It’s worth noting that Lois Lane has a singular distinction among comics characters, being the only non-super (or, at least, non-protagonistic) character to appear in Who’s Who.¹ No other non-super characters make the cut: not Ma and Pa Kent, not Perry White, not Commissioner Gordon, not Amanda Waller.²

There’s a reason why Lois makes the cut and why none of them do: it’s because, even nearly fifteen years before she and Clark finally got married, she was established as Superman’s equal. Not just his “girlfriend” – at the time Who’s Who was published, the end of the Bronze Era, Lois and Superman/Clark were actually taking a break, because the Bronze Age Superman comics had made it pretty clear that Lois already had a pretty good idea that Superman was actually Clark and she wasn’t happy about him bullshitting for all those years (not that this made her stop loving him, of course, but it was definitely a bump in the road). Hell, fans had actually been clamoring for the two to get married for some time – not just the pre-internet equivalent of ’shippers, but longtime Superman fans.

This is why: the only natural course of action for Lois and Clark is to get married.

It’s really not like any other relationship in comics. For example, as much as I disagree with the idea that Peter and Mary Jane shouldn’t be married (and consider it exhibit A that proven comic writers like Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek and many others can still be completely and utterly wrong about characters they’ve written god knows how many times in certain respects), there’s an argument that can at least be made for them splitting up or never getting married, because Spider-Man at his essence is about the virtue of fortitude.³ Fortitude is about picking yourself up and doing good even when life kicks you in the balls, and divorce – or pathetic magic wish fiat – is a kick in the balls. On the other hand, Batman and Catwoman (or Silver St. Cloud, or Vicki Vale, or Wonder Woman, or… well, pick one) can never get together because Batman, at his essence, is about the necessity of sacrifice. Batman not only doesn’t not need a happy ending, he actively opposes one.

Superman isn’t about any of that. Superman is about truth and justice and doing the right thing; he’s a purer story than any of his contemporaries, both at once simpler and infinitely more complex. That’s why he deserves a love interest who’s just as good and as tough (and understatedly complex) as he is; it’s why Lois Lane gradually evolved from being a comedic annoyance to becoming a tough, smart reporter.⁴ Eventually, because this is comics and that means a little hyperbole is a given, she became the best reporter. Which is fine, because as others have written before: Superman needs a super woman.

And this is the kicker: Lois Lane can’t really be a match for Superman if she doesn’t eventually figure out the whole secret identity thing. This is because there’s a dozen perfectly good reasons why Superman’s secret identity should work, and the comics have used them all: because most people just assume he’s Superman all the time, because it’s not that hard for someone who’s practiced to act like two different people and convincingly, because most people really just don’t look, because Superman super-vibrates when he’s on duty ever-so-slightly to blur pictures of him, whatever. They all work fine, which is why jokes about “it’s only a pair of glasses” ring hollow and feel petty.

But they don’t work if you’re supposed to be an ace reporter who by virtue of being not just good at your job but the best (and Lois is the best) means you’re supposed to recognize things as being a bit off when they’re off, even if it takes you a while because nobody else would notice it. If Lois is Superman’s equal – and of course she is – she has to realize those things happening. That’s why just about every satisfactory rendition of the secret ID reveal to Lois has Lois trumping it by figuring it out on her own.⁵ And once she knows, there’s no reason not to get married; that’s the only bar. She’s not going to accept “it’s too dangerous” (and Superman couldn’t stay away if he tried).

And really, what’s the appeal of a status quo where Lois isn’t aware of the truth? Superman angsting about how Lois doesn’t know? Lois scheming to prove that Superman has a secret identity? Boring recycled hjinks and Superman robots and Batman pretending to be Superman and other penny-ante misogyny? That shit was stale in the Silver Age – it’s why the Bronze Age happened, for Christ’s sake – and there’s just nothing left in it. Flashback stories are fine; let them be flashbacks. The complexity of a regular relationship suits Clark and Lois to the ground. They have the same problems every other couple does, just in a slightly different way involving evil scientists and tyrant aliens and the occasional giant killer robot. But they have them nonetheless. There’s more juice in that than a thousand “oh, how will I get away from Lois this time?” sequences.

There are a significant number of comics writers who think that Wonder Woman is Superman’s perfect match, mostly because they’ve read “Men of Steel, Women of Kleenex” too many times and think that the most important aspect of Superman’s perfect mate is whether or not he can fuck her according to the rules they’ve made up in their head. However, Wonder Woman is a boring cipher. Lois isn’t: she’s her own woman, and we’re well past the point where a Lois Lane ongoing should be back on the stands. (And not Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane either. She can stand on her own two feet, thank you very much.)

She really is the best female character in superhero comics.

1. Okay: Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang and Alfred all make appearances, but rather than as themselves, they’re listed under Elastic Lad, Insect Queen and the Outsider, respectively. If you don’t know how Alfred transformed into the Outsider, let’s just say “Silver Age Batman comics” and leave it at that. You’re better off not knowing. [↩]
2. Eventually in one of the supplements they published an issue that was mostly JUST non-super characters. Terry Long shows up. He is gross. [↩]
3. Much like Charlie Brown. The comparison has been made before, I’m sure. [↩]
4. And because girls started reading Superman comics and complained that she was being written as a dimwit, of course. [↩]
5. Exception: the actual one that happened in the post-Crisis pre-Death-of-Superman comics. Incidentally, if DC is going to retcon everything else to suit their whims, why don’t they retcon that? [↩]

I was going to write a long thing about Tyr sucking, but basically it boils down to this: he looks like when you were seven and you pulled off one of the arms off one of your action figures and then stuck a robot arm on it. And that’s just not cool. Not in a comic kids pay money for. They can stick their own damn robot arms on their own damn action figures. They don’t need comic books to do that for them.

Even when Dave Cockrum first drew him, he didn’t look cool. He looked like Dave Cockrum working on a prototype for one of the Starjammers.

If Cable had been invented in the 1970s, he would look like Tyr. I can’t think of any better way to describe Tyr’s total lack of cool than that.

Now, if you look at the Jester without knowing anything about him, you’d probably write him off as Yet Another Bad Idea From The Golden Age (Which Is Forgivable Because It Was The Dawn Of Comics And So On). Seriously, that’s possibly the silliest, most garish superhero costume of all time. Not only does it include a fool’s cap and bells and a muscle shirt with poofy sleeves, but it has both stripes and polka-dots in an eye-popping yellow-and-black motif.

But here’s the thing: the writers, even then, knew what they were doing! See, Paul Gustavson, who created the Jester (and also the original Golden Age Marvel Comics Angel, the one with the moustache, who has shown himself to have some legs as the more-or-less official symbol of Marvel’s Golden Age – the one who isn’t Namor or Captain America), recognized that the Jester was a pretty silly idea. Probably he created him after a three-day bender, looked down at the paper, then at the bottle of whatever he had been drinking, and quietly said “fuuuuuuck…”

And then he made it work. He did so by having the Jester’s total ridiculousness be his gimmick: the criminals the Jester fought were scared of him because the Jester, so far as they were concerned, was goddamn crazy. Gustavson emphasized the Jester’s freaky-sounding high pitched laugh in the stories, which makes sense because if you were a criminal, probably the last thing you would want to hear at 2 AM in a shadowy alley would be giggling from the shadows. That would be seriously creepy.

Basically, the Jester is the Joker if the Joker were a hero rather than a villain. And also not (too) crazy.

DC got the Jester along with the rest of the Quality Comics properties, but have barely touched him. With one major exception – a guest shot in Starman #46, where James Robinson basically let the Jester do his crazyfied schtick in a teamup with Ted Knight – he’s gone more or less unused. In a way it makes sense, because the Jester doesn’t really work in a modern setting and DC isn’t doing any titles like All-Star Squadron right now where they focus on a past historical era of superheroing. But it’s still a shame nonetheless, because there’s some real storytelling meat here.

This is the interesting thing about Sunburst: other than one appearance in a Global Guardians backup story in a Superboy comic, he was a total nonentity in the DCU Universe. I mean, total nonentity: he’d even been hypnotized – at his own request – to become unaware of his superpowers. Possibly this was because whoever was writing the story realized that Sunburst’s powers and gimmick were almost entirely a duplicate of the Global Guardian known as Rising Sun, who is pretty awesome in his own right.

But then, in Crisis On Infinite Earths #12, with literally no advance warning whatsoever, Marv Wolfman pulls Sunburst out of just about the deepest obscurity a comics character can go into, and not only gives George Perez the opportunity to draw Sunburst fighting the Anti-Monitor’s shadow demons alongside Rising Sun as part of the superb “battle around the world” sequence (seriously, Crisis #12 is probably the most brilliantly crafted ending to an epic comics story ever and if anybody says different they are wrong and bad and also wrong), but he goes even further and he gives Sunburst a little story arc.

It’s Sunburst who convinces Dr. Light (the female Dr. Light, not Dr. McRapeyrape) that to serve as a superhero is the highest honor one can undertake. With no introduction beyond Sunburst explaining that they both had to learn this, Wolfman makes Sunburst a noble figure without giving him more time than the character deserves – Sunburst gets maybe five balloons’ worth of dialogue. And then after that he kills Sunburst off, offscreen to boot, because that’s Sunburst’s arc: he learns he has to be a hero, he nuts up and is heroic, and he dies nobly in battle against baddies. With five lines of dialogue and maybe six or seven panels over an entire double-sized comic book, which was not incidentally one of the most important books DC had ever published, the final issue of the absolutely enormous gamble that Crisis was.

Basically, Sunburst is the Biggs Darklighter of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I mean that as a compliment. He’s an object lesson on how obscure characters should get killed off: he gets a noble ending and his death isn’t fetishized for the sake of gore.

Count Vertigo is one of those villains who I think has never really gotten his proper due. He’s kind of stuck in between the second and third tier of DC supervillains and should be higher.

He started off with a decent powerset that’s pretty unique and a great costume (seriously, it’s exactly what a supervillain costume should be: the exact right balance point between ominous and colorful, without becoming garish or over-the-top). This was later extended to be given a really great character hook: the heir to the throne of a small European country. It gave him a sense of duty and a motivation often not present in supervillains.

Of course DC tried to piss this away by destroying Vlatava, his country, when the Spectre went nuts (which the Spectre seems to do every other year now). But that was easily ignored – expat Vlatavans meant that Vertigo now had a country to rebuild. And Vertigo will do whatever he thinks is necessary to do that, and he’s smart, which is why he’s one of the villains who jumps back and forth between working for himself and working for the feds and working for other villains.

And that’s the real reason Count Vertigo is a good character. Most villains are predictable, because most villains are ciphers who only exist to make trouble for heroes and barely have motivations in their own right beyond “want money” or “kill a guy.” (The Joker, who should be a force of pure chaos, is absolutely terrible in this respect.) But the truly great villains are the ones that are capable of surprising the reader.

Major Force, as I previously pointed out, sucks because when you see him in a comic, you know exactly what he’s going to do. When you see Count Vertigo in a comic, he’s one of the few DC villains whose actions are never guaranteed (Lex Luthor and Captain Cold are the other two big ones in this regard for DC); maybe he’s working for Amanda Waller on the side this time around and only pretending to be working for the Society, or maybe he’s taking a commission for the Society proper, or maybe this is all something to do with Checkmate. He never has a hate on for a superhero, because what’s the point of that? He’s a professional, and not just because being a professional is cool, but because it’s vital for his survival and his personal mission.

True independent agents in the DCU are rare, but he’s one of them. And that’s why he’s good.

When DC bought Charlton’s intellectual properties, they got some decent acquisitions on the cheap out of it: the Question is probably the most important, along with Blue Beetle (”the intellectual property so good, they shot him in the head”), and although everybody makes fun of Captain Atom the good Captain has his place as the DC Universe’s official dupe of shadowy powerful men. After a long stint of meaninglessness, Nightshade managed to get a little respect as a member of Shadowpact, and they’ve revived the long-dormant Judomaster tag by giving it to some new girl Judomaster in JSA: Fifth One On The Right Gets A Miniseries.

And then there’s Peacemaker. Peacemaker, living proof that no matter how hard you try, some concepts are just stupid. In the case of Peacemaker, the concept was “a man who loves peace so much, he’s willing to kill for it.” Seriously, that’s his tag line. You know how I know that’s his tag line? Because every writer who uses a Peacemaker – any Peacemaker – uses that tag line, because it sounds dramatic. However, it also doesn’t make any sense, because it’s stupid. It’s a very stupid way to describe someone who is essentially a cop in a costume – moreso than most for that matter. Like Peacemaker, it only sounds cool until you think about it for a couple of seconds.

(It also doesn’t help that he has a terrible costume. The Keith Giffen rendition above is probably the single best version of Peacemaker’s costume and it is still fucking ugly as sin – like a Cylon on ‘ludes or something.)

And he’s kind of a schmuck. The Christopher Smith Peacemaker is basically a crazy dude who listens to the voices in his head (which he started hearing after, guess what, he got hit in the head!) who tell him to kill baddies. This works really good up until the voices tell him to go kill Eclipso, at which point he dies because he’s just a guy with a couple of fancy guns and Eclipso is, well. Eclipso. Since then, there have been several other Peacemakers. They have all been either boring or stupid. Yes, including the new one in Blue Beetle.

It’s easy to explain why Peacemaker sucks. Peacemaker sucks because he’s just a guy with some guns and a little baggage. He doesn’t even have Punisher-level baggage to justify why he wears a helmet that looks like a tin-plated fan. He just kind of thinks it’s the right thing to do. He’s so boring that the best thing he can do is be bodycount fodder. He did that just fine. Let him stay friggin’ dead until the next time they feel the need to rejuvenate the trademark.

I was gonna do this week’s entry starting out by making fun of Strong Bow’s listed abilities, which include the fact that he has very strong legs since he walks a lot. But then I looked at him and I changed my mind.

I changed my mind because fucking look at him. This is not some happy nature warrior. Look at the face. This guy is a stone-cold killer. He’s not a psychopath or a kill-crazy fun-seeker or a berserker ninja samurai Canadian possibly descended from a race of werewolves or something. He’s not somebody who kills people for fun; there’s no pleasure in it for him. It’s just what he often ends up having to do, and he’s just really, really good at killing people. You can tell just by looking at him, and by the way he holds that giant fucking knife.

This, my friends, is a total one hundred percent badass. Look at the background art, where he is stabbing a dinosaur to death. Maybe he needs meat for a long journey. Maybe the dinosaur decided to try and kill him, and found out the error of its ways. It doesn’t really matter. Strong Bow doesn’t care either way. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that the dinosaur has to die. Somewhere in the universe’s cosmic planner, somebody wrote “today, Strong Bow kills dinosaur,” and the reasons are really besides the point; there’s need for him to kill a dinosaur, so he kills the dinosaur.

Maybe I’m basing all of this on one bit of art, but so what? Look at it.

QUICK QUIZ: You are a billionaire American businessman turned Senator, enormously charismatic and vitally important in your country. You wish to become President of the United States. Do you:

A) leverage your personal wealth and popularity in the Senate to run for President, using your money strategically to create an unstoppable electoral campaign, targeting swing states with large cash outlays in the form of advertising, and spend your way to the Presidency in an era predating campaign finance laws?

OR

B) use your power and influence to take over a small, moderately unsuccessful high-tech crime cartel, use it to hire a shapeshifting assassin to kidnap the President and Vice-President, then have the shapeshifting assassin kill the President and assume his form so he can name you Vice-President, then resign, leaving you as the Presidency? (Note that if this plan fails, you have a backup plan where you don a palette-swapped version of the Prowler’s costume and fight Booster Gold to the death.)

Choose one and explain your answer.

TWENTY REASONS WHY QUISLET IS AWESOME

1.) He is a tiny alien in a tiny spaceship
2.) Who talks like Yoda if Yoda had gotten himself totally buzzed on like seven dozen espressos beforehand
3.) Or possibly like Spongebob Squarepants, again with the seven dozen espressos
4.) Or most accurately, a combination of Spongebob Squarepants and Yoda, buzzed out on caffeine
5.) Which come to think of it explains a lot of Quislet’s mindset really
6.) Stated official reason for wanting to fight crime: “What fun!” (Legion of Super-Heroes v3 #14)
7.) Brainiac 5 could never actually explain how his powers worked
8.) But so what, because his power was turning inanimate objects into giant warrior-smashy things and using them to beat up bad guys
9.) Seriously: tiny spaceship
10.) Which he stole
11.) From his home planet which is in an alternate dimension
12.) Frequency with which he would shout “hurrah” when beating up bad guys with inanimate objects
13.) Or when he was blowing things up by possessing them and then leaving immediately
14.) Essentially he is a sentient spark of energy
15.) From a world of sentient sparks of energy who really, really hate the concept of individualism
16.) And who really don’t like it when you shout “hurrah”
17.) Which is why when they recaptured Quislet, he basically invented lying (for sentient sparks of energy, anyway) by pretending that if they didn’t let him go the spaceship would blow up and kill everybody
18.) So he got to rejoin the Legion, and fought the Emerald Empress to basically a standstill before she blew up his ship
19.) Which forced him to return home, but not before he uttered the best last words of any comics character in history: “Never stop having fun!”
20.) Seriously. Tiny spaceship!

Serious question: does anybody actually like Major Force?

I mean, yes, I get he’s a villain, but everybody has their favorite villains. Mine is Lex Luthor. Lots of people love the Joker or Dr. Doom. And there’s always going to be one or two holdouts for the lesser lights, somebody who really loves the Gambler or the Ratcatcher or Big Wheel. That’s natural. But does anybody really love Major Force? Or even like him?

It’s not a problem with his concept, which is actually pretty clever. Since the experiment that turned Nathaniel Adam into Captain Atom also flung him twenty years into the future, the people conducting it had no idea that they hadn’t killed him – so they tried again, but this time they used a psychotic murderer on the basis that if they killed him, nobody would care. (Of course, the question of “well, what if they had succeeded” is one that is casually walked around. I have always favoured “they wanted data on the huge explosion, but needed someone expendable to trigger the huge explosion, and so…”) And then a little while after Captain Atom pops into the future, hello, it’s Major Force! Perfectly good start to a story, right? And Wade Eiling (who was never, ever interesting until he became The General, which is just so comics it is perfect) makes him a government agent, and…

…that’s when it goes downhill. Because Major Force is just kind of boring: he’s a self-interested thug with a tendency to get violent who is basically indestructible. He has never done anything interesting ever. “A ha,” you say, “but he killed Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend!” And my answer is “big deal,” because A) all of Kyle’s girlfriends die sooner or later and B) her death wasn’t about her, it was about Kyle, and Major Force could have been absolutely anybody and it wouldn’t have mattered. Similarly, he killed Guy Gardner’s mother for some reason I forget and again, nobody cares. Nobody cares about anything Major Force does, because he doesn’t have any personality worth mentioning: he just does things other people tell him to do. Why does he do these things? “Because.” Commenting on Major Force as a character is like commenting on the character of the gun that killed Batman’s parents. “Well, he has this trigger. And if you pull the trigger… people might die!”

And the worst thing is that he just keeps showing up. Every time DC wants to have the government be sorta-malevolent (which is like seven times a year now), up pops Major Force like a bad pimple. He just showed up in the godawful Captain Atom backup story in one of the Superman books that doesn’t currently have Superman in it, because the very moment that Captain Atom found out that the government was behind him being in a fantasy world – hey! Major Force! I think if you say “government” five times fast in the DC Universe, Major Force just kind of shows up. Like Candyman. Except he sucks.

I always felt Warp got a bit of a raw deal getting killed off in Salvation Run (which has numerous flaws as a story, not least the idea that half of the supervillains would willingly say “sure thing, Joker can be the leader!”). I mean, yeah, he’s a teleporter and all so he can come back easy enough, but even so – Warp is a cool character, and cool characters shouldn’t get sacrificed for a lousy climax to a miniseries most people didn’t even read. Warp’s ow-tray-zhuss French accent should be fiat armor enough to protect him in any crossover. That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it.

And really, that goes for most of the New Brotherhood of Evil – including Monsieur Mallah and the Brain, also both victims of Salvation Run and writers who don’t know awesome villains when they see them. But also Plasmus (a Nazi made entirely of acid goop, which is almost as good as Swarm, the Marvel Universe’s Nazi made out of bees) and Phobia (a fear inducing villainess with awesome costume). Those are awesome characters.

And then there is Houngan, a character who is really kind of dumb, and who escapes criticism mostly because the vast majority of his appearances have been drawn by George Perez. If ninety percent of Carcharo’s appearances were drawn by George Perez, he would be a totally awesome villain, rather than the worst of all the DC shark-themed villains. But Perez aside, sometimes you just have to recognize when a shitty character is shitty, even if they have a pretty nifty costume. (And Houngan’s, while a bit dated at this point and in need of a small bit of revamping, is pretty nifty.)

And Houngan is shitty, because his origin doesn’t exactly work. He’s a computer scientist, right? And he goes back to Haiti and he learns voodoo. Fine and good. Computers and voodoo, mix of science and magic – this could be a pretty good villain concept! And then what does he do?

He makes a voodoo doll, but it’s a computer voodoo doll. That’s it. That is Houngan’s entire fucking shtick.

Voodoo is this massive goddamn religion, right? With tons of nifty occult trappings: slave-zombies, evil spirits, secret societies, ancestral protection… hell, voodoo’s entire thing is that it is the religion that takes whatever it likes from every other religion. It is like open-source religion (which, and I know Houngan was created in the early 80s before open-source was really a thing, but whatever – the next time someone uses Houngan, they should understand how a computer scientist would think about open-source as applied to religion). All of this could be combined to make a pretty damn awesome character. (In fact, it did. And then they decided for some stupid reason he should be Sorcerer Supreme. Sorry, “Houngan Supreme.” Yeah, still bitter about that.)

But all Houngan does is one thing. He does a voodoo doll. Which he says is better because it’s done with computers, but whatever – it works the same as a regular old voodoo doll. All Houngan’s voodoo doll does that other voodoo dolls don’t is spark electricity every so often. Plus, given that Houngan needs a sample of skin or hair or whatever for his supposedly superior voodoo doll, every time he actually wants to use his voodoo doll, it’s the same scenario: the hero is unconscious or tied up or whatever, so he has time to stroll over and get a skin sample and put it in his voodoo doll, and then he uses the voodoo doll to hurt the hero.

So basically Houngan is the supervillain who’s really only threatening once you’ve already lost.

Last time on Thursday Who’s Who, we examined a successful spear-carrier in the All-Star Squadron. And most of the Squadron were spear-carriers, when you get down to it: they can’t all be slumming members of the Justice Society (or Johnny Quick). A lot of guys in domino masks who punch baddies. This is how it was done in the old days, see.

However, there are degrees of how awesome these guys are. Tarantula, for example, is pretty cool. But Neptune Perkins? This guy is a schmuck. Initially he had the good sense to realize that the “superpower” of having to immerse himself in saltwater every day or die was not exactly grade-A superheroing material, but then he went and joined the All-Star Squadron’s Young All-Stars adjunct, presumably because with Tsunami on the team what they needed was another aquatic hero to emphasize how cool she was.

Seriously: no powers. He’s not super-strong from a life in the depths – he’s fit, sure, but not even, like, Captain America strong. He can’t breathe water (he can hold his breath for seven minutes, which means that he can’t even listen to all of “D’You Know What I Mean?” by Oasis whilst underwater). He’s not a super-swimmer (although his webbed feet give him the ability to swim as strongly as… somebody with a pair of flippers!).

How useless is Neptune Perkins? He is so useless that when he grew up, he eventually became a U.S. Senator. That is how useless Neptune Perkins is.

Also: his most prominent role in comics was serving as the Old Guy Who Doesn’t Get It in Young Justice. That is a damn useless character.

The Tarantula is interesting in that everything that’s been done with him in the modern era is effectively unconnected to the Golden Age rendition of the character. After all, if you’ve read any of the Golden Age appearances of the character, he’s probably one of the most generic mystery men out there. A boring yellow-and-purple costume (which would later be adopted by the Wesley Dodds version of the Sandman in a weird coincidence), boring stories, boring name (come on, his name is literally “Johnny Law”), and token gimmick: suction cups on his boots so he could walk up walls.

And that was pretty much it. Unlike a lot of the Golden Age heroes DC bought over the years, the Tarantula was boring and one-note: he wasn’t that successful in the Golden Age (his run in Star-Spangled Comics was pretty brief) and didn’t do anything memorable, unlike for example the entire Justice Society, which really was an all-star assortment of characters back in the day.

So when he was brought into the All-Star Squadron in the 80s, he was effectively a blank slate. What Roy Thomas and Jerry Ordway did was take the name and create an interesting story hook: John Law wanted to write a book about superheroes, so he became one. They added a “wirepoon gun” that fired “thin but superstrong” nylon cord as his version of a spider’s web-shooter: a joke on the fact that in Tarantula’s first Golden Age appearance, somebody called him a “spider man.”

The “why does he have the same costume as Sandman” thing was resolved by having Dian Belmont design a costume for Wes, and then when Wes initially rejected it John took it for his own use, but eventually decided to go his own route and thus Jerry Ordway (who, incidentally, had one of the best artistic runs on any superhero comic ever when he worked on All-Star Squadron) created one of the more memorable and successful costume revamps in comics: the Tarantula’s new outfit still feels “Golden Agey” but adds a welcome touch of modern complexity.

The result of all this was to take a character who was the definition of “fringe” and make him into a mainstay of one of DC’s more successful team books for about fifty issues. That’s the definition of a successful reintroduction of a character. Tarantula might not be a star player, but he filled his role in the Squadron very well.

I really want to punch Tim Trench in the face. Sadly, he is fictional, so I cannot do this.

It’s not because of his association with the nonpowered era of Wonder Woman comics. Which, incidentally were bad comics, and the attempt in recent years to rehabilitate these bad comics as being good or at least decent kitsch amazes me; not only were these comics bad comics on the basis that Wonder Woman shouldn’t be a normal person being a swingin’ secret agent, but they were bad comics about a woman being a swingin’ secret agent period. Too many comics fans suffer from the delusion that the great creators were/are infallible, which is why people can actually say that Devil Dinosaur is a work of genius, rather than the far more obvious answer of “Jack Kirby having an off-day.” (And the “Diana Prince era” of Wonder Woman isn’t actually even by any great creators, so really it’s just the same old nostalgia for stupid old crap that motivates so much of modern comics fandom.)

But I digress.

No, that is not why I want to punch Tim Trench in the face. Why do I want to punch Tim Trench in the face? Because he is a fucking poser. He blathers about how Hollywood doesn’t make good movies any more and he names his gun “Lulu” and he spouts one-liners blatantly stolen from old Raymond Chandler novels. If he were a modern-day twentysomething, he’d be drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, wearing a trucker hat, and telling everybody how he loves Superchunk, but only their old albums. If you knew him in person, you would hate his fucking guts.

Even though he is fictional.

Seriously. Fuck this guy.

The Predator, being as it is a reflection of Carol Ferris’ “inner masculine drive,” is sort of the first transsexual supervillain, albeit only in a weird Bronze Age sort of way where issues of gender had to be addressed with space magic. (Marvel would later refine the concept with Vamp, the pretty girl who turns into a male monster thing, and make the whole gender-changing thing a lot more explicit.)

What’s weird about the Predator is that, when Carol Ferris split off into herself and the Predator, the Predator immediately started trying to get with her. Is that supposed to be a reflection of her masturbatory urges or something? I hate it when supervillains make you want to check psychology textbooks to see if they make any sense. (Invariably they don’t.)

And of course, this being a Green Lantern villain, he is woefully underequipped to fight Green Lantern. No superpowers, no awesome weapons, not even anything made of yellow. Hell, at least Javelin had a yellow costume. Predator doesn’t even have that. Which means that in order for him to have ever posed a threat to Green Lantern, someone’s going to have to come along and revamp him.

What I’m saying is that I live in dread of the day Geoff Johns decides to revamp the Predator for the modern era.

It’s rare that you find a historical hero who is instantly anachronistic, but Miss Liberty is that hero. Count the stars on her top (which, at the time, would have probably only have been suitable for a really, really weird prostitute, but never mind that now). At a bare minimum she has sewn 24 into the fabric. This, at a time when there were thirteen states. Presumably Miss Liberty was either innumerate or very, very optimistic.

But she can’t be optimistic, because her reasons for wearing the ridiculous costume in the first place are inherently pessimistic – she was worried that if she openly opposed the British, that the British would retaliate by doing bad stuff to her brother who was captive in Britain. Given the even-then large population of the colonies and the multiple-week travel time, this seems terribly unlikely; given the general lack of anything resembling a census or organized databases of geneological information it seems nearly impossible. Perhaps this was merely an excuse; Ms. Lynn decided that, by gum, she was going to put on her ridiculous costume better suited to the mid-18th century (at least in terms of state count) and fight the British with a sword and whip.

Also note that Miss Liberty was eventually crushed to death by the Liberty Bell, which definitely earns her a spot on the Stupidest Superhero Deaths Of All Time roster. I mean, at least Batman was shot with magic death eyebeams rather than, say, being smothered by bats. Miss Liberty’s Liberty-Bell-themed death is worthy of The Puzzler. “You called yourself Miss Liberty and your real name is Bell! Now you’re dead because of the Liberty Bell! PUZZLER!”

Although she is quite sad, she is a patriotic-type hero, and the bar is set lower for them. I didn’t make the rules. Well, I did, but in this case it’s more of a societal trend re: comical books.

I don’t really need to introduce the Phantom Stranger to most of you, I think, so I just want to say something about him.

The reason the Phantom Stranger is great is because he is the elemental expression of something we all, deep down, want to believe is true (even if we don’t), and that is that the universe gives a shit about us.

In recent years, the Phantom Stranger has gotten more exposure than he ever has since his series (which he shared with Dr. 13 – man, that was some awesome old-school comics), but with that exposure has come – not surprisingly – the need to explain the Stranger a little more than he has been. This is the biggest mistake that could possibly be made with him. The Phantom Stranger is remote and unknowable. That’s not a minus; that’s who he is and who was designed to be. There’s a reason his issue of Secret Origins contains not one but four separate possible origins: we aren’t supposed to know who the Phantom Stranger is, and it doesn’t matter who he is.

What matters is what he is: he’s the purest possible expression of hope in superhero comics. He only shows up when things are at their absolute worst, when it looks like there’s no possible way the good guys can win, whether those good guys are the Justice League or a single mother and her only child stuck in a house of horror or a lonely policeman on the brink of personal despair, and he helps. He never outright saves the day; he just gives the good guys a bit of a nudge, exactly as much help as they need to get themselves out of trouble, and then he disappears again before he can even be thanked. Oftentimes he doesn’t do much more than remind the heroes of how strong they really are.

And it’s cool because you know that the Phantom Stranger is crazy-go-nuts levels of powerful. He could solve all of the heroes’ problems for them. But he doesn’t, because to do so would be to take away the opportunity to triumph from them, and what kind of help would that be?

That’s a wonderful thing. That it comes in one of the best superhero costumes ever is only a bonus.

The Dummy isn’t handicapped – he’s handi-capable! Or possibly handi-killifying. I don’t care what anybody says: you have to admire a deformed midget who takes a look in the mirror and says “I think I can make this work for me,” and then doesn’t go into a life of circus work. The Dummy figured out that he was freaky and that people would naturally recoil from this, and so chose to use that to scare people when he got into gunfights.

Of course, the Dummy was also really intelligent to boot. That’s why when he started up his own crime ring, he pretended to be just a ventriloquist’s dummy, with the real boss hidden in the shadows. (As this was the Golden Age, it is entirely possible that the Dummy was the eventual inspiration for the Ventriloquist’s personal brand of insanity – although the Dummy doesn’t look anything like Scarface, of course.) This was brilliant because when hoods would go gunning for “the boss,” they’d ignore the dummy on the floor just lying there – except the dummy was The Dummy, and he would then shoot them in the back. That is planning.

Plus, the Dummy would invent super-weapons. Net guns, electric traps, fire machetes, that sort of thing. Okay, maybe these aren’t the most impressive things in an era where you have the Metal Men walking around, but again, for the Golden Age this was pretty wild stuff. They were impressed by robots who took off their pants back then, you know.

And the Dummy had a great nemesis: the original Vigilante. The original Vigilante is awesome because he’s a cowboy on a motorcycle who fights crime. He’s so cool that in Justice League Unlimited he was voiced by Nathan Fillion; that’s how cool he is. The Dummy never got a speaking role in JLU, but you know that if he did he probably would have been voiced by Alan Tudyk for nerd humour value.

Top comment: A top hat? Classy.
Suit? Classy.
Monocle? Classy.
TWO MONOCLES? Classiest motherfucker to ever stride across the earth. – chenry

You really have to wonder about comic book writers sometimes and if they’re not just playing a gag on you. Such is the reaction I get when I look at The Gang. They look like a comic book writer got inspired on a trip to Bulk Barn. “Hey, what if we had no-name brand X supervillains?”

Hence, The Gang. You have Brains, with the red uniform, who is the Smart One. You have Kong, with the green uniform, who is the Strong One. You have Ms. Mesmer, in yellow, who is The One With The Gimmick. And you have Bulldozer, in blue, who is Also The Strong One. (Presumably they felt that Ms. Mesmer having a thing was almost too individual, so they doubled down and made Bulldozer a shorter version of Kong with a slightly different fighting style.) If The Gang were pills, they would all be generic aspirins.

No coincidence that they made their debut in The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl, quite possibly one of the dullest comic books of all time. (Seriously, go track it down sometime. Then pawn off the books on somebody else. That is how dull they are; you have to witness it to understand it. They are the event horizon of dull.)

I want this entry to be longer, but The Gang is just so goddamned plain. It’s like talking about vanilla ice cream, and not good vanilla or French vanilla or vanilla mint; The Gang are the vanilla ice cream you get for $2.99 at the back of the freezer, the one you know probably gets made with artificial vanilla extract and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. It tastes like inoffensiveness.

Top comment: I’m surprised you didn’t notice that out of a group of criminals supposedly determined not to go to jail, the one named “Brains” is the only one not concealing her face. – 01d55

Sometimes a good comic can make a big mistake. In Manhunter, that mistake was killing off the Monocle.

This is because the Monocle was a pretty goddamned great supervillain. First off, he has exactly the right amount of tragedy in his origin to be one of your more compelling supervillains. He was an honest businessman and a skilled scientist who got screwed over by greedy bankers (see? See? He’s even more relevant now) and then went the overreacting-because-he’s-a-villain route and started murdering them until Hawkman (who, as a good conservative, of course has to protect Big Bidness from the dangers of the little guy) stopped him.

On top of the great origin story, though, the Monocle brings more to the table. First off, he looks really cool. Full 40’s-style evening dress, complete with opera cloak? Bad. Ass. (Consider how many super-characters wear opera cloaks. It’s Monocle and the Phantom Stranger. That’s pretty rarified company.) And that’s before you get to the Monocle’s monocle, which could shoot lasers and strobe blinding lights and just generally be wicked cool.

Secondly, it’s not just that the Monocle looks classy – it’s that he is classy. When the Ultra-Humanite recruited him for the Earth-2 side of the Secret Society of Super-Villains, the Monocle was in retirement, having stolen quite a lot of money and not needing to be a criminal any more; it took the promise of humiliating Hawkman to lure him back. (This is because Hawkman is a dick and everybody hates him.)

So, the Monocle is cool. What happened? Well, first Brad Meltzer used him for the first time in eons for a brief walk-on in Identity Crisis, where he basically said the Monocle was not all that and a bag of chips. This was hardly the worst thing about Identity Crisis but certainly proof that the comic was flawed on every possible level rather than just being an otherwise okay comic with a big event that was a bad idea. But then, after that, Monocle was used in Manhunter, where he was A) depicted as a whiny coward and B) shot through the eye (and monocle) by Manhunter and killed instantly.

LAME. That moment was the low point of the entire run of Manhunter, an otherwise good comic.

There reasonably has to be a son or twin brother or something who can pick up the Monocle’s monocle and carry on. Good villain concepts are rare. Why waste one?