Stumbled upon this while looking for more examples of Bizarro cartoons with Batman in them:
That’s a thoroughly perverse counterpart of Batman, an anti-Batman, so to speak: a parallel to the character Bizarro, who’s the anti-Superman.
(Yes, Batzarro is a portmanteau of Batman and Bizarro. Just as Batzarro the character combines characteristics of Batman with the evil of Bizarro.)
Today’s Calvin and Hobbes is a replay of a strip from 2/24/86:
I remember this strip (with its play on two senses of pro) with great fondness, and I was sure it had been posted (possibly by me) on Language Log or this blog, but an hour’s searching found nothing, so I’m posting it here.
Added on the 20th on this site: three Pages, two under “Comics lists” and one under “XBlog essays”.
Under “Comics lists”: Archie comics (Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica) and Batman postings. The latter is about all things Batman, with links to postings about the many incarnations of the Dark Knight (not just the Batman of the DC comic books), to images of Batman, to parodies of Batman, and to incorporations of Batman (and Robin) into other comics and cartoons (Batman and/or Robin are recurrent figures in Bizarro cartoons, for example).
Under “XBlog essays”: b/t roles, with postings (mostly on AZBlogX) about the roles taken by characters in gay porn films, with the b man acting as subordinate to the t man, who runs the show. b and t are not the same thing as bottom and top in anal intercourse, though the two things are related in complex ways. The assignment of characters to the roles b and t is also a complex matter, being connected significantly to f/m gender roles in the straight world and to attributions of femininity and masculinity in both the straight and gay worlds: roughly, the more masculine character (on a number of dimensions) is likely to be assigned the t role, and then the b/t role assignment to characters will correlate with the likely course of their sexual interaction: who does what to who, in what order, etc. (These expectations are sometimes frustrated for dramatic effect, of course.)
I had considerable trouble assembling this Page. AZBlogX is a livejournal blog, and Google doesn’t track livejournal entries, so I couldn’t do a Google search; livejournal does have an internal search engine, Yandex, but it’s pretty much a worthless piece of crap (this might be connected to its being a Russian product), so I’ve had to resort to hand searches, and I’ve surely missed some postings that should be on the Page.
In any case, I’m now preparing an AZBlogX piece with some b/t analysis of (parts of) a gay porn flick I recently viewed. Stay tuned.
Yesterday, two items from the Homo History site, the second (#4 there) a panel from an old cartoon (“MAN, DICK IS GOOD.”), which was not only unsourced but also without context. Another example from the same place:
This time we can imagine what the context is, at least roughly: Batman and the Boy Wonder have have just finished a physically taxing mission (which did not involve the Caped Crusader screwing Robin, as this panel might suggest). Still, I thought it would be nice to see how this panel fits into the story, so I ran the image past Google Images — and got tons of hits, all from sites enjoying it as an out-of-context comic panel; these people don’t want the context. In fact, there are collections of out-of-context comic panels on the net, most apparently inspired by one Mitch McConnell, and this drawing is a great favorite. So I never did get the background story.
Three OBH strips on language matters that I’ve saved up: Ruthie vs. ambiguity, Ruthie wielding analogy, and Joe vs. ambiguity in pronominal usage:
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One more Zippy strip in the Easter Island series I posted about yesterday, now with an origin story for the Dog People of Easter Island and a proposal to make money by developing the site commercially:
Background to the story in yesterday’s posting.
This would be a good time to end the series, I think.
Note: this posting is about pickles (in the American sense: pickled cucumbers) and uses of the word pickle, especially in proper names; my main theme is that pickles and the word pickle tend to be intrinsically funny, inherently risible. I’ll be citing a whole bunch of uses, but I do not intend this posting to be a complete inventory of uses of the word, so if I don’t mention some example that you know or especially like, please add it in a comment, but don’t do this by accusing me of having failed or neglected to mention your example; that would just be gratuitously insulting.
It started with an entertaining piece by Winnie Hu in the NYT on the 15th: (on-line) “At United Pickle, Preserving the Standards of a Deli Staple”, (in print) “Family-Run Supplier Preserves Standards For a Briny Deli Staple”, beginning:
Not every cucumber has what it takes to be a pickle. As dozens of them tumbled from a steel hopper onto a conveyor belt in a Bronx factory, two workers enforced a strict pickle standard.
Bruised. Broken. Too curvy. Too short. Sorry, no exceptions.
The rejects — about one in 10 — were tossed into plastic bins, destined to become relish.
“You can’t just pickle any produce,” said Stephen Leibowitz, the self-described “chief pickle maven” of this operation, as he reached past the workers to personally pluck out an offending cucumber. “I can put in the best ingredients, and they still won’t turn out right.”
Mr. Leibowitz is the man to see if the pickles at your local deli, diner or burger joint have lost their crunch. Whether kosher dills, sours, half-sours or bread-and-butters, chances are they got their start on the production line at United Pickle, the largest family-owned supplier of pickles and pickled condiments in New York City.
Or as Mr. Leibowitz, 73, ever the pickle pitchman, put it, “If you’re in a pickle, call United Pickle.”
Kosher dill spears in preparation:
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Today’s Zippy is the third in a series mashing up the moai of Easter Island and the characters of Disney cartoonist Carl Barks. It then turns out that the moai do appear in the Orlando FL of Walt Disney World — but in chocolate. The cartoons:
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Today’s Daily Jocks ad, for an offer featuring BCNÜ underwear (in this case an Atletico Sports Brief), showing the model alluringly posed on sheepskin:
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The same model, in a similar but darker pose, in a Grip Retro Brief:
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My caption:
Man-Dragon
He chose the name Mandrake,
His conventionally handsome veneer
Concealing a magical, dangerous
Creature, the taste of whose body drove
Men into delirium. Posing as an
Underwear model, he transformed
Men into beasts.
