LUDIC LOG

Holy Jesus creepers, it's Thursday again and time for another snarky recap of Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, the illustrated 1986 compendium of everybody who's anybody in the world of wearing your underwear on the outside. We're in the home stretch -- Who's Who only had 26 issues during its original run, and here we are looking at #25! What will we do when it's all over? Will your lives be empty and void without my peurile comments about superheroes you've never heard of? Will I be forced to actually come up with original material on Thursdays? Not if I can help it. I've got a good dozen issues of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe on the way.

Now, right here is where you'd normally read a couple of brief comments about the issues itself -- letters page, cover art, editorial vision, and other unimaginably tedious crap. But you won't have to slog through that stuff this time around -- it's straight to the entries. Why's that, you ask? Well, it's because, uh, technically, I don't actuallyhave Volume XXV of Who's Who. But Calamity Jon Morris was kind enough to actually photocopy his copies of issues #25 and #26 on big ol' office paper and mail them to me. (In return for this kindness, I demand that each of you go and buy a copy of Boo!, his spiffy collection of Halloween comics with Manning Krull. Order now and get it by All Saint's Eve!) Jon also included a fancy yellow Post-It note on the front of Volume XXV reading "I swear, this is exactly what comic books look like in, like, Third World Africa". And it's true! You can just see this thing, only now being released in Namibia after 16 years, stuffed into a rotating rack made out of bamboo, with a little sign at the top that reads "HELLO THE KIDS! COMICS". Now, because of this little scheduling quirk, this recap might be a bit, er, light. Seeing as I have no retarded letters page to read, and the mimeoed nature of the copy excludes me from adequately describing the garish colors that are no doubt employed within. But I feel sure that once you've gotten to the end, you'll wish it was even shorter than it is.

THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER. The spiffy Joe Kubert art in evidence here can't really excuse how demented this character concept is. Not only do they co-opt an emotionally powerful iconic symbol -- the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier being meant as a tribute to every man who died in anonymity in service to his country -- and turn it into an excuse to tell goofball super-spy stories, but we are told at the end of his bio that "he 'helped' the Fuhrer commit suicide" in 1945. I dunno; maybe it's just me, but this strikes me as the same level of tastelessness as would the Viet Nam War Memorial coming to life, going back in time, and smashing Ho Chi Minh into jelly beneath its great obsidian feet.

VALDA THE IRON MAIDEN. Speaking of tasteless...normally I steer clear of any characters inspired by toy lines, but Valda (girlfriend of Arak, Son of Thunder, and vaguely affliliated with the Warlock mythos) is worth a mention. First, her uniform illustrates one of the eternal conflicts in character design: should it look good or be practical? Comic artists have almost always chosen the former, which leads to stuif like the wicked-looking mask that restricts its wearer's peripheral vision and the big flowing cape which interferes with crimefighting by getting stuck in doors and being tripped over. Valda, obviously designed on the theory that sex appeal trumps rationality, is wearing a chainmail mini-skirt. In the history of garments whose design obviates its purpose, this is right up there with cutaway football helmets that show off your hair. Second, Valda is drawn (by Ernie Colon) astride a huge pile of human skulls, which rather flagrantly flaunts the unspoken agreement comics have with the reader to pretend that superheroes don't spend a lot of their time killing people.

VALIDUS. Why is Darkseid the baddest villain in the DC universe? Validus is why. Darkseid is such a bad-ass, he is willing to kidnap the infant child of two of his minor enemies, transform it into a huge, twisted, violent, inhuman monster, and send it back in time ten years to try and kill its parents before it is even born; and he is willing to do this for no good reason other than to fuck with them. This is the kind of cold-blooded, pure hatred for all that lives that you just don't get out of, say, Calendar Man.

VANDAL SAVAGE. One of my favorite DC villains, his first appearance nonetheless had an extremely nonsensical plot. Savage was a man born over 50,000 years ago who spend thousands of lifetimes shaping the world as a brutal warlord. He had been Caesar and Genghis Khan, an advisor to Napoleon and an admiral in the Spanish Armada. By the 1930s, he had manipulated Europe into totalitarianism, and came up with a scheme to defeat the Americans before they even got into the war; his scheme hinged on being named War Labor chief, so that he could scuttle wartime production and leave the US unprepared for combat. Unfortunately, the whole thing fell apart when, in order to get this cushy federal job, he had to produce his birth certificate -- and, since he didn't have one, he stole one belonging to the Green Lantern's best friend. Now, this hapless coincidence aside, are we really to believe that a guy who's lived for fifty millennia can't get his shit together enough to forge a lousy birth certificate?

VARTOK. Varton was an unexplained alien in a very gay costume (shorts, tight vest, no shirt, cop mustache, thigh-high leather boots) who palled around with Superman for a while. The funny thing about his entry is that they spend eight paragraphs going over his ludicrously overcomplicated origin and then, in the Powers section, say "there is simply not enough room to list the powers he has displayed so far."

VIGILANTE I & VIGILANTE II. The Golden Age Vigilante was a radio crooner called "the Singing Prairie Troubadour", who dressed up like a Cowboy and fought space-wasting villains like Nebula-Man and the Dummy. The Modern Age Vigiliante was DC's answer to the Punisher: a bloodthirsty, murderous psychopath who was perpetually overwritten or underwritten, and whose homicidal behavior was excused by the fact that the hundreds of people he murdered were criminals. There were about nine people who took on the identity of the second Vigilante, but astoundingly, not one of them is interesting.

VIKING COMMANDO & VIKING PRINCE. Two ancient Norsemen who were somehow transported forward in time to WWII and inexplicably fought on the side of the Allies. This strains credulity even by comic book standards. If you're a Viking, and you see two groups of people competing -- one a group of Aryan blonds who are constantly talking about blood, conquest, war, death, heroism, and the virtues of violence, who play Wagner 24/7, and who seem to be really into rape, pillage and lootings; and the other a bunch of mongrels who talk about peace and freedom and opportunity and are always trying to help people and play crazy jazz music -- which group are you going to hook up with? There is absolutely no reason that Viking Commando and Viking Prince wouldn't have headed straight for the nearest SS recruiting office, especially if they saw Triumph of the Will first.

VIRMAN VUNDABAR. On the flip side of this equation, why in the hell would a a man brought up in an orphanage on an alien planet light years from Earth who has never even seen a human, let alone a human from Germany, call himself "Virman Vundabar" and dress like a Prussian university duellist? Shut up, it's Jack Kirby.

VYKIN THE BLACK. And, to bring it full circle, here's another Kirby New Gods character (well, Forever People, if you really wanna get nerdy about it) who's named Vykin, which sounds a lot like "Viking", even though he is not a Viking, but a Negro. Or, to be more precise, a space Negro. Jack helps out anyone who can't understand that he's black just by looking at him by putting "the Black" after his name. How Power Man got away with not being called "Black Power" is beyond me.

THE WAR WHEEL. This was a huge, spiked, ironclad, armor-coated wheel, bristling with cannons and machineguns, built by the Nazis to help win the war. Basically, it looks like a giant Ferris wheel that has jumped its supports and gotten involved with a biker gang. The Blackhawks were able to defeat this gargantuan war machine not once, but twice, by tricking it into quicksand, where it sank under its own massive weight. This makes perfect sense, until you realize that the War Wheel is obviously over a hundred feet tall and a hundred feet wide. How much quicksand is there in Europe? It would take a patch of quicksand the size of two football fields to sink this monstrosity, and a patch that huge, you have to think the guys piloting the War Wheel are gonna notice it ahead of time.

THE WEATHER WIZARD. Okay, kids, the Weather Wizard is a member of Flash's Rogues' Gallery. And what does that mean? That's right: stupid costume, stupid power, drawn by Carmine Infantino. I really want to be charitable to WW; his costume is downright tasteful compared to the rest of the Beau Brummells in the Rogues' Gallery, his power is actually kind of interesting and peppered with enjoyable pseudoscientific terms like "eolic energy" and "instant weathering effect", and the Carmine Infantino drawing is, well, it's not good, but...well, it's not good. Up against any other villain, the Weather Wizard would come off as a complete moron; but in the sewer that is Flash's Rogues' Gallery, he's virtually the cream of the crop.

THE WHIP. Alias "Rodney Elwood Gaynor". Uh huh. He and Mr. America used to have big parties at Sal Mineo's house, is my understanding.

WING. Carrying on a tradition of Asian second bananas whose real name their white bosses couldn't be bothered to learn, Wing ("last name unknown") had to spend all of the '30s sucking up to the Crimson Avenger, who kept promising to do something about the three million Chinese people who died during the Japanese occupation just as soon as he got around to it. Wing, like many black action movie characters decades later, died while his non-ethnic big daddy lived on: he "heroically sacrificed his life" to defeat some outer-space dipshit, and the Crimson Avenger paid tribute to his memory by swearing a vow to 'really look into this massacre of the Chinese thing, any day now'.

WITCHBOY. Holy shit look at this scary-ass Jack Kirby artwork. Witchboy looks like some kind of 11-year-old Marylin Manson imitator with crazy fucking eyes and a pet cat who obviously tears peoples' nuts off and plays with them like catnip balls. Even though Witchboy is clearly a pre-adolescent, he spent his free time fighting the Demon; and who can blame him? Even Etrigan, spawn of Hell, would be terrorized by this creepy little fuck.