Before we get to the next installment of our weekly rundown of the All-New Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, let me explain briefly why the following several installments are gonna have undie-stink.

First, a whole lot of these characters are from 1991 and after, and I basically left Marvel behind from 1989 until about 2002, so a lot of them are completely new to me, thus robbing me of my ability to make marginally funny jokes about them.  Second, and I don't know if any of you have noticed this, but Marvel Comics kinda suck these days, and when you get a gander at these non-starters, you'll see why.  And third, these new OHOTMUs blow thanks to two major editorial decisions:  first, to farm out the writing work to internet nerds who work for little to no money and who aren't very good writers even by comic-book standards; and second, to stick all the major characters in their own books (e.g., the OHOTMU:  Spider-Man edition, the OHOTMU:  Avengers edition, etc.), which means the folks who end up in the 'main' title are the dregs of the dregs.  So, long story short, this is going to be less an exercise in whimsical geek humor and more a long, dreary slog.  In otherwords, I'm going to perfectly recreate the process of actually reading one of these cocksuckers.

There's no point in lingering on the intro; they're boring and poorly written without even the marginal attempt to engage the reader that Mark Gruenwald and his boys made back in the day.  It mentions that Marvel now has close to 100,000 characters (!), which should give you an idea of what their batting average is; the only thing of note is that the editors purport to be "proud to have some of this information appear here for the first time ever", as if we should jump for joy at the prospect of finally learning how much Atleza weighs or what Goliath II's middle name is.  Let's get on with it; it's gonna be a haul.

ABRAXAS.  One of many characters that I seemed to have missed, this dude is a sort of anti-Galactus.  My eyes started glazing over when I read about his adventures on multiple Earths (another thing I missed is how Marvel now has a multiverse that makes DC's Silver Age continuity look streamlined by comparison), but then I got to this evocative sentence:  "Abraxas sent a decapitated Galactus skull hurtling towards Earth-616 with an alternate-Earth Nova stored within it."  I have to admit, the idea of someone tossing a Galactus skull (second-string hero trapped inside or no) at the FF just to prove what a bad motherfucker he is -- that's pretty cool.  But the effect is kinda spoiled by the clumsy wording:  you can't decapitate a head, dumbasses.  You decapitate a body.  You disembody a head.

ABYSS.  I'm not even gonna get into the ridiculously convoluted X-continuity here, where this dickweed is related to Nightcrawler and Mystique and Azazel and Kiwi Black and for all I know Robbie Robertson.  He's just a swirly tool (with some nice Andy Kubert art) who is now entirely inconsequential due to M-Day.  Remember when one of the big factors in Marvel's appeal was that their continuity was a lot less complex than DC's?

ACHEBE.  Now, this guy first appeared in the Black Panther series that appeared in the late 1990s, and I have a vague recollection of that title having been written by a black author (Robert Morales, maybe?).  I hope that's right, because otherwise, there is no excuse for this clown, who embodies every African stereotype in the book, including several that contradict each other.  First off, his name is "Michael ibn-al-Hajj Achebe", which is not only nonsensical ("ibn-al-" don't work), but is like naming a European character "Nigel Pierre di Santini-Voyanovic".  Second, he's drawn with a huge Stepin Fetchit smile, jug ears, and buggly eyes.  And third, his best friend is a psychotic hand puppet!  Okay, that last part's not racist, but it's still seriously fucked up.  And dig this, from his History:  "Refusing to die, (Achebe) sold his soul to the devil for revenge and insanity."  AND INSANITY!  That's a good bonus to get, when you're selling your soul for revenge!  Make sure the devil throws that in or you got robbed!  "Look, I'll give you my eternal life, but I want revenge on the people who killed my wife, and while you're at it, make me batshit crazy, I think that'll really help me out."

ACOLYTES.  Yet another expression of the X-MenFactorMutantsStatix continuity that makes me recoil like I was trying to fish my car keys out of a snake pit.  A bunch of these yoyos got exiled to Genosha Island, which was some kind of leper colony for mutants but always makes me think of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and implants in my mind the image of a bunch of costumed superhumans working at the Jelly Belly plant and going to the Dinosaur Discovery museum.  There's an Indian character in the Acolytes with heat powers, and guess what he's called?  VINDALOO!  Oh, cultural sensitivity, thy name is comics.  What, they couldn't use Curry?

AEGIS.  This kid somehow inherited the mystical breastplate of the goddess Athena, which gave him amazing superpowers and eventually won him the friendship of the Olympian gods, who invited him to visit their realm whenever he wanted.  His history section ends thus:  "Aegis has been seldom seen of late, perhaps because he needs to keep his school grades up if he hopes to qualify for a college scholarship."  Yeah, perhaps!  I mean, sure, he's got a magical suit that renders him impervious to all harm, and at his leisure he can visit an immortal paradise where he has the steadfast support of dozens of vastly powerful gods, but he's gotta get that BA in mythology so he can, what, work at Borders?

AGED GENGHIS.  You know the Ancient One, right?  This guy is, I dunno, the really fucking ancient one.  He has some kind of super-Alzheimers, so even though he's the most powerful sorcerer on the planet, his powers only work for one day out of every century.  Which is about how much I work, too.  His entry caps off with a perfect example of why I kinda hate writing these:  "The cursed diary weakened and transformed Strange until he brought it to the Bazaar at the End of Unreason, where a creature known as Grogonk of Gonk took it to its realm, akin to a cosmic landfill."  Think of a context in which this would not be idiotic.

THE AGENT.  I hate to keep harping on Marvel's non-stop parade of racial foot-in-mouthery, but with dullards like this, there's not much more material to go on.  In the midst of a pretty tedious entry, we learn that Agent Rick Mason once went up against a team of super-mercenaries, one of whom was an African cyborg.  His name?  QUOTA!  That's right, a black superhuman named Quota.  I bet he and Vindaloo loved swapping stories.

AGENT X.  Like the Joker, Agent X and his partner Sandi Brandenberg, had their HQ at an abandoned amusement park.  In our world, run-down fun parks and abandoned warehouses never get much further than the level of tax writeoffs or lawsuits waiting to happen, but in comic books, they're a breeding ground for supervillains.

AHAB.  Sadly, this lame-o I actually do remember, from his earliest appearance in a Fantastic Four annual.  He was a dipshit who hunted down mutants, because, you know, why the fuck not creat seven or eight thousand more dipshits who hunt down mutants?  He had one leg, hence "Ahab" because I guess it was too soon for Heather Mills Man.

AKHENATEN.  As soon as I see stuff like "Earth-4321" or "Earth-811", I become frightened and lost and I have to hide under a table with a copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths for an hour or so; hence, I cannot tell you much about this cosmic Egyptoid.  However, one of his super-powers is "vast cosmic power" that allowed him to, among other things, "sense other beings".  WOW! 

ALBERT & ELSIE-DEE.  Donald Pierce, a relative of mine who, like everyone else in the Marvel Universe after 1986, spent most of his time hunting down mutants, built these two robots, see, and one of theme looked exactly like Wolverine and the other one looked like a little girl.  Because why would you not do that?  Why would you not build robot duplicates of Wolverine and a little girl, and then give them genius intellects and stuff them full of dynamite?  This shit reads like Roadrunner cartoons rewritten by autistic psychotics.

ALBION.  No, not the comic written by Alan Moore's kid.  It's not even that good!  This is a guy with a magic suit and a robot lion and mastery over the "Arthurian tarot", whatever that is.  By day, he is a mild-mannered history professor at a private English boarding school, and by night he uses his powers to break up unauthorized instances of the Biscuit Game.

ALKHEMA.  The second female adamantium robot designed by Ultron to keep him company after Jocasta betrayed him.  To no one other than Ultron's suprise, this one also betrayed him.  You would think that Ultron would stop building female companion robots with free will, or at least just hire a hooker.  But that's Ultron for you...stubborn.

ALPHA THE ULTIMATE MUTANT.  You hope that by "ultimate" they mean "last".  Sadly, no.

AMERICOP.  An embittered Houston cop who dropped out to become a vigilante after deciding that the law couldn't protect innocents from crime, Americop started going around shooting people and calling himself "the future of law enforcement".  His career came to an end at the hands of Paul Verhoeven's lawyers.

AMPHIBION.  Here are twenty stupid words from Amphibion's entry:  Qnax, Xantarean, life-mate, Hulk-Hunters, Horror-Hunters, Watcherworld, Sagittarieans, Ultimate Machine, Daydra, Torgo, Mekka, Dark Crawler, Galaxy Master, Didoceros, Xecu, psychic torment.

THE ANACHRONAUTS.  A group whose history, lineup, and place in continuity is so incredibly convoluted that I lost track in the very first paragraph!  They include the son of an Eternal from an alternate future; a cybernetic warrior from a different alternate future; another cybernetic warrior from an alternate world, but not the future; a caveman with a magic stone hurled backwards from the future (not an alternate future, but our present); and a bunch of other guys too boring to mention.  Their commonality was getting their asses kicked by Kang the Conquerer, who decided, on the strength of his ability to beat the tar out of them, to make them his personal guard.  Because who better to serve as your bodyguard someone you yourself could defeat in combat?

THE ANARCHIST.  Why is he called the Anarchist, when nothing in his history indicates any political beliefs whatsoever, let alone anarchism?  You might as well ask why he would serve on a team with people named Sluk and U-Go Girl.  At any rate, this guy earns pride of place in Marvel's racial Hall of Shame by dint of his status as a self-hating negro (he spent his entire childhood with his adoptive white parents trying to wash the black off himself) and his amazing power to defeat his enemies through the power of his highly acidic sweat.  Yes, you heard me!  And hear this:  that's not even the stupidest thing about him!  No, even his dumb name and radioactive sweat take a back seat to the fact that while a member of X-Statix, he started having sex with a zombie.  COMICS R DUM

ANGEL.  Sometime, when I wasn't looking, Angel stopped being a fruity whitebread snob named Warren Worthington, and became a Li'l' Kim lookalike with a puffy coat who was drawn by Frank Quitely before he figured out what the hell he was doing.  Angel was a New X-Man, which is different from the X-Men, or X-Force, or X-Statics, or X-Factor, or any number of other books I didn't bother to read and never will.

ANIMUS.  Why do I even bother? Here, I'll just let the entry speak for itself"  "Posed as Bushwacker, Captain America, Dr. Faustus, Gambit doppelganger (and how do you pose as a doppelganger?  Isn't the doppelganger already posing as someone else?  So you're not really posing as a Gambit doppleganger, you're just another person posing as Gambit.  Jesus.), Giscard Epurer, Madcap, Needle (Horseshoe), Nomad, Red Wolf and others.  Anims, a.k.a. Hate-Monger, should be distinguished from the Hitler clone Hate-Monger, the Man-Beast (who posed as the Hate-Monger), and the Psycho-Man's Hate-Monger construct, as well as the Vamp/Animus, an agent of the Corporation."  Why would anyone read this?

ANTI-CAP.  An anti-terrorist "super-sailor", this guy was bad, see, because he killed people.  Of course, they were terrorists, and Cap killed plenty of Nazis, but go look for sense in comic books.  Anti-Cap's career went south when he tried to fuck with MODOK; he ended up letting himself get hit by a train, because man, you don't wanna live if MODOK is birdogging your ass.

THE APACHE KID.  Strangely, this retconned Western character looks pretty interesting, has a cool-sounding history and a plausible backstory, and has a nice piece of art by Leonardo Manco.  So I will let her live, because I am an optimist and like to think there's at least one page in here that doesn't totally suck.

THE ARABIAN KNIGHT.  It sure ain't this one, though.  I've talked before about my deep detestation for this botched attempt at creating an Arab superhero, and judging from his history, they've only made him worse since the '80s.  After the indignity of appearing alongside ROM:  Space Knight, he had to infiltrate a terrorist group fighting Americans in the Gulf War, then quit working for his bosses because they wouldn't intervene in Eastern Europe, and finally he got killed by a super-mutant named Humus Sapien.  Which I hope to God isn't some play on "Hummus", but who knows with Marvel, the company that brought you Quota and Vindaloo?

ARIDES.  This guy was boring when he was called Shatterstar and wore a Trivial Pursuit wheel on his chest, and he's boring now that he's a glowing gasbag made of golden light.  He did have a pretty great biker mustache at one point, though.

THE ARRANGER.  Actually a pretty cool character, a nudge named Oswald P. Silkworth who acted as the Kingpin's lieutenant and fixer for a number of years (you can see him at his best in the outstanding "Born Again" arc of Daredevil by Miller and Mazzuchelli).  What's up with his art, though?  Sally Buschema does the job here, and it's okay up top (pudgy face, double chin, fat neck) and down below (thick legs), but his waist is like a gym rat's.  Wake up, Sal!  Time to get your paycheck!

ARSENAL.  A hilarious bit of Cold War paranoia at work, Arsenal was a Stark Enterprises-designed robo-American designed, basically, to destroy the world in case the Reds managed to take over.  Because, really, would a world where the Soviets ruled be worth living in?  Better we take out the whole globe; death is better than that.  It's only too bad they went awry; we could really use this thing today.

ARSENIC & OLD LACE.  No, not the charming 1950s comedy, but something much stupider!  It's some kind of nerdy teenager from the future, and her pet, a genetically engineered girl dinosaur from the 87th century!  The art (Jo Chen) is pretty good, and she's from a comic called The Runaways that I never read, so who knows?  Maybe this wasn't as dumb as it sounds.  It couldn't be dumber, at any rate.

ASBESTOS LADY.  Weirdly, the OHOTMU steals my thunder here, and we do a crazy switcharound:  normally, they would play it straight, and I would bitch how the entry sucked and joke that she probably died of cancer.  This time, the entry scores a cheapie off how she did die of cancer, and I'm left staring at the gorgeous Gil Kane art.  You think you're so smart, Marvel!

ASHCAN.  Probably right where this guy should have been left.  Yet another crazy mutant teen with yet another abusive dad (seriously, abusive parents in the Marvel Universe are as common as downed spaceships in the DC Universe); he's only really notable for the fact that his real name is Alexander Wolcott.  Funny, I don't remember any of the other folks at the Algonquin Round Table making jokes about how their friend could fry the skin of the Incredible Hulk.

ATLANTIS.  This entry goes on for two full pages...

ATLAS.  ...and this one -- dealing with grade-Z has-been Erik Josten, a.k.a. Giant-Man II a.k.a. Shatterfist, a.k.a. the Intruder from Beyond, a.k.a. the Smuggler, a.k.a. Power Man I, goes on for three.  I won't lie to you geeks:  it's 12:15AM, and I still have twenty more entries to go, so if you think I'm gonna read five pages of the Smuggler trying to find something to laugh at, well, maybe you can dig through Fred Hembeck's archives.  The man does good work.

ATLEZA.  She's a guardian of the Infinity Abyss!  From the comic of the same name (no, really)!  Her occupation is "anchor of reality", which surely comes with a mother of a 401(k)!  She added the line "Adam Warlock is the key to oblivion" to the data stream of the nihilistic Thanosi, self-variants of the mad Titan Thanos created using a combination of sorcery, cloning and technology!  I thought Marvel stopped doing cosmic spooge like this around 1981, and yet here they were, still trafficking in it as late as 2002.  Oh, she's 2'9", by the way.

AURORA.  Here we go!  Finally, someone I actually remember!  Admittedly, I remember her mostly for being bugfuck insane, and for being portrayed as a slutty bad girl who was punished for her loose morals by going crazy, and for being one of the only interesting characters in Alpha Flight which is a lot like being one of the richest people in Bangladesh, but still. 

THE AUTHORITY.  All I know about this guy is that he had something to do with Earth-98151, and thus I am not interested in him.  Oh, and that he had a metal body armor suit and for reasons unknown, he designed a little metal beard to go on the outside of it.  And that Eric Cartman demanded that you respect him.

THE AVENGERS M2.  Now, I'm not quite sure, but this appears to be nothing more than an off-brand version of the Avengers from one issue of What If?.  And yet, they get a two-page entry!  One of these clows was J2, a 'slacker dude' version of the Juggernaut who wore a plaid shirt around his waist, over his super-costume, just so we'd 'get it'.  Sorry for all the ironic quotes, but I've been reading comics all day.  They're sadly necessary.

AWESOME ANDY.  Yay, another character I really like!  I even dug the blockheaded son of a gun back when he was just one of the Mad Thinker's flunkies, but when Dan Slott got ahold of him in She-Hulk and turned him into a sort of gigantic, mega-powered administrative assistant who wrote his dialogue on a little chalkboard, I fell in love.  They've even managed to make him poignant!  Who'da thunk it?

AXIS MUNDI.  A neo-Nazi supergroup created by the Red Skull, these guys graced the pages of New Invaders a few years back, and amazingly, they too do not suck.  Come on, Marvel!  Gibe me some grist!  Two good entries in a row?  What are you doing to me?

AMUN.  Ah, that's more like it.  A teenage assassin (because, of course, so many teenagers have the discipline and concentration to hone their bodies into living weapons), Amun is one of those cats where the writer decides to throw a bunch of ethnic influences together and see what comes out (see Moon Knight).  He's ethnically Asian but Spanish-speaking, with an Egyptian name and sharpened metal ankhs, but his weapon of choise is the punch dagger, which is, of course, Indian.  Makes sense!

BATWING.  You know, if you're going to rip off a Batman villain, you could really set your sights a bit higher than Man-Bat.  Also, I ask again:  what the fuck is up with the alphabetization in this series?  It's really, really not hard, guys.

AXUM.  A petty criminal who pooled his loot to buy his parents a comfy house in Long Island, Danny Broughton eventually got busted and had to sell the house to pay for his failed legal defense.  In jail, he found religion and got into black identity politics, changing his name to reject his slave heritage.  When he got out, he became an Ultimate Fighting champ, but couldn't resist the urge to settle scores with old rivals, and back to jail he went.  Take out Spider-Man and substitute cocaine and anal rape, and you got yourself an episode of Oz.

BA'AL.  The Bible and Marvel Comics agree:  Ba'al worshipers engage in baby-eating.  It kinda makes you wonder why God didn't send Ghost Rider and Wolverine to settle his hash way back in the Pentateuch.

B-A-D GIRLS, INC.  A trio of super-assassins formerly in the Serpent Society, judging from the Patrick Zericher art, they'd be better named the Lipstick Lesbo Tease League.  At least they're familiar characters -- in another life, they were Black Mamba, the Asp, and Diamondback.  You may recall that the Asp, who although still being Egyptian has lost the gray-green skin color and now looks totally white, was supposed to be a pacifist, a strange ethos for a professional killer.  They finally bothered to give her a real name, and in keeping with what I'm guessing is official Marvel policy of being as culturally clueless as humanly possible, it's the most predictable Egyptian name imaginable:  "Cleopatra Nefertiti".  Nice.

SUNSET BAIN.  Sunset, of course, was the younger sister of Conrad Bain from Diff'rent Strokes. 

THE BAND OF THE BLAND.  It's always hard to know how to deal with joke characters when they were intended to be a joke.  It's one thing, that is, to make fun of the Injustice Society, and another to make fun of the Inferior Five, because the fact that the I5 were supposed to be funny essentially makes them immune to criticism.  But given that the Band of the Bland originally appeared in a Howard the Duck story means that they were never funny.  You can see the bind I'm in.

THE BANDIT.  The evil half-brother of Night Thrasher, the Bandit served mostly to force me to type out the words "the evil half-brother of Night Thrasher" and thus lose any vestige of self-worth I may have had remaining.  I wish I could find a shot of this entry to post, because his outfit -- headband, Jheri-curls, salmon-colored trenchcoat, Danskins, aviator shades, and what appears to be lipstick -- makes him look like Rick James in drag.

BANSHEE.  Why isn't he in the X-Men book?  When did he get the fruity new costume?   How did they get the rights to the Kirby incidental art?  So many questions, so little interest in the answers.  Reading this entry alerts me to the fact that there are at least two more X-groups, other than the six billion I've already mentioned, of whose existence I was unaware:  X-Corps and Generation X.  I am also alerted to how little I care.

BARON MORDO.  This still has the same swell Paul Smith art that was used in the original OHOTMU, a reminder of the fact that while it was't very good, it obviously could have been much worse.  Strangely, aside from having died, the good Baron's history didn't get that much more insanely convoluted in the 20 years since the original OHOTMU.  Maybe the Marvel editors should consult this entry from time to time to relearn the value of simplicity.

BARON STRUCKER.  Number two in the Marvel Pageant of Evil Barony-Holders is the ex-Nazi and frequent Captain America villain Wolfgang Strucker.  He eventually became the head of Hydra, pissing off the Red Skull in the process, and then three pages of other things happened, but I forget what most of them are because I'm drunk.  Apparently, he did okay the last few years:  he blew up S.H.I.E.L.D. (Supreme Headquarters, blah de blah blah blah blah) central command, killing 1500 agents, and then performed a hostile takeover of a TV station previously owned by the Kingpin and no doubt featuring an all-villain local news broadcast.  Good for him!

BARON ZEMO.  Strucker and Zemo are working together these days, which leaves the door open for Mordo to come back from the dead and form an all-Baron team to go out and show those uppity dukes and prince-regents who's boss.  He has a new costume these days, and while snazzy, it's still purple and thus indicates serious wind-sucking.  If you're wondering what he did with his adorably tacky old outfit with the gold cummerbund, striped boots, and whoopsie ermine shoulderpads, well, he gave it to his daughter...

THE BARONESS.  Who went ahead and died in prison, probably ensuring that the costume ended up with Rip Taylor where it belongs.

BASTION.  It's one o'clock.  Do you know where some jackass with four separate identities, all of them tied to the insanely overcomplicated 1990s X-continuity is?  Me neither.  Good night!

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"What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you're in it." (David Simon)