In which a fleeting thought at work is good enough for blog content.
So I was processing a recently-acquired collection, which included a copy of Our Fighting Forces #134 (Nov/Dec 1971):
…and it made me wonder, just for a moment, if this was the first usage of the word “butt” on the cover of a mainstream comic. That is, “butt” in the context of directly referring to someone’s posterior, as opposed to the “butt of a cigarette” or “butt out!” or other usages.
I’m sure something like “move your butts, Easy Co.!” was shouted by Sgt. Rock on a cover at some point, but I’ve done absolutely zero, zilch, nada research on this, so I’m depending on your memories. Has the word “butt” (in the context of referring to, if I may use the medical term, the “ass”) been used on a mainstream comic cover prior to this issue? This vital question must be answered!
Well, okay, maybe not. But this is the kind of thing that floats through my mind as I’m robotically processing, bagging, and tagging old funnybooks. The brain goes weird places sometimes.
I’m not sure how the conversation eventually got to this point, but these were the words spoken in our shop a few short weeks ago:
EMPLOYEE AARON: “Hey, Mike, if Carol Channing were a member of one of the Lantern Corps, what color would she be?”
ME: “Why, she’d be a Raaaaaaasssspberry Lantern, of course!”
EMPLOYEE AARON: “…I’m going to need a raise.”
TWITTER SHENANIGANS: So a couple of days ago I started a series of “Stan Lee Porn” posts on the Twitter (starting with this post, though Tom Peyer actually came up with the Twitter-searchable #stanleeporn hashtag). And yesterday, because I was feeling especially sarcastic, I started #savecomics, with many impractical and smart-alecky ideas for this industry I’ve found myself working in. A couple of people took it a little more seriously than it was intended, I think, but it was some goofy fun at any rate.
So there you go. If you didn’t like me taking part in pal Dorian’s Uncomfortable Plot Summaries, you’re certainly not going to like any of the above. But it was all in fun…and hey, sometimes I need to vent, and I can’t always beat the employees.
Anyway, in conclusion, I refer you to this.
TWITTER: Destroying modern discourse one 140-character smart-ass message at a time.
