Day Seventy-Six: Just the Facts
One of the great things about the big shared universes that Marvel and DC have set up is the fact that there's so much interaction between the characters and the titles. In fact, so many of these characters have upwards of 40, 50 or even 60 years of history that it can be difficult to keep them straight in your head. Exactly which Hate-Monger was it who was secretly Adolf Hitler, anyway?* At DC, the solution they came up with was Who's Who in the DC Universe, a publication designed to give you a bit of a scorecard on their major players. For my money, though, you can't beat the House of Ideas' equivalent, the often-imitated, never-bettered Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
In 1982, Marvel's repositories of knowledge about their own characters were the late lamented writer Mark Gruenwald and Marvel's own librarian Peter Sanderson. The Marvel Universe had grown to such a size that they felt it necessary to document the whole thing in alphabetical order, all the way from Abomination through to Zzaxx. They launched this idea in a 12-issue miniseries format, with profiles of all of their major characters and most of their minor ones, each character's biography being illustrated with a handsome spot illustration by one of their leading artists (the original Official Handbook, or OHOTMU as it's abbreviated, featured work from the likes of John Byrne, Dave Cockrum and others, with later editions having pieces by Bill Sienkiewicz, Kyle Baker, Joe Kubert, Walt Simonson and more). They made a nice set, but fans complained that their favourite minor villains and heroes had been left out, and so in 1986 the Deluxe Edition (or OHOTMUDE, acronym fans) was produced. This was 20 issues and ran three times as long as the 1982 edition, its aim of being exhaustive being quite easily attained. Still, that wasn't enough for Marveldom Assembled, and eventually the Official Handbook Update '89 (OHOTMUDEU89) saw the light of day, this time showcasing some of the non-super-powered characters who had been key players in the Marvel Universe alongside the newer capes-and-tights crowd.
The great thing about the OHOTMU is that it manages to highlight just how ridiculously goofy a lot of the characters are without poking fun at them - we can all appreciate that there may be some things about us which are a bit daft, but that doesn't make us stupid, and as above, so below with the Marvel Universe. The tone of the profiles often seems more deadpan than deadly serious, and when the entries have categories such as "Occupation", which is then filled in variously as "Plumber, adventurer", "Freelance artist, crimefighter", "Ex-psychologist (M.D.), houngan (voodoo priest)" and "Ex-call girl, now mercenary", you know you've stumbled on somthing special.
Perhaps the best example of the deadpan tone of the series is exemplified in entries such as the one for Spider-Man villain the Kangaroo. According to the comics, and dutifully reported by the Handbook, the Kangaroo grew up in the Outback, where he developed the ability to jump great distances by... well... watching kangaroos and copying them, and practicing really hard at it until he was good. The Handbook notes all this, then tries to make sense of it by saying that this is such a patently ridiculous origin story that the Kangaroo must have made it up, and that he can actually jump really far because it's his mutant power. They also were extremely fond of citing characters' powers as being linked to "an unknown, extradimensional force". Basically, Cyclops has to be taking the energy for those eyeblasts from somewhere, and the "unknown, extradimensional force" became a code term for "we have no idea how to explain this, so let's just go with it, okay?"
The Handbook was revived a couple of times, once in a loose-leaf format in the early 1990s which completely missed the point by providing only bare statistics and none of the knowing tone of the Gruenwald/Sanderson volumes, and again in 2004, which version is still running to this day with a mixture of A-Z issues and "themed" editions. Unfortunately, this current edition, while admirably thorough, lacks the sense of fun that the classic Handbook had, preferring instead to regurgitate dry accounts of characters' histories. That said, they do get bonus points for having recently recruited the technical artist of the original Handbooks, Elliot Brown, to produce new images for them - now a new generation will be able to see cross-sections of Machine Man's limbs with authentic-sounding gibberish part names like "finely tessellated miro-mail armor skin", "bicep motor tendon sheave" and "knee".
The entirety of the classic OHOTMU, OHOTMUDE and OHOTMUDEU89 are in print at the moment, in the form of the highly competitively priced black and white Essential editions (as previously covered on this very blog). If you're a fan of the Marvel Universe, then you could do much worse than to have these on your shelves - how else are you going to know that "Daimon Hellstrom was not known by the general public to have demonic parentage. Few called him 'Son of Satan'"?
*The first one, who first appeared in Fantastic Four #21, according to this here Handbook.
