From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy:
(#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza cartons (plus, we assume, a lot of concealed Trojan warriors)
The liver. Patent medicine. Greek mythology. Advertising. The illustrator’s art. All together now.
In the hands of French illustrator Charles Lemmel (1899 – 1976), the task of devising a poster to advertise a hepatical (a patent medicine for maladies of the liver) somehow fixed on the myth of Prometheus, punished by Zeus (for having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humans) by being chained, naked, to the side of a mountain and subjected to endless hepatophagy: every day, Zeus’s eagle feasts on the Promethean liver, which then regrows for the next day’s torture.
Not, you might have thought, an ideal theme for a medicine ad; but look what Lemmel did with the idea in the poster (from the 1930s):
(#1) Lemmel presents Hepatior as a rest and relief from the pain of hepatic ailments, a pain like that of Prometheus’s aquiline torment; meanwhile, he elevates the real-life sufferer by depicting the suffering Prometheus as a hot hot muscle-hunk and also a curly black-haired Greek dude — who is smiling and winking at us through the ordeal, reassuring us that it’s all a joke
That’s quite an artistic performance, also soft porn at several levels (extravagant body display, proud masochism). I happen to think it’s deeply silly, but enjoyable in its crudeness.
From the annals of cartoon understanding: about today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which an unaccompanied young man in classical Greek attire inquires about the reflectivity of the water in a Tunnel of Love:
(#1) In case you didn’t recognize (a pop-cultural version of) the figure of Narcissus from Greek mythology, the young man sports a buckle with a big N on it; meanwhile, you need to recognize another piece of pop culture, the amusement park ride the Tunnel of Love (which largely disappeared about 80 years ago as an actual amusement park phenomenon, but lives on as a trope in songs, movies, and tv shows) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
So, yes, you need to bring cultural knowledge to bear on understanding the cartoon — to seeing that it’s hilarious that a Narcissus figure would buy a single ticket for a ride through a Tunnel of Love (designed to provide about 6 minutes alone in the dark for couples to get steamy with one another) and want to know how reflective the water in it is: can I see myself in it?, he needs to know; can I become one with that beautiful man in this dark monument to love?. But all this cultural knowledge is second-hand, coming to us through the distorting, simplifying lens of pop culture: not the myth of Echo and Narcissus, but just a guy foolishly falling in love with himself; not actual amusement park rides, but their pop-cultural echoes in cartoons and the like.
(Male bodies, one full frontal, allusions to sex between men — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
On the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager (recently encountered in Pinterest, though his drawings have been featured in Advocate magazine several times). Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images (you can pretty much smell the sex on them), male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples (and to chronicling his domestic life and the street life of NYC). Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile (really big boots):
(#1) Self-portrait With Boots and Jock
Encountered on Pinterest yesterday, a reproduction of this painting, identified there as a “Pompeian fresco” (and attributed to the painter Filippo Venuti) from the Palazzo Paradisio (a site I didn’t recognize, but it turns out to be a lavish palace on Malta). The central figure is clearly that of the winged Roman god Mercury, steering a small winged boat across the sea. (I don’t recognize the flag the boat is flying.) At the prow of the boat, a female figure, apparently in despair, languishes precariously.
This would presumably be Mercury in his role as the guide taking the souls of the newly dead to the underworld; as for the woman, if she’s meant to be some specific character from Roman mythology, I don’t recognize her. But the composition is all about Mercury.
(#1) And who would have thought Mercury was such a stud? — with the face of a handsome young modern Italian man, the body of a muscle-hunk, and just barely concealed genitals
Ah, this is a modern work, painted in the first decade of the 20th century: a “Pompeian fresco” only in the sense that it’s in the style of the frescoes at Pompeii (near Naples; ancient Pompeii was destroyed in 79 CE by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, but the volcanic ash preserved an extraordinary record of both the art and the everyday life of the city). A modern work, painted about 2,000 years after Pompeii went under, on the island of Malta, about 345 miles by air from Naples.
(The randy elves of 12/22/23 are engaged in 3-way man-on-man sex, described here by its makers in street language, so this part of the program is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest (IF THAT’S YOU: DO NOT READ); the rest of it is about a variety of seasonal customs, some of them off-beat but none requiring policing (PLEASE READ AND ENJOY))
In my title: highlights of the first day of the three-day run-up to Christmas 2023.
Each day provides two occasions to celebrate:
— 12/22/23: CAYF (the gay porn movie Cum All Ye Faithful) climax day, with that Christmas-elf 3-way sex as the centerpiece of the final scene in the movie and the title of the movie distantly connected to the Christmas carol in Latin, Adeste Fideles; and Festoonus (celebrated at my house with that Korean feast)
— 12/23/23: Last day of Saturnalia; and Festivus
— 12/24/23: Fourth Sunday of Advent; and Christmas Eve (finally, two well-known holidays — though how Christmas Eve is celebrated varies enormously)
Notes on the first two days, on which fall four occasions of minor rank (at least in the modern world).
Vadim Temkin’s digital art on Facebook for Christmas 2023, (Gregorian-calendar) New Year 2024, and lunar New Year 2024:
[Vadim’s greeting:] Merry Xmas and Happy New Year of Dragon!
Since this is Vadim’s composition, Santa Claus is a shirtless muscle-hunk: not only jolly, but also an object of gay desire — not to mention the rider of a fearsome dragon, the tamer of a demonic monster, the vehicle of all-conquering love. This Santa is playfully silly, smoking hot, and truly noble, all at once.
… decked out in red and green, in lovely Christmas smocks; also throughly wired and wielding gear, both vintage (what appears to be a record player) and modern (iStuff), along with Christmas gift boxes:
(#1) A delightful card from Dean and Tim Allemang; on the back it has the Walgreens logo:
(#2) So it’s a Walgreens card, but after much searching on 12/11, I couldn’t find it anywhere on their site (they are demons about their photo cards, but hopeless about everything else)
Then on 12/12, Erick Barros labored on my behalf to find any trace of the card on the net, with no success at all.
Meanwhile, I wrote Dean to applaud the card and report on our fruitless searches, asking if he knew anything about the artist or the composition. And got a surprising answer.
That’s Hector de Gregorio, whose fantasist digital collage Love of Hermes came past me on Pinterest recently:
(#1) The male figure’s face is (a version of) de Gregorio’s own; the composition is packed with symbols and allusions of many kinds. only a few of which I can identify
Some of the iconography in #1 might be understood from information in the Wikipedia article on the Greek god Hermes:
Hermes is an Olympian deity in ancient Greek religion and mythology considered the [emissary and messenger] of the gods.
… his main symbol is the caduceus, a winged staff intertwined with two snakes copulating [sometimes crowned with a pair of wings and a sphere]
[AZ: Among the many female objects of his love was the love goddess Aphrodite, with whom he fathered the god Hermaphroditus — born a handsome boy, then transformed into a hermaphrodite, with a name compounded of the names of the two parents]
… Hermes also loved [many] young men in pederastic relationships where he bestowed and/or taught something related to combat, athletics, herding, poetry and music
Now, four more of de Gregorio’s dream-like, often highly theatrical, body-focused compositions — two relatively spare ones, two densely symbolic ones. Then some words about the artist.
(Note this posting’s title — it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
It’s all about fucking in fur: two scenes from the MEN.com gay porn flick Norse Fuckers in which men mate wildly and promiscuously, like the proverbial fur-bearing carnivores, while wearing fluffy fur stoles (which they discard as impediments when they dig into their pronging) and delightful furry boots (which stay on, even while the men, otherwise stark naked, are fucking their mates).
There will be pictures.
