LUDIC LOG

Thursday means time for another glimpse at the Marvel Zombie's Bible -- the 1980s encyclopedia of crimefighting men and women and the fat nerds who loved them. Today we'll be taking a look at the 11th issue of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, from Richard Rider to the Sidewinder.

Reading these OHOTMUs, you get a strange sense that time has come to a halt. I quit reading Marvel titles in the early 1990s, and so for all I know all this stuff is current. DC Who's Who at least had a larger stable of artists and writers, while the Marvel handbook was all written by those two hapless dingbats, Pete "Sackful of Silver Sable" Sanderson and Mark "I Gave Captain America a Jewish Girlfriend" Gruenwald. Even the covers reflect this stagnant futility, with the heroes running endlessly towards nothing. It's enough to make a zombie depressed. But at least it's almost over, and we can look forward to jumping into our graves.

Boy, that was way too serious for this retarded series! Let's go to the yuk-yuks.

RICHARD RIDER. The alter ego of Nova. At this point he's not Nova anymore, but he's still in the book for some reason. He's not really interesting, or relevant, or important, but hell, gotta make that page rate. And who better to illustrate this crappy has-been than the man who created Flash's Rogue's Gallery -- Carmine Infantino? Yes, the man who drew the ugliest supervillains of all time was brought over to Marvel specifically to illustrate a former superhero who nobody cared about even when he had powers. Carmine doesn't do his normal dramatic job; there's not stripes, polka-dots or huge earflaps. But he does give us a very, very disturbing crotch shot of Dick Rider, which makes it appear he is keeping Baron Karza in his pants.

RINGMASTER. Created by Ditko! You bet. Ringmaster has a hypno-wheel in his hat. Don't you wish you had a hypno-wheel in your hat? I know I do. His real name is Maynard Tibaldt, which is a name so stupid that it probably explains why he picked a costume that's garish even for a circus performer. Oddly enough, Ringmaster's father was also a circus-ringmaster-cum-Nazi-supercriminal. It's nice to see people taking on the family business.

ROCKET RACOON. Marvel seemed to have a thing for creating characters based on pop-cultural concepts that no one understood. From the inexplicable drug-humor of Howard the Duck to the snarky in-jokes of Claremont creations like Sym or B'Nee & C'cll, no one did the pointless and obscure like Marvel. Case in point: Rocket Racoon, an anthropomorphic 'coon based on an unpopular and not particularly good Beatles song. As outer-space racoon characters go, Rocket was slightly less lame than DC's Ch'p, but honestly, when you find yourself judging the relative worth of outer-space racoon characters, it's time to go to bed.

ROGUE. Mmmmm, yasss. Like many a teenaged dork, I had me a big crush on Rogue. She was pure bred-in-the-bone white trash; she sang Nazareth songs in the shower; she had a great power; and she sucked the life out of the ridiculous Ms. Marvel on her way to becoming the baddest bad-ass in the X-Men. (Don't get it twisted -- she could have handed Wolverine his hat in half a second.) Rogue was one of the few characters from the X-Men comic who was actually worse in the movie version; they got rid of most of her powers, busted her down a few years (in the comics, she was in her early 20s), and worst of all, changed her from a dangerous, ass-kicking hillbilly to a perennial victim. Rogue in the comics used to be a super-villain and always retained a bit of a sinister side; Rogue in the movies was just a pushover.

ROM, SPACE KNIGHT. Long ago, I made a promise that I would not sully the pages of my comic book recaps with discussions of characters based on toys. Rom is why.

SABRA. The official super-hero of the nation of Israel, Sabra was the only comic book character I know of to be named after a pear, unless you count the Amazing Pear-Man. I only remember her from the dorky Contest of Champions mini, where she exchanged some predictable barbs with the lamentable Arabian Knight, but I am assured that she not only slummed around with the Hulk for a while, but also was eventually "revealed" to be a mutant (along with 90% of the rest of the Marvel Universe) and hooked up with some X-Men offshoot. Although she was a representative of the government of Israel and a high-ranking MOSSAD agent, you never saw her blowing the head off of an 11-year-old Palestinian kid in the comics.

SABRETOOTH. Another endlessly confusing product of the X-continuity, Sabretooth was Logan's best friend, co-Weapon X enlistee, brother, father, cousin, son and possibly clone. He's also one of 78 people who fathered a child with Mystique. That said, he was a pretty good supervillain, decently handled in the movie, and he liked to give people a hard time.

SASQUATCH. The token brick in the profoundly boring Canadian super-group known as Rush...er, I mean, Alpha Flight. Sasquatch was notable for any number of reasons: his asinine love affair with Aurora, which inspired some of John Byrne's most ludicrous dialogue; his insipid alter-ego; his running around naked with a flap of hair covering a presumably monstrous wang (also, note that in the drawing, his ab muscles clearly look like a drooping testicular sac); and his hopping bodies for reasons that are lost in the mists of time, eventually becoming Box, then Shaman, then Smart Alec, and then a woman. No, really. It was at this point that he tried to rekindle his thing-thing with Aurora, but she wasn't having any of his trifling Sorority Girls Gone Wild action. Sas, of course, later hooked up with American butt-rockers Tenacious D, and the rest is history.

SCARECROW. Marvel and DC both had supervillains named Scarecrow, and they were both pretty cool. What the fuck are the odds of that?

SCOURGE. Scourge wasn't really a good character; he had a boring costume, no particular motivation, a crappy catchphrase ("Justice is served!"), and no interesting powers, weapons or hooks. But boy, did the Marvel Universe need him. Neatly described by Ludic Log guest columnist William Renkin as "Marvel's immune system", Scourge was a mysterious asshole who went around assassinating shitty super-villains who no one cared about but who were still gunking up the continuity. He was a one-man Crisis on Infinite Earths. And even though he was dull and had no dramatic reason to exist, his services in wiping out schmucks like Turner D. Century, Megatek and the Termite were profoundly appreciated. He was like the garbageman: you might not want to hang out with him, but you're glad he existed.

SENTINELS. Okay, sure, they were pretty cool despite being purple, and sure, I hope they're in X3. But these giant mutant-hunting robots sure have a strange background. First of all, they were designed by a scientist with the frankly bizarre moniker of "Bolivar Trask". Second, Trask was an anthropologist. When was the last time you heard of a fucking anthropologist creating an army of 30-foot tall killer androids with nuclear hearts that powered a wide array of laser weaponry? I mean, besides Margaret Mead?

SHADOWCAT. You know why we're mentioning her, right? Because every nerd in America wanted to do Kitty Pryde. Everyone but me, that is. When you've got fine aged white-trash k-l-a-s-s like Rogue around, why waste your time whacking it to a jailbaity, snoreworthy suburban donut like Kitty? She was the kind of person who probably said "Oh my goodness". No wonder she could only attract mud-clods like Colossus. Even worse, when Marvel attempted to hip her up, making her "tough" and "edgy" through failed efforts like changing her name from Sprite to Shadowcat and sticking her in a mini-series with Wolverine in a terribly misguided attempt to convince the world that she could single-handedly defeat a platoon of cybernetic ninjas, she actually got even lamer. It was like watching that girl who used to go to Bible Camp every summer act all rebellious because she'd just discovered Culture Club. At some point, they apparently stuck her in a leather-slut outfit and renamed her "Widget", which is even more pathetic than "Sprite".

SHAPER OF WORLDS. He could shape worlds and craft universes, but he couldn't make himself a decent set of prosthetic legs?

SHE-HULK. Look, I know what you people are looking for. Well, you're not going to get them, see? Not for nothing. When I see some money in my PayPal account, then we'll talk.

S.H.I.E.L.D. The Supreme Headquarters of International Espionage, Law Enforcement Division, as we were told every goddamn time these guys appeared. I guess they expected us not to be able to remember that, or other details like how that acronym actually spells S.H.I.E.L.E.D. Anyway, this was Marvel's #1 super-spy outfit, and it fulfilled all the qualities a supergroup needs: lantern-jawed leader with macho name (Nick Fury), big lunkheaded muscleman with silly name (Dum Dum Dugan), blonde tart with porn star name (Sharon Carter), weedy annoying nerd sidekick (Jasper Sitwell), pompous and arrogant but suave foreigner (Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine -- who writes this stuff, Jackie Collins?), and the black guy (Gabriel Jones). Later on in the S.H.I.E.L.D. story, they even threw in a token hesher dude with a mullet in the form of my long-lost cousin, Alexander Goodwin Pierce. Yes, the non-powered comic book adventure team: leaving no stereotype unturned and no token unspent, since 1938!