The front cover of Ivan Brunetti’s 2006 An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories:
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So many kinds of comics to read, so many kinds of readers.
The main image looks like a New Yorker cover with a gentle send-up of current interest in comics and, especially, graphic novels. It’s the work of the cartoonist who goes by the pseudonym Seth.
The One Big Happy in my comics feed today (from April 5th originally), with Ruthie putting together the tartar of dental hygiene (as held in check by toothpaste) and the tartar of tartar sauce, going on the resemblance between toothpaste and the sauce commonly accompanying fish:
Here, Ruthie adopts the widespread attitude that Sound/Spelling Rules: an element with the phonology /tártǝr/ or the spelling TARTAR is “the same word” as any other such element (or, at least, is very closely related to it). The opposed attitude — Sense Rules — is also well-known, as evidenced (for example) in some speakers’ hot denials that gay ‘foolish, stupid, unimpressive’ (NOAD2) has anything to do with gay ‘homosexual’.
In the case of tartar, there are two clearly different etymological sources, one having to do with the production of wine (the ultimate source, believe it or not, of the tartar of dental hygiene), the other with inhabitants of Central Asia (the ultimate source, believe it or not, of the tartar of tartar sauce). This is a case where, spectacularly, etymology is not destiny, the two sources of tartar having each split semantically a number of times, each developing into a collection of elements that have nothing much to do with one another beyond sound/spelling, indeed not much more than the descendants of wine tartar have to do with the descendants of Asian tartar; from the point of view of modern speakers, what we’ve got is either a big assortment of distinct lexical items (if you follow Sense Rules resolutely) or a single lexical item with a big heterogeneous assortment of uses (if you follow Sound/Spelling Rules resolutely) — or something in between.
Back on the 28th, a posting here on the gay cartoonist Mioki, with sexy but not X-rated illustrations. Now four all-sex pages from Mioki’s Side by Side (2008) on AZBlogX: about the touching story of a loving couple, plus (in this case) some well-done porn.
Today’s Zippy dips into morphosyntax:
The three panels are far from parallel. Adjective and Adverb are the names of major syntactic categories, while Past Subjective and Present Subjunctive are (intended to be) the names of infectional forms of Verb words: the Present Subjunctive in things like
(1) I insist that Sandy be promoted.
and the Past Subjunctive in things like
(2) Were Sandy my friend, I would be proud.
(Mostly about tiki stuff, but with some initial talk of hot-hot man-man sex, which you should skip over if you’re modest about such things.)
A week ago, in “Sex comics: Brad Parker / Ace Moorcock”, I wrote about gay cartoonist Brad Parker (who also worked under the jokey name Ace Moorcock), especially in his 1988 book Oh Boy! — but without posting any X-rated images, an omission I’ve now remedied with a posting (about three strips from his series “Bigdicked Cocksucking Surfers”) on AZBlogX (more on this below).
But then readers of my earlier posting wondered what had happened to Brad Parker. Where was he now? The answer is: on the Big Island of Hawaii, creating Tiki Art — a genre of pop art, though Parker prefers the label Low Brow Art (for works that might be categorized as folk or outsider art, except that it’s created knowingly) — under the professional name Tiki Shark. More on the Tiki phenomenon and Tiki Shark below, but for a taste, here’s Parker’s Red Tiki Lounge:
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/ˌuˈ(w)i/, used as an exclamation. OED3 (Sept. 2013):
N.Amer. colloq. Expressing astonishment, admiration, dismay, etc. [first cite 1910]
(No one seems to have looked at actual usage in any detail — a tough task for colloquial expressions in general, but especially tough for exclamations.)
Why do I mention it? Because of my posting “sg /u/, pl /i/” a couple days ago — with sg / pl pairs involving these vowels, but also nonoccurring pairs like noose / neese. And then, in the April 2016 Funny Times, this Mark Stivers cartoon starting with the sg / pl pairs tooth / teeth and foot / feet, and then immediately branching off into silly play with pairs like toon / teen:
(The X-rated images are on AZBlogX, here, but let’s face it, the posting is about comics depicting man-man sex, and there’s plenty of explicit talk, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
In between the Gay Comics compendium of 1989 and the recent Strippers compendium (2009), both discussed on this blog, there was 1989-2004, filled for comic-fan gay men by 26 issues of the book series Meatmen. Today, issue #1. Front and back:
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(No actually X-rated images, but still not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A few days ago I looked at gay comics in the 70s and 80s, especially as represented in Robert Triptow’s volume:
The series [Gay Comix, begun by Howard Cruse] was continued by Robert Triptow, who edited the 1989 compilation Gay Comics: The Smartest and Wittiest Gay and Lesbian Cartoonists, with a broad coverage of relatively conventional single-panel and strip cartoons focused on humor or story-telling (leaving out material that is mostly visual and material that’s significantly lubricious.)
(So Tom of Finland doesn’t make this volume.) The contributors are both male and female, but all are North Americans writing in English.
Now comes the 2009 volume Stripped: A Story of Gay Comics, by Markus Pfalzgraf, with 13 cartoonists featured, plus a series of essays (in parallel English and German) on aspects of gay cartooning. The artists are all male, working in English, German, Dutch, and Japanese, and the subject matter is much more varied than in the earlier volume, taking in bondage, S&M, and other kinks, and indulging in piles of mansex for its own sake:
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The story of the address term bro in relatively recent years begins with its use by black men to black men, roughly (but not exactly) like the widely used American buddy — a term of male affiliation. It then spread into the wider culture, serving as a mark of male solidarity. This is what I called in a 4/12/16 posting “good”, positive, bro. But male solidarity tends to come with a dark side: rejection of anything perceived as feminine, played out as sturdy misogyny and homo-hatred in general; and the elevation of boys’ clubs (formed for whatever reasons) to boys-only clubs, aggressively hostile to women and to men perceived as inferior. When these guys use bro to address (or refer to) one another, then we’ve got what I called “bad”, negative, bro.
Regular use of bad bro between men in groups, for instance by fraternity boys and so-called brogrammers, has led to a steady pejoration of the term for people outside those male groups; bro is now a tainted term for many people, calling up unpleasant images of aggressive masculinity.
A brief review of these matters on this blog, then two recent entries in the conversation. And a cartoon too!
