LUDIC LOG

Stupid holidays, delaying the crappy Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe recaps for a whole 24 hours! Hey, don't blame me, blame Jesus, President Coolidge and P.T. Barnum, who came up with the whole idea of Thanksgiving in the first place according to this bubble gum wrapper I found under my pillowcase.

At any rate, we shall delay no longer! Let's get right to the run-down of OHOTMU #9, which is chock-full of villains who are stoopid with two Os. I love the '80s! Well, not really.

MOLECULE MAN. Let's talk for a moment about the Superman Problem. The Superman Problem, essentially, goes like this: once you've established that your main character is omnipotent -- like, say, Superman -- how do you keep him dramatically interesting? (See the Matrix movies for a primer on this problem, and how to fail to resolve it in a particularly spectacular way.) When applied to villains instead of heroes, the Superman Problem is restated slightly: once you've established that your bad guy is all-powerful -- like, say, this lightning-faced dipshit -- how do you explain how he keeps getting his ass handed to him instead of reducing everyone on the planed to molten ash? The answer: "powerful mental blocks". You see, poor Owen Reece had low self-esteem, and so he sort of convinced himself that he couldn't use his powers to the fullest even if it meant going to jail again and again instead of turning the Thing's swim trunks into liquid nitroglycerin. Hey, I know how it is, Marvel! I have trouble giving up the sweets! Anyway, Mols eventually rehabilitated himself with the love of a good woman made of lava, which is something else we can all relate to, right? Later on he became the Cosmic Cube, and then killed Klaw to no one's disappointment, and then got a job making TVs, or something. It's all too boring to recall for a guy who has such a purple costume.

MOONDRAGON. If you ever wondered -- and who hasn't? -- whatever happened to Persis Khambatta after the slow-moving train wreck that was Star Trek: the Motion Picture, the answer is, she got a job in Marvel Comics as the cosmically loopy whackjob formerly known as "Madame MacEvil".

MOON KNIGHT. I was never a big fan of MK, even though he brought Bill Sienkiewicz into the world of comics. First of all, he had too damn many secret identities (lunkhead mercenary Marc Spector, prissy jillionaire Steven Grant and halfwit cabbie Jake Lockley). Second, the idea of Batman reimagined as some kind of quasi-Egyptian demigod was not as interesting as the editors at Marvel seemed to think it was. And third, his arsenal of weaponry was a bit ethnically confused. He used a sort of grab bag of gear from non-white cultures: he wielded an ankh and "scarab darts", which sort of fit the Old Kingdom motif, but he was also packing such distinctively non-Egyptian gear as boomerangs, bolos and lassos. At some point, he was a member of the Avengers, and was the focal point in their split into the Avengers Who Like To Kill People and the Avengers Who Don' t Like to Kill People groups. Which, you have to admit, is more interesting than the East Coast and West Coast Avengers.

MOONSTONE. I don't really know anything about this character, but she did come up with one really interesting innovation: her costume had a little mirror right at chest-level, so all the creeps where were presumably staring at her tits would see their own slavering reflections. Take that, male gaze!

MORGAN LE FEY. Comics writers just looooooove Morgan Le Fey. Almost every publisher of superhero books came up with a supervillainous variation on King Arthur's arch-nemesis, but leave it to Marvel to give her the most convoluted backstory imaginable. They somehow involved her in the continuities of Dr. Doom, the High Evolutionary, the Inhumans, Spider-Woman, and, for all I know, It the Living Colossus. But no matter how fancy you dress up this suitable case for treatment, nothing changes the fact that she is basically Elvira, Mistress of the Dark with a skull on her cooter.

MUTANT FORCE. Oh, laws, laws. If you ever find yourself thinking "man, for a group headed by someone as cool as Magneto, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants sure are lame"...well, it's not that you're wrong. They are lame. Blob, Toad and Unus the Untouchable, in particular, are so lame that Professor X could beat them in a footrace. But at least you can be thankful that they're not as lame as Mutant Force, so count your blessings. These sad specimens, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby after drinking six bottles of Manischewitz each after their nephew's bar mitzvahs, were hired on by Magneto, who at the time was calling himself Mister One and apparently wanted to put together a team of evil mutants comprised entirely of number two. Aside from their extremely uncreative names (Kirby, apparently having completely run out of ideas, dubbed them Burner, Lifter, Peeper, Shocker and Slither), they were very disturbing to look at, especially Shocker -- whose claw-feet, for some reason, did not render him as immobile as a Dalek going upstairs -- and Peeper, who had a whole bug-eyed child molester look going.

MYSTERIO. As if any other reason were needed that Kevin Smith should not be let within a thousand miles of a comic book script, he killed off Mysterio, one of the best Spider-Man villains ever. Thanks a lot, Ballcap! Couldn't you have killed off Hydro-Man instead?

MYSTIQUE. Comic nerds (like, say, myself) are always bitching about movies that fuck with the "canon" by making wholesale changes to their favorite super-types with no explanation. But the fact is, they often make them better, rather than worse. Take, for example, the X-Men movies, and what they did with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. They made Pyro more interesting by giving him a personality; they made Unus the Untouchable more interesting by not putting him in the movie. They made...well, all right, be fair, they didn't make Toad more interesting. But at least they made him very slightly less pitiful than he is in the comic books. And Mystique! Hell, you can count the ways: having her assume a bigger role as Magneto's good right hand; dropping (so far at least) the "Nightcrawler's mom" angle and "girlfriend of stupid dumpy Destiny" angle; having her be a total fucking bad-ass; having her played by the super-hot Rebecca Romijn-Stamos; having her be naked throughout most of the series; having her played by the super-hot Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and make out with a fat guy in a toilet -- I could go on and on. Bravo, Bryan Singer! Bravo!

NIGHTCRAWLER. You know, I'm going to come right out and say it: I don't like Nightcrawler. I don't like his furry blue skin; I don't like his cutesy "bamf"; I don't like his bogus Claremont cod-German; I don't like how he's constantly reinvented with Sybil-like personality shifts to appeal to newer generations of readers. Whether it's "tortured freak Nightcrawler" or "zany circus clown Nightcrawler" or "failed guilty Catholic Nightcrawler" or "wacky teen Nightcrawler" or "extradimensional swashbuckling pirate Nightcrawler", all this guy is doing is taking up valuable space that could be given to Wolverine killing people or Colossus rogering teenaged girls. Even the movies, which improve on almost all the X-Men, can't do anything with Nightcrawler except give him some ridiculous tattoos and have him played by an actor who delivers the worst German accent in the history of film ("Zo I vock in zer falley uff zer shattow uff zer dess", my ass"). Also, he is named after bait. BAIT!

NIGHTSHADE. Can someone explain to me why every single black female comic-book character created from 1965 to 1983 looked like Pam Grier in one of her grade-Z blaxploitation roles? Seriously. I mean, admittedly, there were only about three black female characters in Marvel Comics during that span (I think they're up to seven now), but every damn one of them looks like she should be named "Vampirella Jones" or "Hot Potato Simmons" or something. Honestly, just look at her! She's wearing a leather bikini, for Christ's sake!

NIMROD. "I am Nimrod." HA HA YOU SURE ARE, BUDDY!

NORTHSTAR. Studying the history of Northstar is like taking a clinic on how to completely mishandle a gay character. In brief:

1. Decide you're going to have a major character in one of your books be gay. But don't come right out and say it; dance around the topic as much as is humanly possible.

2. Have other characters imply that he is (a) a weakling, (b) a sissy or (c) not really a part of the team, because he's "keeping secrets".

3. Give him a really hot sister for the fanboys to crack off to, so that they don't fly into a panic at being confronted with their own sublimated homosexuality and stop reading the comic en masse.

4. Make sure that he's got some other repellent personality traits so that we're forced to despise him right off the bat, like he's really arrogant, or French, or both.

5. As soon as is humanly possible, give him AIDS.

6. When you are inevitably criticized for giving him AIDS, go into a tailspin of damage control and come up with some ridiculously convoluted "explanation" for how he doesn't really have AIDS after all. Like, for example, you could say that it was part of a nefarious plot by Loki. That should stick!

7. Kill him anyway.

8. Years later, try and claim credit for having been brave enough to create one of the first gay characters in comics. Do this with all the pride of the utterly shameless.