LUDIC LOG

Hey there, comic book nerds! This being Thursday, normally you could look forward to an installment of our weekly Who's Who/Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe recaps. Unfortunately, my OHOTMUs haven't arrived yet, and I'm extraordinarily busy preparing for a big Halloween party here at the crib, so instead, I'm going to sell you, my loyal readership, short. Today I'll be taking a very brief look at issue #2 of the Who's Who Update series from late 1987, which I happened to find stuck in the back of one of my longboxes.

The Updates series was essentially a combination mistake-catcher and expansion, throwing in characters who had been accidentally left out of the original series run and hyping new characters who had been introduced since then. It also occasionally served as a vehicle for hipping readers to the retroactive continuity of the moment. You can tell how seriously DC took these updates by taking a gander at the sleepwalking Joe Brozowski/Dick Giordano cover and by noting the fact that it took six guys to write this issue, only one of whom was Doug Moench. Anyway, let's plow right through it.

CATWOMAN. Yet another Catwoman entry, making the grand total three. The reason for this extra Catwoman page is reputedly to handle her retconning after Batman: Year One, but any fool could figure out it's just an excuse to stick in another sexy slinky picture of Selina Kyle (drawn here by Alan Davis, who gives her huge, televangelist's-wife-sized hair in the incidental art. The text mentions as genteely as possible that prior to her masked career, she made her living "by engaging in illicit sexual activities" and lived with "a young girl in the same line of work as herself". This level of blushing child porn stands in marked contrast of the NAMGLA-level output of today's Marvel Comics.

CHEETAH. The third Cheetah entry, too, if anyone's counting. And yet another excuse to show a hot chick in a skin-tight outfit in the name of retroactive continuity. Nifty George Perez drawing, though.

CHILLER. A snoreworthy Booster Gold villain, Chiller had the ability to change form to look like anyone he chose. At the time of this issue, he was on a mission to assassinate then-President Ronald "Para-dijum" Reagan, and so in the incidental art, we get a couple of disorienting shots of what appears to be the Gipper dressed up in Kirbyesque body armor and wielding an acid cannon. He probably pictured himself like that, too.

CH'P. A member of the Green Lantern Corps who came from a planet of funny animals. He was a talking chipmunk with cute googly eyes and he wore a pair of interstellar Oshkosh B'Gosh overalls. They kept sticking him in stories where he would do something awesome to convince the hostile readership that he was interesting, but no one was fooled. I spend a significant portion of 1987 praying to a God I knew did not exist that Ch'p would die a horrible, disgusting, bloody, painful death.

COMMISSIONER GORDON. Representin' Chic before heading to Gotham. This is the retconned Jim Gordon of Year One, transformed from an ineffectual boob who couldn't catch pneumonia without Batman's help into a super-badass Viet Nam veteran who whales on guys twice his size and is actually a more interesting and morally conflicted character than Batso himself. Spiffy art here by David Mazzuchelli, and the retcon actually set the stage for Dark Knight, which at the time was still a "future" event. Don't question it!

DARWIN JONES. A salt & pepper dimwit with a pet monkey who went around solving crimes using his amazing scientific knowhow, Darwin Jones was of no interest to anyone save as a springboard for a pet theory of mine: any multisyllabic word combined with "Jones" makes a cool-sounding name. Try it yourself: 'Springboard Jones, the diving detective'. 'Multisyllabic Jones, pretentious investigator'. 'Vomitorium Jones, the puking P.I.'. See? It works.

DECAY, DEIMOS & PHOBOS. These new-jack Wonder Woman villains are included for a reason other than the swell George Perez art. They're included because John Byrne, who took over WW at the time, succeeded in doing one thing right while running the series into the ground: he actually used mythological figures as the villains instead of dillholes like Dr. Psycho. Also, his relinquishing the art duties probably got Perez a new house.

DR. MIDNIGHT. Another Dr. Midnight. Also a blind doctor, although this time a black woman. Apparently, there is now a fourth Dr. Midnight, who is also a blind doctor. At this rate, there's probably doctors all over the DC universe shoving scalpels in their eyeballs because they know they'll probably get superpowers out of it.

DR. MOON. Man, I love Dr. Moon! He was a batshit Korean surgeon who worked for any megalomaniacal jackass who would pay for his deranged experiments, and then made these bizarro relativistic pronouncements while, say, brainwashing Plastique, or fusing a time bomb to Catwoman's spinal cord. The incidental art has him smiling indulgently, looking like a Peter Sellers character, while the Joker goes ape behind him.

DR. SPECTRO. Not an actual doctor, but the owner of a pool hall. Dr. Spectro has one of the dorkiest costumes of the modern era; he's essentially wearing a black bodysuit like the people who move the sets in between acts of a play, only it's covered with hundreds of tiny Christmas lights.

DR. U'BX. Can there possibly be a character I hated even more than Ch'p? You bet there can: Ch'p's arch-enemy, an evil beaver with a pot belly and gigantic buck teeth who wielded something called a "Sucker Stick", which is more boring and less dirty than it sounds (and consequently less interesting). As if this wasn't already the most asinine character in DC history, somehow managing to be even more annoying than Egg Fu, they eventually decided to rehabilitate him so he wasn't evil anymore. This managed only to remove the sole interesting aspect of his character.

DUKE OF OIL. That's right, you heard me: "Duke of Oil", a robotic Texas oil man. This kind of mind-bending junk could only have come from The Outsiders, also known as 'the worst thing Batman has ever been affiliated with, including Superheroes vs. Super-Gorillas and Man-Bat.'

ELECTRIC WARRIOR. The Electric Warrior gets two whole pages in the Who's Who update -- and more text and art than Batman, Superman or Wonder Woman got. And as if that's not enough, the frontispiece to the issue features not letters or an editorial, but an OHOTMU-style technical drawing of his gadgets. Naturally, Electric Warrior was cancelled in the blinking of an eye and the character was never heard from again.

ESAK, FASTBAK. Fascinating and enduring characters from Jack "King" Kirby's startling New Gods series. They get half a page each. Hey, they're no Electric Warrior.

THE FLASH. Barry Allen had snuffed it by this point, so this is the Wally West version of the Flash. Gone is Carmine Infantino; in his place is Jackson "Don't Call Me Butch" Guice, who pays tribute to Carmine with a terrible drawing of the Flash with his arms and legs distorted and completely out of proportion.

FRANCES KANE. Joining the Marvel "everyone in this universe gets superpowers eventually" bandwagon, DC gave Wally West's longtime girlfriend the ability to generate powerful magnetic fields. Her costume suggests an important question: why would you wear a full facemask when you use your real name as yout superhero handle?

GOLDSTAR. We close out today's all-too-brief recap at a look at Trixie Collins. She was Booster Gold's secretary, and as we all know, anything associated with Booster Gold (aside from the Giffen Justice League) is utter swill. Appropriate, then, that when his loyal typist and receptionist got a superhero suit, she named herself after a cheap line of Korean knockoff TVs.