LUDIC LOG

It's Lame Comic Book Recap Thursday here at the Ludic Log, and this week we turn our attention to The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #8.

Now, I know last week I promised you MODOK. Well, it was helpfully pointed out to me, since I had not bothered to open the fucking book yet, that MODOK, despite the fact that his name comes in alphabetical sequence after Magus and before Mole Man, is not actually in this issue. Why? Because Marvel stuck him -- stuck one of the most truly awesome characters in their entire history -- in issue #18, which is one of the "Marvel Book of the Dead" supplements. See, unlike DC, who crammed everyone who had ever been in a panel into Who's Who, Marvel decided to put people who were dead, inactive, retired, missing, or so lame that no one was willing to draw them into a supplemental series that followed the main entries.

Well, fuck that. First of all, I don't have the Books of the Dead, okay? And I'm not going to leave out a great character like MODOK just because I'm too cheap to track them down. Second of all, it was and is asinine to stick dead characters in their own book. No one stays dead in superhero comics. In fact, like Tupac Shakur, most Marvel characters are more active after they die than when they were alive. And third, you can't kill MODOK! MODOK never dies! You can't even hope to contain MODOK! He's not a Mental Organism Designed Only for Dying; he's a Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing! Anyway, this is my web log, so I'm gonna put people wherever I want them. If I want MODOK in the OHOTMU issue #8 recap, he's goin' in the OHOTMU issue #8 recap, even if he is, technically, not in OHOTMU issue #8. In fact, I'm giving him his own special section! Suck on that, Jim Shooter!

Moving on.

MAGUS. This was some kind of extraterrestrial whatchamajigger whose son joined the New Mutants to get away from him. Oddly enough, I read the comic in which the New Mutants appeared for pretty much the exact same reason. Despite being an immeasurably powerful technowhozis who could, according to the impenetrable description of his powers, grow to 45 million miles in height, he was stymied by worthless jackasses like Doug Ramsey, just as if he couldn't squash everyone on the planet like a gnat. Bill Sienkiewicz, who was probably engaging in some sort of quiet revolt at having to illustrate boneheaded characters like this when he could have been working on Stray Toasters, chose to depict him as a sort of outer-space Captain Ahab wearing a suit made out of circuit boards.

MALEKITH. A snazzily designed Simonson-era Thor villain. Simonson, who doesn't get nearly enough credit for upping the ante in a mainstream superhero comic, is responsible for truly brilliant yet indisputably surreal plot arcs that have yet to really be rivalled for sheer chutzpah. Malekith was central part of a very lengthy series of stories in which, among other things, the god of thunder is transformed into a talking frog and people are turned into zombie slaves by eating McDonald's french fries that have been tainted by elves. This was not as stupid as it sounds, but then again, how could it be?

MALUS, DR. KARL. A fruity little nimrod who strongly resembles Dr. Octopus after several months on the Atkins Diet, Malus was employed by a wrestling federation that specialized in hyperpituitary monstrosities. Wanting to kick things up a notch, they hired Dr. Karl to inject people with an experimental drug that either gave you super-strength, or turned you into a horribly misshapen freak, or both. Any resemblance between this storyline and Vince McMahon's entire career is entirely coincidental.

MAN-APE. You know, another key difference between Marvel and DC is that the former could never quite get ape characters right. When DC made an ape character, which they did with numbing frequency (see: Angel and the Ape, Congorilla, Gorilla Grodd, Detective Chimp, Beppo the Super-Monkey, Titano the Super-Ape, Monsieur Mallah, etc.), they made him an actual ape, dammit! I mean, sure, all these characters were stupid, but at least they were actual monkeys, and monkeys are funny. But Marvel, erroneously believing that they were taken more seriously, came up with things like Man-Ape, who is more man than ape but not particularly satisfying as either. His entry, as this picture shows, makes him look like an albino gorilla who has had his torso grafted onto the lower body of a human being, kind of like Ray Milland and Rosey Greer in The Thing with Two Heads, and who has been photographed while in the process of swallowing a black man.

MAN-BULL. Alias William Taurens. In case you were wondering if the name-as-destiny concept ever gets any less lame. (No.)

MANDARIN. Mandarin was actually a pretty flash Iron Man villain. His gimmick was attacking people with miniature oranges. HA HA no, no. Really what he did was attack people with all these fancy D&D-style magic rings which he got from an alien spacecraft that crash-landed in his native China. This was actually a very common way to get super-powers in the funnybooks; if you sat around in a remote field for long enough, eventually a spaceship would crash near you and you could build something out of the wreckage that would let you rob banks. For a long time, I wondered: since there are thousands and thousands of alien races in comic books, and they all have interstellar travel and weapons and technology far superior to our own, why did none of them ever successfully conquer Earth? The answer, upon reflection, is obvious: all their spacecraft pilots are incredibly incompetent. Any time they'd get within a hundred thousand miles of this planet, they'd go down in a heap of burning wreckage.

MAN-THING. The pride of Citrusville, Florida, this shambolic swamp monster has long been considered an inferior rip-off of DC's Swamp Thing. Since I am one of the people who considered him such, I was surprised to learn that he actually predates Swamp Thing by nearly a year, which means that in fact, Swamp Thing is a superior rip-off of Man-Thing. At any rate, he will always be remembered for two reasons: he had a long green carrot for a nose, and he once starred in a book which was called -- that's right -- Giant-Sized Man-Thing.

MAYHEM. "Brigid O'Reilly's most distinctive feature is her ability to radiate a strange green gas." Phew! You don't gotta tell me! Hey Brigid, lay off the nacho plate at T.G.I. Friday's, huh? COME ON! Who doesn't love a good fart joke?

MENTALLO. Uh, nice skirt there, holmes. Yet another example of the principle that purple makes for a sucky super-villain, and also that no one in comics knows how to write a good mentalist character. I mean, honestly -- if you can control peoples' minds, you can get anything you want any way you want, and no one will even know you're doing it! So why, why, why do you have to dress up in the tights and the magic hat and parade around in front of Stan Lee and everybody, thus calling attention to yourself? Someone explain it to me.

MIMIC. The Mimic had the ability to duplicate the powers of anyone within a ten-foot radius of himself. Which means that when he stood near the X-Men, he had the power to look totally fucking retarded.

MIRAGE. Here's another dead guy I imported from the Book of the Dead, for the sole purpose of mocking his ridiculous costume. Oh, no, it's no mirage: I'm tellin' all y'all, it's a sabotage! Killed off by Marvel during the "Scourge" story arc (a.k.a. the "Let's dump the most asinine of all our characters in one fell swoop" story arc, which DC did better via Crisis on Infinite Earths), nobody, but nobody, mourned this pointless Spider-Man villain. His power was to cast realistic holographic illusions, and not, as you might guess from his outfit, to transform into a human legal pad.

MODOK. MODOK Bonus: oh, hell yeah.