The Geek Index continues to expand at roughly the same rate as my ass and my diminished standing as a human being.  Today we'll be taking a look at all the entries -- yes, every damn one of them -- in the Marvel Legacy 1970s handbook.  This was a fun decade for Marvel, full of cosmic slop and horribly misguided attempts to be hip; not coincidentally, it's also the exact time I started reading comic books, thus cementing forever my reputation as a person not to know.  However, you're here, so obviously you're just as messed up as I am; let's get started.

The covers, by the way, to the '70s handbook is by Sal Buscema.  It's a pretty shabby affair, but at least it gives ol' Sally something to do.

AVENGERS.  It was sometime in the mid-'70s when the Man stepped in and took the Avengers' reins, putting a bunch of do-nothing superheroes on the dole queue, and there's a great shot of this in the incidental art.  It reminds us of those good old days when George Perez was a real superstar, and also those days when Marvel tried to make us care about the Guardians of the Galaxy.  They describe Moondragon as a "haughty mentalist" instead of a "total bitch machine", but you get the idea.

BLACK BROTHER.  Boy, this is a downer of an entry.  Aside from the insulting name and the black-and-white ink original art (I guess they don't have the colored copies for a lot of this stuff, and are too cheap to recolor), the story of Black Brother is a real downer:  he was a governor in a small African nation who fought for indigenous people, women's rights and nationalizing the oil industry, so his own government brought him down by framing him and driving him out of the country.  So he left in disgrace, and, having had no impact whatsoever on the Marvel universe, never appeard again!  Even in seventies comics, a brother can't catch a break

DEVIL'S HEART.  See, this Sioux necromancer, he killed a bunch of people, and got himself transformed into a gigantic, thirty-foot-tall human heart under a lake.  Hey, we've all been there, right?  Anyway, he spends a couple centuries getting farmers to off each other, and then along comes Dracula, and mmmmm, dinnertime!

BLACK LAMA.  Jesus, who does the alphabetization in these things?  The Black Lama is, without question, the kind of character they only could have created in the '70s.  He was an alternate-universe version of Gerald Ford who was second-in-command of a monarchy based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  In order to defeat his rival, who was aided by an alternate-universe version of Edward Teller, he decided to meditate on cosmic balance, which, naturally, led him to send a gang of super-powered jackoffs to beat up on Iron Man.  This is how things work in comic books, even in the Kingdom of Grand Rapids.

BRUTE.  They really went for the alternate-Earth dystopias back in the seventies, man.  The Brute was the evil Reed Richards of Counter-Earth (hello?  Civil War spoiler?  nah, they wouldn't be that clever), and he, I don't know, Hulked out, and fucked around with Annihilus, and said things like "The fools!  The blind, trusting, doomed fools!"  Unlike the DC Brute, he didn't hang around with a snotball named Glob.  More's the pity.

CAPTAIN MARVEL.  Actually a product of the 1960s, Mar-Vell (ho ho!) came into his own in the seventies, when they blow-dried his hair, gave him a fancy new outfit, and backed a hose into his asshole that pumped non-stop cosmic hoodoo.  There's a great shot of him walking down the streets of Denver (where he went to fight crime and watch the Broncos lose ballgames), and there's a dude standing right behind him, clearly checking out his fine, spandex-clad Kree hiney.

COBALT MAN.  Cobalt Man has the hilariously hapless distinction of nearly being killed in not one, not two, but three nuclear explosions.  To cap it all off, there's this hilarious sentence in his "Where Are They Now?" section:  "Cobalt-Man crusaded against nuclear power, appearing on CNN, but the Hulk dropped a car on him and defeated him."  HA HA!  Take that, hippie peacenik!  Nuclear power 4 life!

THE COMMITTEE.  The Committee, the nerds who wrote this thing tell me, were an "organization of financiers ostensibly dedicated to reviving the U.S. economy by any means, however illegal or bizarre".  In the 1980s, they went on to become the Halliburton Corporation, but back then, they had an anonymous leader who went by the clever name of Anonymous Leader.  He employed a staff of winners with similarly slick monikers, including Mister Orange, Colleague, Shaved Head, and Turtle Neck, and, following the economic principles of Milton Friedman, he attempted to use werewolf blood to revive his fortunes.  This gang of nitwits appeared in Werewolf By Night (companion book to Werewolf By Day and Werewolf On Weekends, Holidays and Occasional Sick Day Coverage.  There's a hilarious panel where the straitlaced businessmen are being introduced to their new co-worker, Sidney Sarnak, who has the ability to control an Army of Fear with his sonic whistle, and inexplicably, they are shocked at the idea!  Is this guy even covered in Robert's Rules of Order?

THE CONSPIRACY.  Another soporific gaggle of dingalings trying to take over the world, only these guys wore funny costumes and dabbled in magic instead of wearing suits and dabbling in economics.  Aside from the core group, which included not only an evil dolphin sorcerer and a sinister cardiologist, but a stripper (excuse me, "ecdysiast", as the bottom-shelf highbrow narration has it) who used a mystical blood-gem instead of her titties to enthrall her audience, the Conspiracy employed Killer Shrike, a failed version of Batman, Sharzan, a failed version of Shazam, Ulluxy'l, a failed version of Cthulhu, and Goram, a failed version of Godzilla.  The book in which they appeared was Rampaging Hulk, itself a failed version of a good comic.

THE CORPORATION.  The third of our boring trilogy of sinister aggregations of ill-meaning shitheads is the Corporation, which, also like Halliburton, was a "body of businessmen and politicians who performed numerous acts of terrorism and espionage.  Fighting such go-nowheres as Machine Man, Shang-Chi, and the White Tiger, they included luminaries like Filippo Ayala, Lyle Dekker, Curtiss Jackson, and Sen. Eugene Kligger Stivak, thus proving that men with two consecutive identical consonants in their names cannot be trusted.

THE CRUSADERS.  A bunch of British 4-Fs, the Crusaders were shoveled up by Alfie (Michael Caine), a traitorous member of the Howling Commandos, who gave them lame superpowers and set them loose fighting Nazis, in a rather circuitous effort to discredit the Invaders, another Allied super-team.  Surprisingly, they have not been brought back recently to fight Muslims.

THE DEADLY DOZEN.  You know, if you're going to rip off both Kelly's Heroes AND The Dirty Dozen, couldn't you at least try to be a bit more subtle than calling your version "The Deadly Dozen" and giving them a commanding officer named Kelly?  The fact that Marvel didn't get sued behind this one only shows you how little anyone cared about comics back then.

THE DEFENDERS.  Yaaaaay!  There's nothing I don't love about the Defenders, especially the 1970s incarnation, even containing as it did crazy Spielberg wannabe Dollar Bill and Jack "Ass" Norriss.  They even had their own advice column!

DEMON-FIRE.  Another group of worldbeaters Marvel obviously cared about so much that they didn't bother to keep any of the colored art.  This was a gang of demons who hung around San Francisco vainly searching for a virgin they could sacrifice, instead of moving to, say, Omaha where their chances would be better.  One of them was named Katabolik, but it doesn't say if he had a degradative metabolism that released energy in order to facilitate the internal breakdown of proteins and lipids.  Where are you when we need you, Eliot R. Brown?

DOCTOR GLITTERNIGHT.  With a name like that, you'd think this guy would be a drag queen, but he's just some cosmic ne'er-do-well who fucked around with Werewolf By Night.  Did you know that Werewolf By Night's real name was Jack Russell?  Wouldn't you imagine he'd be a were-terrier instead?

THE DRAGON CIRCLE.  In contrast to most super-teams of the era, these guys -- another group of pseudo-mystical doofuses -- operated out of the Water Crest Country Club in Georgia, so it's no surprise that they were actually an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan.  What is mildly surprising is that they appeared in Jungle Action (like most of the characters in the '70s handbook, they came from a book I didn't read), and what is exceptionally surprising, and not explained in the entry, is the fact that one of their key operatives, the flatulently-named Wind Eagle, was a black man.

THE FACELESS ONE.  Not to be confused with the alien Faceless Ones fom the '60s handbook, although this one, too, does not have a face.  Here's my favorite thing about the entry:  Dr. Doom, it seems, hired Luke Cage to track down some rebellious Doombots who had fled to New York.  The fee was $200, but Doom stiffed him, so Power Man goes to Latveria heads off to Latveria to collect.  Now, what's the stupidest thing about this story?  That Dr. Doom, one of the most powerful men on Earth, would hire a dopey ex-con to do his work for him?  That Luke Cage would agree to track down four highly dangerous robots for less money than he could have made in a month working at McDonalds, even in 1970?  That Doom would screw a guy out of such a pittance, even though he runs his own country and could probably spare it?  Or that Cage would go all the way to Eastern Europe to get his money, although the trip certainly would have cost him more than $200?  I don't even know!

THE FANTASTIC FOUR.  Speaking of Luke Cage.  Generally speaking, the 1970s are when comics discovered that black people existed, but even in that era of blaxploitation, having a brother join up with the FF, who -- the covertly Jewish Ben Grimm notwithstanding -- were the whitest of breads was akin to having James Brown join the New Christy Minstrels.

FATHER DARKLYTE.  Oh, boy.  This Son of Satan villain is proof that someone -- my guess was Steve Englehart, but the internet tells me it was Steve Gerber -- was sidemousing the bong back in '75.  Aside from his trippy Hendrix-poster name, the guy is described as "the cold in the midst of flame, the air in the midst of vacuum, the absurd in the midst of causality and the causality in the midst of the absurd" and was on a mission to "bring you soothing agitation" and "impart to you the wisdom of ignorance".  When he was defeated, his magic lantern broke and an army of cockroaches poured out.  Whoah, heavy.

HELLCOW.  I have read Proust; I have visited the home of Frida Kahlo; I have recited portions of Ulysses from memory.  Now I am telling you about a vampire cow who appeared in Giant-Size Man-Thing and fought Howard the Duck.  

GIANT-MAN.  Created back in the day when every single black character was obligated to be called "Black (Something)", in case we didn't notice they were black, Bill Foster was originally "Black Goliath".  He was a biochemist, but he still talked like Luke Cage.  And looked like Luke Cage.  And acted like Luke Cage.  And, prior to getting a hole blown in his chest or electrocuted during Civil War (depending on which poorly edited story you believe), he, like Luke Cage, had a very, very gay costume.

GOLEM.  Based on the ancient Hebrew legend, this version of the Golem fought Ben Grimm (who surely felt guilty about it) and, according to the text, was brought to life "through unknown supernatural means", which is a lot more tasteful than saying "by a rabbi choking one off on top of him."

HYPNO-HUSTLER.  Oh, man, did I love this guy.  He was a punk-funk guitarist with an outlandish outfit who used his music to cause hypnotic trances in the audience -- basically, an evil version of Eddie Hazel.  And the name of his band was the Mercy Killers.  Goddamn!  I'd buy their albums.

MANPHIBIAN.  I don't know anything about this creature from the Black Lagoon-lookin' motherfucker, other than that I believe he teamed up years later with Manimal, Manvian, Mansect, Mantable and Maneral.

JANUS.   I wasn't allowed to read stuff like Tomb of Dracula when I was seven years old, so here's another guy I don't know anything about.  Judging from the text, he was the son of Dracula; judging from the creepy incidental art, his job was to constantly reach for his mother's breasts.

KORREK.  Man, they really combed the dregs for this '70s issue.  Fear?  Legion of Monsters?  Werewolf By Night?  War is Hell?  Marvel Super-Heroes?  Who the fuck read these titles?  Not me, and when I further learn that he was part of Howard the Duck's cosmology, that tells me that I don't need to know anything more about Korrek.

JOHN KOWALSKI.  This guy was a big fuckup who died right before WWII.  As penance for his crimes, or possibly just for a giggle, Death decided to keep sending him back into living people who were about to die until he either atoned for his sins or Death got bored.  One of the funny things in his bio is that someone tried to warn him in 1939 that the Germans were about to invade his native Poland, but he blew the guy off as a crank, because, really, who mistrusted Hitler in summer of 1939?

THE LADY LIBERATORS.  An Avengers offshoot dedicated to the principle of women's liberation.  Naturally, it all turned out to be an evil plot by the Enchantress to manipulate the female Avengers, rather than a perfectly reasonable reaction to the fact that the male Avengers were a bunch of jerks.  But don't worry, we all had a good laugh about it later!

THE INVADERS.  Roy Thomas saw what DC was doing with the Justice Society, and he said, "I can do that".  And Stan Lee said "Yes.  Yes, you can."  Well, really, Stan probably said something like "Great granny's ghost, Rollickin' Roy!  This will be the most crater-crushing creation since the Jolly Green Goliath!", but that's Stan.

THE MAGUS.  A goofy cosmic villain thrown at Adam Warlock a few times, this purple (remember the Fallacy of the Purple Costume, folks), afro-sporting nimrod started his own religion, but it wasn't as successful as the Church of Scientology, even though it was just as plausible.  In the incidental art, it has him attacking Warlock, saying "I am release!  I'm your escape to fantasy!  I'm everything you seek!  I'm the madness monster!"  Apparently, he had the power to spontaneously create Journey lyrics.

MAHKIZMO.  Mahkizmo, the Nuclear Man, was a foe of Thundra, the Femizon.  Strangely, neither the Lady Liberators nor Rush Limbaugh were involved in this storyline.

MAN-WOLF.  See, okay, Jonah Jameson's kid, he was an astronaut, see. And he, he went to the moon, and was bitten by a werewolf, or he found a magic rock, called the godstone or possibly the wierdstone or moonstone, and it turned him into a magic werewolf, but really, he was a wolf-god from another dimension, and then he married She-Hulk and...man, fuck this.

MARTIAN MASTERS.  To be clear, these were masters who were Martians, not people who were masters of Martians.  They were one of several manifestations of Martians in Marvel comics (like DC, Marvel was addicted to endless, mutually contradictory manifestations of Martians), but the salient point is, they looked exactly like the ones in War of the Worlds.  Marvel musta had some hella good lawyers in the '70s.

MATADOR.  A minor Daredevil villain whose real name was Manuel Elongato (HO HO, if you know what I mean, HO HO INDEED), this guy, after the 1970s, became sort of a running joke in Marvel comics, held up as a paragon of a lame, useless villain.  I'll be damned if I can understand why, though; sure, he's stupid, but he's not one iota stupider than a million other comic book villains who aren't singled out for such shabby treatment.  He doesn't even have a purple costume!

THE MISSING LINK.  The actual missing link!  Of course, he was buried alive in a volcanic explosion; of course, he was unearthed thousands of years later by a Chinese a-bomb test; of course, it gave him radioactive superpowers.  He eventually ended up working as a coal miner in rural Kentucky.  These days, he'd wind up on the E! Channel, hosting a fashion program.

MISTER KLINE.  This was an android from the future, sent back by a supercomputer to prevent a catastrophe that would someday destroy humanity.  His first job, of course, was to prevent Foggy Nelson from running for governor, which he accomplished by blackmail.  Why he didn't just murder Foggy with his super-strength or deadly eye-blasts is not made clear, any more than why a robot from thousands of years hence would have a name like Mr. Kline.

MR. ZODIAC.  Despite being a Persian, Mr. Zodiac was blond, blue-eyed and light-skinned.  Which is fine.  He appeared in a book called Spider-Man Zaps Mr. Zodiac, which, by giving away the ending right there in the title, spares you from having to read it.

SKY-WALKER.  Seriously, editors Jeff Youngquist & Jennifer Grunwald:  it goes A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z.  "S" comes after "R", not between "M" and "N".  I have faith in you that you can learn this one thing.

MS. MARVEL.  The Farrah Fawcett to Captain Marvel's Lee Majors.  Carol Danvers had a strange career path, starting out as an Air Force pilot, then becoming a spy and a private-sector security consultant and then ending up as an editor at Rolling Stone during the Jann Wenner era.

NOMAD.  In a misguided but noble attempt to be politically relevant, Steve Englehart, around the time of Watergate, had Steve Rogers become disillusioned with politics and take on the identity of the Nomad, Man without a Country, even though he never actually left the United States.  Of course, since then, we've had him turned into an ultraviolent version of John McCain, who would defend America even if the flag came to life and started eating babies, and an ultraviolent version of Harry Browne, who would forsake America in five seconds if its people passed a law he didn't agree with.  Curiously, both of these interpretations came from Mark Millar, for whom the words "plausible characterization" are too long to understand.

POWER MAN.  Luke Cage, we are always told, was in prison because the cops found a bunch of drugs in his apartment, planted there by a jealous rival.  What is rarely mentioned is that Luke had just recently gone straight after having been a gang boss for years and enforcing his authority with a series of brutal beatings.  Hey, the point is, he was not guilty of something!

PRIME MOVER.  This was a robot built by Dr. Doom to play chess with.  Which is pretty sad.

PSYKLOP.  Not the leader of the X-Men, but a member of an ancient race of bipedal insect-men who ruled the Earth long before the dawn of man.  Strangely, though, just as boring as the leader of the X-Men.

THE PUNISHER.  Oh, for the days before Marvel hepped up the Punisher, before they made him "Francisco Castiglione", before he was supposed to "relevant" and "edgy" and an "anti-hero", when he was just a comic book ripoff of the Executioner!  There's no Eliot R. Brown technical drawings here, but it comes pretty close in the eyes-glazing-over text about his gear, because what else are you going to talk about with the Punisher?  In case you've been wondering all these years, the Punisher's van has an 85-gallon fuel tank and a 440-cubic-inch V8 with a 1:2:1 gearbox.

THE ROYALIST FORCES OF AMERICA.  A bunch of wannabe aristos who longed to overthrow the U.S. government and return control of America to Britain, these assholes needed a hard lesson in realpolitik.  For some reason, they dress like figures from pre-Revolutionary France rather than pre-Revolutionary England, and one of them was a black scientist named Tinkerbell (!), because who would want to return to the state of affairs prior to the American Revolution more than a black man?

SLITHEROGUE.  I'm sorry, I just have nothing to say about a character named Slitherogue that his name doesn't already say.

THE STEEL SERPENT.  A martial arts expert and master of the Delayed Death Blow, the Steel Serpent met his match in a prestigous kung fu tournament after killing a photographer who tried to take his picture.  This entire storyline from Deadly Hands of Kung Fu was later made into the award-winning documentary Bloodsport.

SONS OF THE TIGER.  The stars of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu were a boffo assortment of seventies stereotypes.  The black guy, Abe Brown, grew up in the ghetto and learned martial arts to protect himself from racist gangs; the white guy, Robert Diamond, was rich, blond and handsome, and was an Oscar-winning actor who was learning kung fu in order to piss his career away by making a chop-socky flick; and the Asian guy, Lin Sun was an inscrutable mystic type who spoke in koans and was the descended of a samurai even though he was clearly Chinese.  Later, for diversity's sake, they brought in a woman and named her Lotus, because, I guess, Jasmine and Jade were already taken.

STAR THIEF.  A nudnik in a coma named Barry Bauman somehow managed to get himself pumped full of cosmic powers and, even though he could physically move stars and thus presumably destroy the entire universe if he wanted to, he decided instead to fuck around asking Adam Warlock riddles until something boring happened and then I woke up.

STUNT-MASTER.  A hero-turned-villain-turned-hero who rode around on a flying motorbike and wasted time going up against Daredevil and Ghost Rider instead of dying and getting out of my nice clean continuity.  Unique amongst characters in this book, Stunt-Master wore a toupee, and according to his bio, he helped Johnny Blaze fight the One-Man Zodiac, who was different from not only Mr. Zodiac and the Zodiac, but also It the Living Colossus.

TAGAK THE LEOPARD LORD.  This schmuck came from an alien dimension where everyone is blind, but they can see through the eyes of their pet leopards.  No, really, he is.  He was one of the infamous "Defenders for a Day", so-called because, when the Defenders announced open membership enrollment, a ton of people showed up to join, but on their very first mission, they found the work too dangerous and quit immediately.  In other words, a bunch of losers who couldn't even make the low, low standards of the Defenders.

THEY WHO WIELD POWER.  As I mentioned in the very first OHOTMU recap, since these dolts are described as a cabal of power-seekers from El Dorado, shouldn't they actually be called "They Who Seek Power"?  Or "They Who Want to Wield Power, But Don't Have Any Yet, The Bunch of Schmucks"?  Plus, how did they refer to themselves?  Did they say "Hi, we're They Who Wield Power", or did they say "Hi, we're We Who Wield Power"?  I think they need to get together with She and I...Vampire and figure this shit out.

ELIANNE TURAC.  Maybe I was allowed to read Giant-Size Dracula ("Run!  It's giant-size Dracula!"), because I remember this character pretty clearly:  she was a bad-ass vampire chick who ran a heroin-smuggling outfit called Saracen Associates (subtle!) and wasted a whole restaurant in order to kidnap Quincy Harker, who had this magic spell called the Montesi Formula that could destroy all the vampires on Earth.  Any resemblance to the entire series run of Alias is strictly coincidental.

VICTORIUS.  In the end, he wasn't. 

VIRAGO.  There's some crazy-ass backstory for this Sub-Mariner villainess involving the, ahem, "Golden Submarine" that traveled to many different alien worlds and dimensions, but I'm just gonna gloss over that as another example of overworking the Bullpen bong.  The point is, she was called Virago, and she was a hard-ass, man-hating bitch who later transformed into a grotesque monster called "She-Beast".  Between this and the Lady Liberators, feminism really took it up the ass in the Marvel '70s.  And people wonder why girls didn't like comics.  Oh, no, wait, nobody wonders that.

THE WRAITH.  Speaking of feminism, who would have predicted that Jean DeWolff, the sister of this incredibly convoluted Spider-Man villain would end up as the most recognizable character in his mythos?  Someday I'll have something to say about how female policemen in comics are invariably lesbians, thus allowing us to accept a physically tough woman without BLOWING OUR MINDS, but not now.  For now, I'll just present without comment this utterly ridiculous description of his powers:  "The Wraith possesses a variety of psionic powers.  He could read thoughts, and control the mind of a single victim.  He could cast illusions indiscernable from reality into multiple minds; among other uses he employed this to make himself appear invisible, to override Spider-Man's spider-sense, and to induce mental pain in others equivalent to the physical pain which would be caused by what they were perceiving.  He also carried a smoke pistol."

THE X-MEN.  The Committee, the Conspiracy, and the Corporation all get two pages each; the X-Men get one, and most of it is taken up by art.  Pretty lame, especially considering that the late '70s/early '80s was the last splash of this comic being good before Claremont flushed the whole Marvel Universe down the mutant sewer.

XORR THE GOD-JEWEL.  Once there was this planet, a really super-awesome mega-planet called Xorr that was so terrific that it had spawned the Kree and the Skrulls and a bunch of other troublesome fuckfaces, but their sun was going nova.   So they build this impenetrable crystal shell to protect them, and when the big blow-up finally came, it send them hurtling through space.  Unfortunately, the forces of the universe eventually led the shell to contract,  destroying all the people inside.  Whoops!  Bad plan.  Anyway, eventually it came to life and went around fucking with Thor, but it never got a chance to go to high school, since as its bio informs us, this "sentient condensed planetary biosphere" had "no formal education".  It just goes to show you, you can be a living god-jewel and spawner of worlds more powerful tha Galactus, but without that diploma, you're working the fryer at BK.

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