themselves have also abandoned the convenient all-encompassing alphabetical format in favor of a series of character-specific handbooks:  there's one for Spider-Man, one of the Avengers, one for Marvel's horror characters, an so on, leaving the A-Z listings for the real dregs like Dr. Nemesis and the third incarnation of the Secret Empire's board of directors.  On the upside, though, there's the Marvel Legacy books.

These, in the form of the 1960s and 1970s Handbooks, are meant to be OHOTMU as if they were written at the tail end of those glorious decades.  It doesn't do much for Marvel's reputation for inaccuracy (or my reputation as a hopeless pedant) that the '60s Handbook asks us to imagine it was written "at 11:59 on December 31, 1969", leaving it a whole year short of encompassing the sixties.  But it does have a hell of a lot of goofball entries, so let's get right to them.

ACROBAT.  Somehow this dingbat convinced Johnny Storm to leave his cush gig with the Fantastic Four and start a new outfit called "The Torrid Two".  The revelation that the Acrobat was really just using the Torch to rob banks is less shocking that Johnny was a big enough chump to fall for such a ridiculous proposal, let alone get within poking distance of anything with "torrid" in the name.

AGGAMON THE ALL-POWERFUL.  Let's talk about purple.  If you're new to this site, you may not know the Rule of Purple, which states that if a supervillain's costume contains more than 33% of the color purple, he or she is going to suck wind.  For some reason, the use of purple almost always signals that someone was napping during the whole process of creation.  So when I tell you that Aggamon here was not only from the Purple Dimension, but also was trying to steal Dr. Strange's Purple Gem, I think you'll understand that nothing else needs be said about him.

ANDROID MAN.  Or, if you prefer, Robot-in-the-form-of-a-man-man.  This is different from the Awesome Android, somehow, even though they both worked for the Mad Thinker; the promary difference is that Android Man didn't end up getting repurposed by Dan Slott and hanging out with She-Hulk as comic relief.

ASBESTOS MAN.  Boy, you didn't have to do much to be a supervillain back in the sixties, did you?  One assumes there was a Captain Space Heater and a Flame-Retardant Insulation Man running around for a while, too.  Asbestos Man had a Ph.D in analytical chemistry, but he still thought robbing banks would be a better gig.

AVENGERS.  These guys were meant, of course, to be the Marvel Universe's version of the Justice League of America, but in the early days, they were stuffed to the gill with second-string losers like the Swordsman, the Black Knight, Goliath, and Rick Jones, who was Snapper Carr without the gimmick.  Did you know that when the founders bugged off, the Avengers 2.0, which featured the Swordsman, Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch, where called "Cap's Kooky Quartet"?  Well, you do know, and I dare you to say you're a better person for it.

BEASTS FROM BERLIN.  Comics were originally directed at emotionally stunted pre-adolescents, but often it's hard to shake the idea that they were in fact targeted at guys on their fifth sheet of sunshine blotter.  The Beasts from Berlin were, well, they were a bunch of gorillas in short pants who worked for East German communists.  Luckily for the west, Hank Pym (as Goliath, the sixty-third of his endless stream of boring alter egos) smashed this fiendish plot, because who knows if the West could have survived the shift in the balance of power that would have occured if East Berlin had been allowed to outfit a dozen hyperintelligent apes with lederhosen?

BULL'S EYE.  Not the bad-ass card-thrower who iced Elektra, but a super-assassin hired by Hydra to wax Nick Fury back in the pre-Steranko days.  Bull's Eye wore a big red-and-white target logo right in the middle of his chest, and the Handbook describes his being shot through it by Dum Dum Dugan as "ironic" rather than "glaringly obvious".

CAPTAIN AMERICA.  Oh, for the days when Cap's history could be described in three-quarters of a page!  My old man tells me he once had a copy of Captain America #1, and here I am temping like a sucker.  When Cap took his dive into the north Atlantic and ended up frozen in a block of ice for two decades, he was apparently worshipped by an Eskimo tribe.  Those adorable ooga-boogas!  They'll just bow down to anything that looks like Old Glory, with their primitive desire to be like us.

CAPTAIN MARVEL.  This would be Mar-Vell of the Kree, the spaciest of the kerbillion comic book characters to be named Captain Marvel.  Before he got swallowed by cosmic glop storylines and taken down a peg by the Big C, Cap was just an attempt by Marvel to catch in on outer space mania, and until they ratcheted things up in the seventies, he specialized in fighting guys whose names sounded like bad arcade games:  Metazoid, Cyberex, Yon-Rogg, and so on.

BURGLAR.  This is the guy who shot Uncle Ben while stealing his wild rice fortune.  He is said to be "adept at breaking and entering", even though he was caught both times he tried it, but really, that pales in comparison to his amazing ability to appear after Captain Marvel in an alphabetical listing.

CHILI.  Chili was a can of Hormel Extra Hot (No Beans) who achieved sentience and...ha ha, no, just fucking with you, but I bet you really believed me there for about five seconds.  She was, in fact, a supermodel character from back in the days when comic books pretended to care about girls.  Her nicknames were "the Red-Headed Riot" and "Chili the Dilly", and she was related to someone with the intensely pornographic name of "Honey-Pot Fumble", and she dates a guy named "Clicker Holbrook" from Squaresville, OH.  Hey, it was the forties!  People thought that shit was funny back then!  Her entry says she was a "talented model, acrobat and bowler", which is three times more things than Paris Hilton can do.

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE.  You can tell that a character came along in the late '60s as opposed to the early '60s when he only has one paragraph of backstory but it's still complex to the point of incomprehensibility.  How much collective intelligence do you have to have before you realize it's a bad idea to wear lime green chainmail pants?  More than this dude could muster, apparently.

COLOSSUS.  This is not Colossus the Russian mutant, but rather Colossus, a giant supercomputer designed to solve the world's problems.  But not the Colossos the giant supercomputer designed to solve the world's problems that we see in the underrated film Colossus:  the Forbin Project.  It should also not be confused with It, the Living Colossus, even though it was a living colossus, unlike Colossus, who is no longer living.  You know what?  I forget what I'm even trying to say here.

COLOSSUS.  This was not Colossus the giant supercomputer, but...ah, fuck it.

COMRADE X.  It would be funny if this was a communist black Muslim, but rather it was just a Russian drag king who pestered Ant-Man.  Yes, there was a time when Ant-Man was considered a major Marvel character!   A sucky major Marvel character, but major just the same.

CRIME-MASTER.  A pretty good early Spider-Man villain, the Crime-Master went awry when he decided to fuck with the Green Goblin.  Ask anybody how well that works out.  Once again illustrating that comics didn't just become needlessly complex in the 1980s, this entry reminds us of Stan Lee's punishing work schedule back then:  Crime-Master was a mob boss named Lucky Lewis, and he decided to make a power grab for another gang led by a guy named Lucky Lobo.  Way to bring your A game, Stan.

CRIMSON DYNAMO.  One of the few commie caricatures to have survived the fall of the Iron Curtain, Crimson Dynamo, who was a red named Vanko, another red named Boris, and probably about eight other guys I can't be bothered to look up, was a collectivist version of Iron Man.  You may also remember his famous adventure in which he reassured you that Magneto and Titanium man were involved in a robbery.

CONQUISTADOR.  Like many other "would-be world conqererers" and "megalomaniacs", El Conquistador build a giant fortress in Dunfee, IL.  Because when you're planning to take over the whole planet, you want to be as close as possible to the nearest Feed & Seed.

CRUSHER.  A scientist in the employ of some rinky-dink banana republic's dictator, this guy drank a potion which gave him super-strength and ballooned him up to a linebackeresque 8'0" and 975 pounds.  Iron Man then dropped him in the ocean, where he sank like a safe and immediately drowned.  Superheroes didn't fuck around back then.

DAREDEVIL.  One angle they've abandoned since DD's early days, along with his billy club containing a gun, gas pellets, and for all I know a water purification kit, is that he is trained in yoga.  Let's bring that back!  Who doesn't want to see their favorite urban vigilante sipping a Jamba Juice and loading a Rodney Yee DVD into the entertainment center?

DEATH'S HEAD.  Karen Page's dad was once a seriously batshit supervillain who got radiation poisoning and rode around on the back of a horse whose skin had been turned transparent from excessive levels of cobalt exposure.  At least he died before he had to see his daughter making porno loops and hooking up with a blindo.

DESTROYER.  It seems like all you had to do back in the sixties was buy yourself a flame-retardant suit and all of the sudden you were whipping Johnny Storm's ass up and down the Holland Tunnel.  Add to that Ben Grimm always getting razzed by a no-goodnik street gang, and you understand why Sue Storm spent most of her time invisible.

DR. STRANGE.  What, exactly, did Stephen Strange do for money after he got the Sorcerer Supreme gig?  We know he used to be a neurosurgeon, and that's a high-paying job, but he pissed all that money away being a wino after his car crash.  Then he spends his last few bucks of Mad Dog money on a flight to Tibet to hang around with the Ancient One, and the next time we see him, he's got this giant mansion on the Upper West Side.  Does he actually do anything for a living, or are we to understand than he just uses his magic to enrich himself?  I smell scandal.

EXILES.  Boy, when it came to writing high-larious commie stereotypes, Stan the Man had no equal.  This gaggle of schmuckolas who tried in vain to give Captain America a hard time were a tidy cross-section of then-current enemies of the state:  a whip-wielding ex-Nazi named Gruning, a hairy Russian wrestler named Krushki, a devious Chinaman called Ching, another ex-Nazi named Hauptman with a metal hand, a guy in a wheelchair called Cadavus, and best of all, a Mussolini lookalike named Baldini (yes, he was bald) whose weapon was a super-long scarf.  He would have had the lamest weapon in the history of comics if the entire team didn't live on an island surrounded by "Killer Kelp".

DR. STRANGE.   I know very little about this Iron Man villain other than that he's not the same person as Stephen Strange, and that he shares with the Burglar the awesome power to defy alphabetization.  According to his history, though, he had Shell-Head helpless after Iron Man's armor powered down, but Strange's own daughter spared Iron Man by tossing him a set of flashlight batteries.  Yes, kids, a suit of high-tech armor that renders its wearer one of the most powerful beings on the planet apparently can run on a couple of Energizers.

FACELESS ONES.  Sure enough, they ain't got no faces.

FACTOR THREE.  An alien from the Sirius system decided it would be a big giggle to blow up some Russians with a nuclear bomb and then blame it on America.  To that end, he inexplicably disguised himself as "the Mutant Master" and recruited a bunch of numbnuts villains to help him out.  Oddly enough, they included the Blob, Mastermind, Unus the Untouchable, and a couple of other guys who would later become the spine of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who became a Marvel institution despite their dopey pedigree and even dopier name.  They were, essentially, the High Numbers of supervillainy.

FANTASTIC FOUR.  Maybe you've heard of these guys.  They spent all their time getting picked on by guys in asbestos jumpers.  Early on, the comics said the FF were based in Central City, and yet they never once ran into the Flash!  Go figure.

FORBIDDEN LAND.  A mysterious ancient kingdom located in South America.  Curiously, everyone who lived there was white.

FOX.  He was called the Fox.  His real name was Reynard Slinker.  He dressed up in a pink shawl and wore an old lady wig, but in reality he had a small, neat mustache.  His secret lairs were accessed via a water fountain in Central Park and a cigar-store Indian in the Bowery.  I'm just gonna let you write your own gay joke here.

FREAK.  Remember the good old days, when Tony Stark used to hang around with Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts instead of starting a gigantic war with other superheroes for no good reason?  Me neither, but apparently it happened, and Happy Hogan would occasionally redefine the meaning of happiness by transforming into a gargantuan sideshow act called Freak the Human Bomb.  You'd develop a drinking problem too, if this happened to your chauffeur.

GARGANTUS.  80,000 years ago, some aliens visited Earth and decided they'd like to conquer it.  Then their wives got pregnant, and there was some big hassle at work, and their neighbor borrowed the gas grill, and the next thing you know, the robot caveman with a severe case of bacne they built to take over the world is eight hundred centuries behind schedule.  Hey, you know how it goes.

GARGOYLE.  The villain who appeared in the very first issue of The Incredible Hulk ends up betraying his Soviet masters after Bruce Banner, whom he has kidnapped, takes pity on him and comes up with a treatment that makes him less grody.  My theory, though, based on a close visual inspection of Soviet authorities from 1953-1992, is that none of the Politburo ever noticed that anything was wrong with the Gargoyle, thinking him identical to every other high-ranking Russian. 

GNOME.  Another freakish midget who vowed revenge on the world because he was an ugmo, a favorite theme with Stan Lee early on (see Gargoyle, Mole Man, etc.).  When people say, as they do ad nauseum, that superhero comics are nothing but adolescent power fantasies, this is what they're talkin' about.

HIDDEN MAN.  The Hidden Man was hidden under a gigantic metal helmet with horns sticking out of the side which, ironically, rendered him entirely incapable of hiding.  He was a Giant-Man/Ant-Man villain, which pretty much puts an end to anything I can write about him.

HULK.  You have to think that either Bruce Banner had a death wish, or he secretly knew the gamma rays would turn him into a bad motherfucker.  Because, seriously, why else would he drive all the way out to the testing site himself to fetch that shiftless asshole Rick Jones?  Why not send EMTs, or a team of experts in radiation suits, or some soldiers to do it?  How about, I don't know, anyone?  He knew.

HURRICANE.  A veritable explosion of comic book bullshit, this guy:  from the name-as-destiny secret identity (Harry Kane) to the ludicrously improbably origin (he stole a magic potion from an Indian, and just as he was about to drink it, he was struck by lightning), this villainous speedster strained credulity at every turn.  Plus, he had a purple costume.  Lucky for us he was a Two-Gun Kid villain, so we don't have to deal with him anymore.

INFANT TERRIBLE.  A variation on the venerable sci-fi trope of a massively powerful alien entity who wreaks havoc until it's revealed he's really just a child, the only interesting thing about the Infant Terrible is that his stat shot says his "existence is disbelieved on Earth".  Uh, excuse me?  On Earth, the planet with hundreds of superheroes, at least five nonhuman races living in hidden cities, and a giant who lives on the moon?  On Earth, the planet that gets visited by aliens every other day, that got stuck in the middle of the Kree-Skrull War despite being nowhere near either homeworld, the planet that Galactus has tried to eat on at least nine separate occasions?  What exactly do they have trouble believing?

IRON MAN.  We all know the story here, about how he was turned to steel in a great magnetic field, about the heavy bolts of lead that fill his victims full of dread.  Still, it seems like a different guy:  the heart ailment still plays a big part in his origin, the Vietnam angle is given lots of attention, and it's considered noteworthy enough to mention that his armor works underwater.  Tony's not a big drunk yet, either, but he does have a taste for corporate takeovers and a snazzy cravat.

IRON MASK.  Essentially an evil 1870s version of Iron Man, this was a blacksmith who designed a suit of metal armor that made him bulletproof.  He then embarked on a crime spree, robbing bankers and ranchers, and I guess making his getaway because everybody in the whole southwest was too fat, lazy or handicapped to chase down a guy fleeing on foot while wearing a 600-pound suit of metal armor.

IXAR.  That's Ixar the Invincible to you, Burgomeister of Transia and commander of the Ultroid Army, overseen by his shape-shifting female android assistant Ultrana.  One great thing about the '60s Handbook is that all these retarded stories were written before I was born, ensuring I never got a chance to be duped by them the first time around.

JACK O' DIAMONDS.  It is a testament to the decency and moral values of the X-Men that when they defeated this man made of living diamond, they did not immediately break him into small pieces and sell him to Hasidic jewelry wholesalers.  That's why they're the heroes, folks.

JUNIOR JUNIPER.  A member of Sgt. Fury's Howling Commandos, Junior was an Ivy Leaguer who read the Bible to learn how to defeat Nazis.  If ever there was a character begging to be updated for today, this is it:  he's basically George W. Bush.

KULLA.  You would think, just by accident, there might be one single interesting Ant-Man villain.  But you'd be wrong.

KURRGO.  This guy, on the other hand, showed up first in the Fantastic Four's book.  But upon proving that he was a profoundly boring run-of-the-mill alien conquerer, he was immediately demoted to being an Ant-Man villain.  Fighting Ant-Man was the 1960s equivalent of a guest shot in ROM:  Space Knight; it meant you could kiss your career goodbye.

LEGION OF LIVING LIGHTNING.  Led by the Lord of the Living Lightning.  The Hulk blew these guys up in an atomic explosion, and not one goddamn minute too soon in my opinion.

LIVING BRAIN.  This was a truly grotesque-looking robot designed by a thinly veiled analog of IBM, run by a computer so powerful it could solve any problem.  At one point, it was asked "What is Spider-Man's real identity", because I guess it had already figured out the meaning of life, the existence of God, and how to solve world hunger.  Luckily, its answer was in code, and they asked Peter Parker to solve the code, instead of any of the hundreds of scientists officially assigned to the Living Brain Project.  The entry concludes that "Peter later conveniently lost the ticker-tape with the Brain's guess of Spider-Man's identity on it".  MAN SO CONVENIENT!  WAY TO BE, PETE!

MAD PHAROAH.  Not to be confused with the Living Pharoah, who is also not the Living Colossus, who is not Col...Christ, it's one o'clock in the fucking morning!

MADAME MACABRE.  Madame Macrabre was a Chinese spy, see, and her henchman was a "loyal dwarf" named Gogo.  And Gogo, see, he designed these "toys" -- also called "special plastic objects" -- for her to use.  And she can, er, change the size of these special plastic toys at will.  I swear to you I am not making this up.  I quote verbatim:  "Her wig's cybernetic circuitry enables her to alter the size of Gogo's special plastic objects.  She carries assorted miniature 'toys' she can enlarge at will.  She directs her size-changing energies through a finger guard."  I guess she called herself Madame Macabre because Dildo Queen was already taken.

MAGICIAN.  He was a magician, all right.  He fought Giant-Man, which is exactly .009% less lame than fighting Ant-Man.  Not enough to justify actually writing anything about him, but still.

MECHANO.  According to the description I barely read because you try thinking of something funny to say about all these fucking minor characters who are exactly the goddamn same, Mechano was a doomed robot who saved humanity.  You know, like Al Gore.

MEKANO.  Not a doomed robot who saved humanity, but a doomed jackass who pestered the X-Men.  The amazing thing about this entry is we learn that when they encountered Mekano, the X-Men were putting on a juggling act to raise money to backpack through Europe.  No, really!  The astonishing mutant team turn out to be lame-ass trust fund hippies.

MISTER RASPUTIN.  One of at least three Russian characters in the Marvel universe named Rasputin, which is sort of like having three major Italian characters named Cagliostro.  A delightfully nonsensical precis of his powers:  "Mister Rasputin could manipulate energy for a variety of effects, such as energy blases, mystic shields, illusions, and teleportation.  He also carried a handgun."  You know, in case all that other stuff didn't work out.

MOGUL OF THE MYSTIC MOUNTAIN.  An early Arab character, the MotMM escapes the typical fate of Marvel's Arabs insofar as his skin is not a sickly grayish-green.  Unfortunately, he does appear to be, well, Chinese.  In further nods to authenticity, he fights the Norse Warriors Three, can "conjure up Satan's Forty Horsemen", and has assistants named Abu Dakir, the Jinni Devil, and Mutaurus. 

NEBULOS.  A wack-ass cosmic threat from the pen of Steve Ditko, Nebulos did us the questionable favor of bringing the Living Tribunal into the Marvel mythos.  He also inspires this hooty line from whatever nerd drew the short straw for writing his entry:  "Nebulos spent untold millennia absorbing evil mystical energy into his Staff of Polar Power, presumably for less-than-benign purposes."  Yeah, you think?  Maybe?  That thousands of years of absorbing black magic might not be taking place out of sheer altruism?  Nice litotes there, nerd!

ORGANIZER.  Abner Jonas was once the Reform Party candidate for mayor of New York, and like Reform Party founder H. Ross Perot, he was a crook, a fraud, and very likely batshit crazy.  He dispatched a small army of animal-men who wore "Creepy-Peepy" television cameras in their chests, which I understand is the same thing that the CIA used to bust up Perot's daughter's wedding.

OVERLORD.  This guy, who was also known as the Supreme One, the Master of the Universe, and the Ultimate Conquerer, was a nuclear mutant who, in the far future, goes on to destroy the whole universe.  The Silver Surfer then goes back in time to prevent the accident that creates him, so this terrible outcome does not come to pass.  Hey, thanks, Norrin!  Now how about doing the same thing for your old boss, Galactus?  I can think of a few billion people who would really appreciate it.

PAINTER OF 1000 PERILS.  There is a big part of me that hates supervillains named Wilhelm van Vile, the Painter of 1000 Perils.  But there is an even bigger part of me that loves them.

PHANTOM.  This was a Stark Enterprises scientist who got pissed off that Tony Stark would never give him an appointment, so he dressed up in a funny costume and planted bombs all over the place to disrupt the company's operations.  When he was captured, Tony, who knows a thing or two about dressing up in a funny costume on company time, "chided him for his irrational behavior".  He then went on to fight his old foe Kettle in his secret identity as the Black Pot.

POSSESSORS.  This was supposed to be a terrifying alien race, but the picture included in the entry shows one of them cowering with a hangdog expression on its face.

PROTECTOR.  I know no one will believe this, but hey!  It's an Ant-Man villain that was kinda neat!  He had a cool costume, a nifty gimmick (he would steal jewels, then covertly replace them with piles of dust; implying he had disintegrated them, he got the jewelers to pay him protection money to not do it again, thus getting an ongoing paycheck plus the payoff for the original theft), and a nice backstory.  There's only one problem here:  during his showdown with Ant-Man, "Ant-Man's ant assistant summoned the police".  How did that work, exactly?  Did it phone?  Did it go down to the station and talk to the deck sergeant?  Did it bite a beat cop's ankle in Morse code and hope to be understood prior to getting crushed under his brogan?

RABBLE ROUSER.  An early iteration of the 'scary hippie' genre of supervillain, the Rabble Rouser was a commie beatnik from Greenwich Village who managed to get the city council to pass a resolution against the Human Torch.  You could tell he was evil, because he didn't wear shoes!

REPLICUS.  A giant robot built by one of the eight billion extraterrestrial conquerers who failed to take over the world in the mid-'60s.  For some reason, its inventor disguised himself as a human and partnered up with a racketeer named Slugger Sykes, instead of, you know, just saying "Fuck it, I have a spaceship and a giant robot, why don't I just fly solo on this one?".

RINGO KID.  One of Marvel's many western heroes in the 1950s, the Ringo Kid was always one of the less popular, always being overshadowed by the John Kid, the Paul Kid, and the George Kid.

S.H.I.E.L.D.  Everybody knows who these guys are, if for no other reason than that every time they appeared, an editor's note told us what the name stood for.  They followed the precise demographic pattern manifested by every single non-superhero group in comic book history:  the Lantern-Jawed Hero with Tough-Guy Name (Nick Fury), the Big Dumb Ox Comic Relief (Dum Dum Dugan), the Hot Blonde (Sharon Carter), the Exotic and Colorful Foreigner (Valentina Allegro de Fontaine), the Scientific Genius Who Is Either Black or Jewish (Sidney E. Levine), and the Emergency Backup Lantern-Jawed Hero with Tough-Guy Name (Clay Quartermain).

SILVER SURFER.  Just think, if trend-keen genius Stan Lee had created him in the 1970s, he'd be the Silver Roller-Discoer.  Oh, wait, that's Dazzler.  Well, if it had been the '80s, he'd have been the Silver Skateboarder.  Oh, wait, that's Night Thrasher.  Well, if it had been the '90s, he'd have been the Silver Rollerblader.  Oh, wait...

SANDU.  This was some douchebag that Loki gave superpowers just to give Thor a hard time.  He "teleported a sultan's palace to the U.S.A. and declared himself master of the world", which is pretty much the same career arc as Donald Trump took, but then he got greedy and tried to lift Thor's hammer, resulting in a "mental short circuit" which I guess is what they called a hiatal hernia back then.

SORCERER.  The only interesting things about this mystical dipshit were his ridiculous haircut and the fact that he was basically bullied into becoming a supervillain by the Human Torch, who reading this Handbook seems more and more like a real frat-boy prick.

SORCERER.  This was actually It, the Living Colossus, I think.

SPACE PARASITE.  You know what?  There's only so many jerks from outer space who fail to conquer the Earth because they run into the Hulk or Ant-Man or whoever that I can write about, and this one is about my limit.  If you want to know more about him, I suggest you consult the appropriate episode of Futurama.

SPIDER-MAN.  We all know and love this cat, seen?  And let's all hope that his recent dust-up with Tony Stark means that he'll dump the retardo yellow and red costume and get back to basics.  Anyway, given that we're all pretty saturated in the mythos by this point, I'll say no more about our boy Peter Parker, except this:  dig the knife-twist they give us in the last paragraph of his History section.  "Though Peter's frequent unexplained disappearances as Spider-Man have caused friction with Gwen (Stacy), their love for each other gives Peter hope for a happy future together."  Maaaan.

SUB-MARINER.  Another guy it's kinda pointless to crack on, so ingrained is he in the collective geek unconscious.  And, let's face it, a pretty great character, too.  So I'll focus on a couple of things I didn't know:  he first appeared in Motion Picture Funnies Weekly (I believe in an adaptation of a Chip & Dale cartoon where the two scampy chipmunks battle a deranged undersea half-breed) in 1939, predating the craptacular Aquaman by a year; and he apparently has the power to absorb and discharge electricity, which has got to come in handy for a guy who spends his time underwater.

SUN STEALER.  Well, he tried to steal the sun, man.  It's marginally better than "Xakku", his real name.  This guy drowned in a swamp and the Watcher just stood there smiling smugly.

SUPREMUS.  This Arab character had yellow skin, which I guess is an improvement of sorts.  Yet another misshapen freak who understandably got pissed at mankind because everybody treated him like shit.  Boy, did Stan the Man have his finger on the Cheeto-clogged pulse of American geekdom, or what?

TERRIBLE TRIO.  Not the more familiar troika of Spider-Man villains, but pretty much identical; three had-been criminals who banded together to take out guys a hundred times more powerful than they were.  They consisted of a handsome con-man named Harry Phillips and his partner, a union goon named Bull Brogin.  Both of them wore lime green socks.  The third man was a fakir named Yogi Dakor.  They worked for Dr. Doom and tried to take out the Fantastic Four.  It didn't work.

TAZZA.  Not just another boring green-skinned extraterrestrial conquerer, no!  This was a boring green-skinned extradimensional conquerer!  I was too bored to even get through his bio, so I can't tell you if there's anything funny about him.  My guess is that after Strange Tales #144, the next place he appeared was in this Handbook.

THERMAL MAN.  This was a giant robot with heat powers built by communist China as a super-weapon against the United States.  The communist Chinese were always a bigger threat to us in comics than they were in real life, it seems.  Anyway, Thor, who was acting pretty partisan in the sixties -- I mean, why wasn't he hanging around in Norway or Sweden? -- helped out the military by throwing the Thermal Man into the Antarctic sea, where it froze.  The giant robot with heat powers.  Good plan, Thor.

THING IMPOSTOR.  Okay, how does the Thing not get an entry, but some one-shot jerkoff who disguised himself as the Thing gets a full page?  You confuse me, OHOTMU.

THOR.  See?  Thor gets an entry, for corn's sake.  Which goes out of its way to note that Donald Blake not only went to medical school, but that he earned an M.D.!  In case we were all worrying that Don took a course in Surgical Doctorism from the Bahamas Correspondence Medical Party School.

TIME-MASTER.  Elias Weems was a brilliant inventor who got shitcanned from his job because he hit the mandatory retirement age of 65.  Pissed, he extracted revenge by demanding to be made ruler of Central City or he'd activate a device that would age the entire populace.  Ant-Man defeated him, but also felt sorry for him, so he testified on Time-Master's behalf at the trial, and eventually Weems got his old job back without serving any jail time.  These days we just use the EEOE.

EL TORO.  There were a lot of commies in sixties comics, like this thick-skulled Giant-Man villain.  There were also a lot of gangsters, and a few commie gangsters.  There were also tons of aliens, and a lot of aliens who were gangsters or who worked with gangsters.  You know what there wasn't a lot of?  Alien commie gangsters.  You'd think Stan would have been all over that.

TRAGO.  Using a combintion of personal charisma and hypnotic music to paralyze all those who listening to his brilliant jazz trumpeting, Trago might have worked out as a sort of supervillainous version of Miles Davis, but he ended up drawing Ant-Man as a foe and was thus consigned to the scrap heap of history.

TRIUMVIRATE OF TERROR.  The Mad Thinker, having gotten tired of spending a bunch of money on giant robots that were inevitably crushed by the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, decided to save some dough and just dress up three schmucks in outfits and have them get crushed by the Avengers or the Fantastic Four instead.  They were called Pile-Driver, Hammer Head, and -- ready? -- Thunderboots.  I bet he was really popular at the supervillain bars.  "Yoo hoo!  Thunderboots!  Buy me a drink, precious!"

TUMBLER.  I have nothing to say about the Tumbler, and I dare you to have anything to say about him either.  Look, do you really want me to make a joke about how he later found work holding peoples' cocktails?

VULTURE.  Not Adrian Toomes, but some shitheel named Blackie Drago who swindled him out of his flying suit and thereby found himself in a world of shit, with both Spider-Man and the original Vulture out to beat his ass.  According to the Appendix, the Blackie Drago of Earth-982 (MC-2) was the father of Brenda Drago, the Raptor.  Whatever the fuck that means.

PATSY WALKER.  Before she became Hellcat and started doing it with a Satanist, which probably made her family pretty proud, Patsy spend her formative years trying to outdo Chili in the Ridiculously-Named Supporting Cast Sweepstakes.  Among her friends and relatives were counted Tubs Wilson, J. Nelson Earplug (of the Connecticut Earplugs), Sweetiepie, Birdseye, Dextrose, and Norbie.  Her nickname was "Sloppy Drain", which has connotations I'd rather not think about.

WARLORD WROGG.  Did you know that the Watcher actually used to be a major character, who would have his own stories?  Unfortunately, they all involved hanging around with dildoes like this.

WOBBOWS.  This was a made-up alien race that appeared in a creepy-ass story that the Wasp told to some sick people in a hospital.  No, really, it was.   She, who routinely encountered real aliens, invented an alien race, and told a story about them eating a space explorer to a bunch of hospitalized invalids.  Why this gets an entry, even a half-page one, is completely beyond me.  Why not give an entry to some 7-11 clerk that Hawkeye once bought coffee off of?

WRECKER.  This Wrecker was a dirty commie inventor who screwed around with the Fantastic Four...

WRECKER.  ...and this Wrecker  was a dirty mobster thug who ran a hardware store.  Would you like to know which one was more boring?  The second one fought Giant-Man.

X-MEN.  Remember back when there were ony six of them?  Remember that?  Good times.  There's an appearance here by the Living Pharoah, but my head hurts too much to get into it.

PROFESSOR ZAXTON.  Professor Zaxton was a jealous colleague of Donald Blake who created a duplicating machine which zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

ZEMU.  You know what's really interesting?  If you read the history of this guy (who was also called "Xemu"), a ridiculous made-up alien dictator in a silly comic book who appeared a grand total of twice and had his ass handed to him by the Human Torch, and then read the history of this guy (who was also called "Xemu"), a ridiculous made-up alien dictactor who somehow formed the foundation of a major real-world religion, you basically can't tell the difference.

ZOM.  "A powerful demon, Zom once fought with Dormammu, had his hands sealed in the mystic Chains of Living Bondage, and was then blinded by Eternity with the Crown of Blindness and sealed within an amphora."  WHATEVS.  I just spent two days reading this shit.

ZOTA.  You get to guess whether this guy was a commie, an alien or a gangster.  I'm going to bed.  Next week:  the '70s!

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"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power, -- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been." (Thomas Pynchon)