LUDIC LOG

Christ, what does that title mean? I'm sure I don't know. Anyway, another Thursday has come, and that means another look at the mid-'80s encyclopedia of men in tights known as The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Today, we're gonna look at issue #10, covering Paladin to the Rhino.

Two notes: first of all, once again, I'm gonna move characters around a bit, such as including characters who actually were listed in the Books of the Dead. I'm doing this, and other stuff like making up information that I can't remember, because, well...okay, I'll confess it: I was as much a Marvel zombie back in the '80s as anyone else. But Marvel, in the incredibly incapable hands of nimrods like Jim "Every Idea I've Ever Had Was a Good One" Shooter and Bill "Can We Get Some More Teenage Girls With No Pants On The Cover?" Jemas, has gone from bad to really, really bad. And so I haven't really paid a lot of attention to a lot of their output over the last decade or so. For this reason, please indulge me if I can't keep the Byzantine X-continuity straight. Second, I beg your further indulgence if I make a little too much reference to the picher shows, but I'll be Frank Castle: I'd rather watch outtakes from X2 for twelve hours straight than read an issue of the current X-Men. Seeing as it, you know, sucks.

Anyway, let's get to it.

PALADIN. Have gun, will travel reads the card of a man...but not this man. This was a sort of Punisher-lite who had a snazzy costume and not much else to recommend him. I really wouldn't even mention him, except he's the only character going until you get to...

PHOENIX I. The Jean Grey Phoenix, this is. She's, of course, most famous for dying. Then not dying. Then dying again. Then not dying. She's had more lives than a cat played by John Travolta, and is probably the best example of how comic book writers piss away the goodwill created by great stories like X-Men #137 with their inability to leave the dead dead. I'm not about to give a lecture on dramatic structure to the underpaid nebbishes who write these things, but I will say, you can only kill someone and bring them back so many times before people, namely me, lose interest. In the case of Phoenix, the number of times was about eight.

PHOENIX II. Now, if you gotta kill someone, why not kill Rachel Summers? Not only was she profoundly irritating, but she made the X-continuity more confusing than Gardner Fox's worst Earth-2 nightmare. She was, I believe, Jean Grey's daughter, mother, grandmother, clone, son-in-law, brother, half-brother, wife, husband, cousin, niece, and possibly girlfriend. Also, she always has bad haircuts.

PLANTMAN. Plantman was a British scientist built like a weightlifter. Maybe this is why his crappy inventions never worked, because instead of spending time in the lab, he spent it in the gym. At one point, he invented a gun that was supposed to control plants, although "invented" probably isn't the right word, since, like everything else he came up with, it was useless. But then it got struck by lightning! And it worked! What a happy coincidence. Of course, this is how everything generally works in the wacky world of comic book science, but I dunno. His origin seemed pretty forced even by the low standards of funnybook supervillains. And yet they used him again and again! Affirmative action for retards, folks: it works.

POLARIS. Polaris was created to answer three particular needs in the Marvel Universe: first, that there were not nearly enough mutants in the world; second, that the Scott Summers-Jean Grey family tree was not nearly complicated enough; and third, that there wasn't a character who was almost like Magneto, only female, with green hair, and really annoying. I'd have to say, in retrospect, that she filled these needs admirably.

PORCUPINE. Lord, do I wish I could have found a shot of Porky's original costume. He was always described as a "walking haystack", but to me he looked more like a guy who crafted his supervillain outfit out of a book or really bad carpet samples.

POSSESSOR. The Elders of the Universe, as I have mentioned, were really irritating. Having existed since before the dawn of time, they filled the endless millennia not by becoming incredibly well-rounded and knowledgable, but by wrapping their entire identities around one completely shallow characteristic. It's as if you were granted godlike powers, near-total omniscience and immortality, and used those gifts to spend eternity collecting Hummel figurines. The Possessor couldn't even get it together enough to buy some decent clothes and wandered the length and breadth of the universe wearing a tattered green robe. Classy.

POWER MAN. How cool? So cool that a young Nicholas Coppola changed his name to Cage to honor the inner-city superthug. Okay, so an endorsement from Nicholas Cage isn't really a mark of coolness like it used to be. Come on! It's Donald Kaufman! Aaaah, you people are Philistines.

PROFESSOR POWER. Have you ever wondered what Iron Man would look like if his armor had an open facemask and was a really ugly combination of orange and green? Me neither.

PROFESSOR X. Good thing about the movie: making him crippled again, instead of turning him into some kind of kung-fu master (which is the direction they were headed in when I stopped paying attention and started reading crappy French novels instead); having him played by all-around Transatlantic ham Patrick Stewart. Bad thing about the movie: giving him such a flagrantly Big School accent that you could never believe he was Juggernaut's brother. And who doesn't like Juggernaut? Nobody I wanna know. Juggernaut!

PSYCHO-MAN. A tiny freaky little alien midget in a cybernetic bodysuit who carried around a gigantic Kriby-gizmo that controlled peoples' emotions. Sure, he was great at technology, but really bad at product design; the thing had three huge buttons reading "HATE", "DOUBT" and "FEAR" in a space that could have held dozens of smaller buttons a la a modern universal remote, thus allowing intriguing possibilities like "ENNUI", "MALAISE", "GIDDINESS", "DIFFIDENCE", and "BIPOLAR".

PUCK. Canadian. Get it? Haw! He was a midget, only not really. He was like Wolverine, only not really. He was interesting, only not really.

PUNISHER. Sure, he was the guy who changed the very concept of the superhero from the superior moral creation who realized the deepest aspirations of humanity to a deranged psychopath who would gun you down for buying a dime bag. But you know what, folks? He wasn't all that original. The Punisher was just a big rip-job by the Marvel crew of the innumerably "men's adventure stories" of the 1970s where some lantern-jawed maniac would spend 200 paged blowing the faces off of nameless mob goons, punctuated by ineptly written sex scenes. You know the ones, like the Avenger and the Executioner and the Haranguer and the Vexer. That's what the Punisher is: he's Nick Carter in a union suit with a skull on the tummy.

PURPLE MAN. Right, he had a hot daughter. We all know that. But look: if your real name was "Killgrave", why wouldn't you use that for your supervillain name instead of "The Purple Man"? Even if your skinis purple? Didn't this guy get the word about purple?

QUASIMOTO. Look, it's a good try. He's ugly, he's go a big head, he's affiliated with the Mad Thinker, and he's got a ridiculous acronym (Quasi-Motivational Destruct Mechanism, whatever that's supposed to mean). But he's just a pale imitation of MODOK.

RED GHOST. His name is Ivan Kragoff! Get it? Kragoff! Like "crack off"! HAW HAW HAW!. Okay, fine. You try writing these things every week.