LUDIC LOG

Well, gang, here we are. After 26 weeks -- half a year -- we've finally come to this: the final installment of our weekly review of Who's Who: the Definitive Directory of the DC Universe. For six months now, you've read my snotty recaps of these 1980s funnybook encyclopedias with a mixture of bewilderment, confusion and bafflement. Some of you have enjoyed them, whether or not you are big fat nerds; some of you have said "Oh, it's Thursday. He must be doing one of those stupid comic book entries again. Guess I'll check back in a couple of days." Whatever your reaction, I appreciate you sticking with me. But all good things must come to an end; the original run of the series ended here, with Volume XXVI, dated April 1987 -- a little over sixteen years ago. The dorky teenage me was probably devastated to see it end; the geeky decrepit me is a bit relieved. No more will I have to trawl around Google for pictures of Wyynde. No more will I actually have to root around my dusty longbox trying to find out who originally created the Human Target. No more will I have to think of something funny to say about Doctor Cyber.

Until next week, that is! If all goes well (and I guess "well" is sort of a judgment call, depending on how you view this stupid series), then next week will see a resumption of the heropedia reviews, taking up with Issue #6 of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Also, sometime in the near future, I hope to do an expanded version of the Who's Who recaps, this time with illustrations from the series so readers might actually understand a few of the jokes, and hosted on its own site! So, please continue to watch this space, and to everyone who's helped me out on this misbegotten project, I can't thank you enough. For now, though, let's head right to the entries in this, the 26th -- and final -- issue of DC Who's Who.

WIZARD. This fifty-time loser was a perennial foe of the Judtice Society, and also had the habit of joining every rinky-dink supervillain group that came down the pike. At various points in his dismal career, he was a member of the Injustice Society of the World, the Crime Champions, the Secret Society of Super-Villains, Injustice Unlimited, and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The grossest example yet of the name-as-destiny concept, his real name was William Asmodeus Zard, but rather than picking the ultra-cool Satanic name "Asmodeus" as his nom du crime, he picked "the Wizard". You put the ball right on the tee, and some guys are still gonna miss it.

WONDER GIRL. Not the current Wonder Girl -- the California blonde ripped fresh from the lost episode of Beverly Hills 90210 who anchors the New New New Teen Titans -- but the Donna Troy version of Wonder Girl. She got retconned beyond the point of comprehension during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, which is just as well, because her origin was really complicated and boring. However, with the loss of her old continuity came the loss of one of the most fucked-up villains in DC history: GLOP! Glop, you'll remember if you're a complete moron, was an outer space blob thing who crashed a party that Wonder Girl was at, and then ate all of her rock 'n' roll records, and then sang her a song that went "I'm not a mop/I'm a Glop/I want my pearl/Wonder Girl". Yes, this really happened. Aren't you glad you didn't read comics?

WONDER WOMAN I & WONDER WOMAN II. I'm not really sure why they do two separate entries here, since the Crisis mooted WWI's existence, but I'm glad for it, because it's an excuse for two snazzy pieces of art -- the modern-day Wonder Woman drawn by the always-stellar George Perez, and the original Wonder Woman ably done by the terrific Trina Robbins. WW, as the best-known female superhero (DC always pushed female characters more than Marvel did, which, in the words of Calamity Jon, is why "scary nerds prefer Marvel"), has long been the subject of perverted speculations by sex-starved preadolescents, adolescents, and post-adolescents alike. But for me, the question was never "will WW and Superman get it on?", or "What's the deal with Steve Trevor?", or any of those other commonplace kink-scenes; I always wondered, given her origin, character and circumstance, "Are we really supposed to believe that Wonder Woman is heterosexual?"

WRATH. If Killer Moth was Batman's opposite number, then the Wrath was Batman's flipside. The son of a pair of criminals who were gunned down before his eyes when he was a young boy, the Wrath grew up with a pathological hatred of law enforcement, and eventually trained himself to the peak of physical perfection in order to become the scourge of Gotham's police department. (In a nice bit of creepy retro-synchronicity, the Wrath's parents were killed the same night that Bruce Wayne's were.) Eventually he was killed in a confrontation with Bats, who never learned that the cop who gunned down the Wrath's parents was...Commissioner Gordon! Possibly this is because the writers of this fascinating and underutilized character didn't want to have to make Batman beat the living shit out of old man Gordon.

THE YELLOW PERI. It's hard for me to write objectively about Peri, because we dated for a brief period in the mid-1980s. But I'll try. The Yellow Peri was not, as you might expect, a typo for a horde of Chinese Communists, but a teenage girl who discovered a magic spell book that gave her incredible powers. She decided to use the powers for good, but sometimes her spells went wrong, so Superboy, using the wisdom and judgment that made him the most insufferable prick in Smallville, threw her book into outer space. Of course, Superboy was constantly fucking up himself, like, say, every time he was exposed to red Kryptonite, but nobody threw his sorry ass into space. Double standard much, Superboy?

ZATANNA & ZATARA. A father-daughter team of crimefighting sorcerers. Their incantations consisted of whatever effect they wanted from the spell, read backwards; like, say, "ekam siht erif og tuo!" or "sith si repus dedrater!" Zatara, the vividly Italian father, got fried into a "lacigam" charcoal briquette during the Alan Moore run of Swamp Thing; while foxy daughter Zatanna eventually hooked up with the Justice League, but sadly abandoned the top-hat-tails-and-black-nylons get-up that made her the idol of horny 13-year-olds all over my bedroom.

ZYKLON. Say, here's a tasteful idea: let's make up, years after the fact, a Nazi supervillain from World War II whose name is disturbingly similar to that of the poison gas used to slaughter innnumerably Jews during the Holocaust! What's the matter, DC, didn't you have room for his partners the Ghettonator and Auschwitzblade?

ANGEL & THE APE. Having run out of characters, DC went back and gave entries at the end of the last issue to new characters and characters who were left out of previous issues. Angel & the Ape, a crimefighting supermodel and her partner, a gorilla in a suit, got an entry. You know who didn't get an entry? PREZ. FUCKING PREZ.

CANNON & SABER. We've had a lot of fun here on the Ludic Log Who's Who recap pretending various super-duos were gay. But with the L.A.-based assassination tandem Cannon & Saber, we are finally a given a pair of super-types who really were gay. Cannon (who shot people) and Saber (who stabbed people) are the first comic book characters I can remember being presented -- not explicitly, but pretty goddamn obviously -- as homosexuals. They lived together, they worked together, and they were ambigiously physical with one another. And despite being gay villains, they weren't portrayed as super-camp or as psychotic screeching perverts. They would have constituted something of a watershed moment for gay visibility in comics if they hadn't been so boring.

CAPTAIN TRIUMPH. A typically goofy Golden Age superhero, Captain Triumph was one of two identical twins with a T-shaped birthmark on his wrist, which, when rubbed, would give him super-powers. He had Golden Age villains (Nazi creeps named Baron von Bragg and Otto Rotter), he had a Golden Age name (Lance Gallant), he wore a Golden Age costume (a tight crew-neck shirt and jhodpurs), and he Golden Age sucked. He first appeared in Crack Comics, which carries an entirely different sort of story these days.

CAPTAIN X. Captain X is largely indistiguishable from Captain Triumph, except that, like the later versions of Wonder Woman, he had a transparent plastic jet fighter that was invisible. I would not be the first person to wonder what the use of an invisible jet fighter would be (after all, people would still be able to see the pilot, flying around in the sky in a seated position), nor to wonder how they managed to make, say, the burning jet fuel or the exhaust from the plane invisible. But, you know. Comics.

KNODAR. I can think of no better way to end the run of these Who's Who recaps than with Knodar. Knodar (who I tried so hard to find a picture of online, because his costume is so very truly ridiculous-looking) is pretty much everything I hate about comics rolled into one totally asinine supervillain. He has a ridiculously overcomplicated origin, a completely ludicrous gimmick (he's the only criminal of the 25th century, where advanced technology has fulfilled all human needs; he got the idea to become a crook from watching old 20th-century gangster movies, which apparently didn't occur to anyone else in the whole fucking world); he traveled back and forth in time, messing up continuity wherever he went, and worst of all, he had the worst...costume...ever. Picture a man. The man has a tattoo around his eyes that looks like one of those old domino masks that bank robbers wear in 1920s silent films. He is wearing a fedora, for no particular reason. He is wearing a form-fitting bodysuit with a high collar, and the suit is covered from head to toe with the letter "P" (for 'prisoner', not for 'pathetic excuse for a super-villain). And he is wielding something that purports to be a "metal controller", but is quite obviously a spatula once wielded by a futuristic fry cook. Picture all of that, and you will be picturing someone only a tenth as lame as Knodar. Worst of all, this Golden Age embarrasment, who clearly should have been left to rot in the crappy 1940s comics that spawned him, was revived by Roy "Why Create a NEW Shitty Character When You Can Just Bring Back an OLD Shitty Character?" Thomas in Justice Society of America AND The All-Star Squadron. I'll let Jon Morris, creator of "Gone and Forgotten", the inspiration for my Who's Who recap series, and the man who so generously copied issue #26 for me to use, get in the last word here: "Goddamit, Roy Thomas, would you just let these lame-ass hat-wearin' magic-spatula-havin' abortions die?"