CSotD: To the ladies, god bless’em
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A lot of the humor at The Gutters is insider, comic-book stuff, which leaves me doubly on the sidelines, but this one is pretty mainstream and awfully funny.
This whole dudecentric view of life is not confined to the realm of comic books, nor is it particularly modern, but it's a lively topic in that world at the moment.
There is an odd issue around cosplay and Cons, which is that cosplay — dressing up as one of your favorite comics characters — used to be simply a fan thing. Of course, going to Cons itself used to be a fan thing, but, like Mardi Gras and Grateful Dead concerts, it sort of morphed into a thing-thing, leaving the original crew feeling somewhat sidelined.
Not being much of a Con-goer myself (though I'm probably going to hit this one), I first ran into cosplay several years ago through an artist with whom I did several projects.
She used to dress up as Yomiko Readman, an appropriate choice for an anime/manga artist from Malaysia, and particularly one who is not just from Malaysia but in Malaysia, where girls in their 20s are still allowed to be diehard fans at a level reserved in this culture for teenyboppers.
Now there is apparently a whole subculture of models who dress up as sexy comic characters and walk around Cons, sort of like the girls in bikinis who lounge around on cars at auto shows.
Meanwhile, any actual fans who dress up like Wonder Woman or Batman had better be built like Wonder Woman or Batman or they'll end up being ridiculed on Facebook. And it seems the treatment female cosplayer fans get on the scene can be pretty unpleasant no matter what they look like.
Mind you, I only know what I read on-line.
Somebody publicly questioned what any of these pneumatic beauties actually knew about comic books recently, but the argument didn't get much traction and I think inspired that purple shirt above.
In any case, if Asian girls are allowed to prolong their adolescence into adulthood, American boys are certainly encouraged to do the same.
But, as I say, it's nothing new. Back in 1970, I gave my parents a copy of "Be Not Content," a semi-autographical work by William Craddock that achieved cult status for its depiction of California in the days of the acid test and bathing at Baxter's and so forth. It even had a character named "Baxter," who appears in this segment, the setting of which will amuse a few of my regular visitors.
My mother's reaction was that she found it interesting but she was a little distressed that the female characters were, in her words, "sexy idiots."
Which I, in turn, found interesting, because this was just about the time the women in my circle decided there was something really not okay about them doing the freaking dishes every night while the guys sat around the livingroom reading "Fritz the Cat" and discussing astral projection.
Particularly since it appeared to be such a challenge for any of us to project our astrals out of bed in the morning and get to work, which they did on a daily basis.
Who knows how those enigmatic minds of theirs work?
Meanwhile, speaking of perennial adolescents and memories of times past, Zonker is about to decamp for Colorado and become part of the legalized marijuana movement.
I miss road trips. It's a pity the "road trip" has been memorialized in most people's minds by "Animal House," with its relevant-to-this-post adolescent misogyny, to which the road trip segment adds a charming touch of preppy racism.
And "Easy Rider" was about as realistic a view of road trips as "Lethal Weapon" was of police work.
The real flavor of the road trip is best captured in Sherman Alexie's "Smoke Signals," even acknowledging with a sigh that I would end up being Thomas, not Victor.
And especially acknowledging that you can't decide to have a road trip like that, though some lifestyles make road trips a little more likely to happen.
And that a little of that lifestyle goes a long, long way.
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