Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The 10/7 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), multifariously playful, cleverly goofy. Something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times.

(#1) It’s all about the original Star Trek tv series (if you have somehow missed learning about the show, the cartoon will be incomprehensible to you); the top-level joke is in the title: the flannel frontier, a silly pun on the final frontier — but there’s a lot more (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

The main pun. The model for the pun is in the opening narration of the series. In the original Star Trek:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!

flannel for final (with /flæ/ for /faj/ is a purely phonologically based pun; flannel is semiotically distant from final — which makes it more startling, more absurd that senior officers of the starship Enterprise  — First Officer and Science Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), and Captain Kirk (William Shatner) — appear on the bridge of the starship not in their uniforms, but all in flannel shirts (of three different colors).

Why flannel? The cartoon then supplies a narrative motivation for the flannel: on occasion the personnel of the Enterprise have explored new worlds by beaming down to them disguised as the local aliens. Spock, Uhura, and Kirk are preparing to beam down to some world in orbit around the star Lumber Centauri, a world where, apparently, the locals dress like lumberjacks, in flannel shirts (I told you it was goofy).

The subsidiary pun. Lumber Centauri for Lambda Centauri, with lumber for lambda — again purely phonologically based, /lʌmbǝr/ for /læmdǝ/, actually fairly close though complicated; and semiotically distant.

Now, from Wikipedia:

Lambda Centauri, Latinized from λ Centauri, is a star in the southern circumpolar constellation of Centaurus.

Meanwhile,

under the Lumber Centauri skies,
the Lumber Centaureans
live out their flannel lives.

And now folk from other galaxies are preparing to descend on them in disguise.

Flannel semiotics. From my 12/28/20 posting “The flannel guys”, taking off from this photo:

(#2) Me and Steven Levine on 2/15/04

the shirt [Steven]’s wearing is one that he wore lovingly to death some years ago (cue Donovan singing “I Love My Shirt”). I still have my shirt, however, because it was one of a set of 5 or so L.L.Bean flannel shirts I bought late in the last century and have been carefully rotating over the intervening years, to make them last through as many winters as possible (I do love those shirts; among other things, they are lined).

… Flannel shirts are both warm and durable, so they serve as excellent workshirts, associated stereotypically with (among others) lumberjacks and cowboys — the macho working class of fantasy.
(These associations with masculinity have led to flannel shirts being viewed as characteristic clothing — a kind of uniform — for dykes.)

They are also very often made in plaid patterns (see Steven and me, above), sometimes associated with the tartans of Scotland and designed in gorgeous colors, so that the shirts can also be fashion objects. And that makes them available for flagrantly way-gay apparel

… (You can now find on Twitter plaintive cries about how hard it is to distinguish lumberjack / cowboy / country flannel from gay flannel — from straight guys trying to protect their flannel fantasies from the faggy stuff.)

Now, back to [the 2004 photo]. It happens that Steven and I are both gay, but that doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with our attractions to flannel shirts. On the other hand, any man, gay or straight, might take pleasure from the routine associations of these shirts with masculinity — just feeling comfortable in your skin when you’re wearing one of these shirts. (Every so often, I have to remind people that I might be a fag, but I’m also a guy, and that both of those things are important to me.)

This entry was posted on October 9, 2025 at 9:42 am and is filed under Clothing, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, My life, Puns, Understanding comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.