Author: Lydia Bugg

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: How to Sleep with your Girlfriend’s Friends 🌭

The internet is an amazing place. It has allowed us to tailor literature for underserved niche groups that could never have found what they were looking for in the pre-internet era. Finally, people who have been scouring the shelves of The New York Public Library for years seeking advice on how to bang their girlfriend’s friends have an answer! These few lonely souls who are smart enough to read but dumb enough to think you have a shot at banging all of their girlfriend’s friends can end their search thanks to a brave man named Guy Blaze. 

I was deeply hoping this book was a trap. I fully expected to slide this bad boy open on my Kindle and find that it was page after page of the words, “Come on, man, think about your life, think about your choices. DO BETTER,” like “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” but as a self-help tool for assholes. Sad to report that was not the case. 

The author of this book directs most of his advice toward men but to be inclusive, I’m going to assume some women might want to purchase the book too. However, in my experience, if you’re a woman and you want to bang all of your girlfriend’s friends, you have, and they’re your friends too, and you’re all on a rugby team together, because it’s 2022 and the world doesn’t have quite as many hangups about sex anymore. 

Which makes me ask, why is this book necessary in 2022? It was written in 2016, but even then, if you wanted to fuck a bunch of people, there were like 75 apps for that. This book takes the joy of sex and makes it into a stressful, manipulative James Bond RPG. However, that’s not how the author of the book describes it. According to Guy Blaze, this sleeping with your girlfriend’s friends thing is a “fun community experience.” 

Fun for whom, Guy Blaze? Because it doesn’t sound fun for anyone, even the person doing all of the friend fucking. This book recommends rules, reconnaissance, and costumes, and only some of those things are good for sex. When I think of a fun community experience, I think of a food and wine festival, maybe an outdoor movie where you can bring your dog, not a high-stress covert orgy that only some people know they’re involved in. 

Guy Blaze’s system for community engagement is devised around a theory he calls “community dick.” It uses a combination of shame and military-style disinformation tactics to ruin a group of women. 

The basic theory behind community dick is that women will not reveal that you’re a cheater to their friends if they are the ones you are cheating with. This makes it less likely you’ll get caught cheating. Therefore, it’s a good idea, and a fun experience, to bang a whole friend group, even on occasion… the ugly friends.

Yes, you may have to treat a person you don’t want to have sex with like a human being. I’m sure it will be a struggle. You can try and picture them as an unfuckable, yet pleasant object, like a cactus with a tiny flower on top or a beautiful ice sculpture of the NFL logo. 

You might look at a book title like How To Sleep With Your Girlfriends Friends and assume that Guy Blaze knows nothing about women, but let me tell you, that’s false. Women are mysterious and unknowable creatures, but someone has taught Guy Blaze our ancient wisdom. I’m not saying he’s a good guy, but this man understands what women want on a fundamental level. 

Never in my life have I loved anything more than a snack. If I ever birth a human child, I would ditch it in a minute for some Twizzlers “especially when you couple that with dinner as well.” Guy Blaze knows how to be a good boyfriend! And being a great boyfriend is step one in sleeping with all of your girlfriend’s friends. 

Weirdly, Guy Blaze understands that there aren’t a lot of good guys out there, so by his estimation, women are in such high competition for the few good men they’ll totally bang their boyfriend’s boyfriend if he seems like a nice enough guy. Women aren’t aware that nice guys typically don’t have sex with all of their girlfriend’s friends. It’s a weird blind spot for us, like how T. Rexes can’t see you if you hold still. Guy Blaze has found our one weakness! Our second if you count snacks!

This book is great at giving advice without any actual advice attached. For instance, it tells you tons of apps are available to help you hide your cheating from your girlfriend, explains all of the fantastic things they can do, and then names none of them. When I typed cheat on girlfriend into the app store, all I got was a bunch of ads for AI Girlfriends that I could potentially cheat on.

This is the same way he gives advice about sex. He says the sex with your girlfriend should be “mentionable” so that she will talk about it with her friends. I feel like you mention things for many reasons, and I’m not sure mentionable is what you want sex to be? I mention things to my friends that are surprising, disgusting, and oddly pungent all the time.

He means mentionable because it’s so good, but again no details on how to make that happen, which feels like he’s just using mentionable sex as a way to brag he’s very good at sex with suspiciously little details. No follow up questions, just do it good. The good way! So that when she goes to her friends she’ll talk about it. 

Again, Guy Blaze seems to understand something about women. Yeah, there is a double standard within society about how many sex partners a woman should have vs. a man. Good job, I’m so proud of… he’s using this information for what? Leverage to sleep with all of this girlfriend’s friends? I see. I see. For the first time in my life, I’m a little bit in favor of book burning. 

I would say that Guy Blaze is a scumbag if I hadn’t read Guy Blaze’s hard and fast rules on what makes someone a scumbag. Sleeping with all of your girlfriend’s friends doesn’t make you a scumbag. You’re only a scumbag if you get one of them pregnant. You know, like how if you shoplift with your eyes closed, it’s not illegal because no one saw you do a crime.

I don’t think this means he actually thinks getting your girlfriend’s friend pregnant makes you a scumbag, more that your girlfriend will consider you a scumbag. Her opinion should be the only thing that matters to you, which is why Guy Blaze, curator of fun community experiences, leaves you with one parting word of wisdom. You should never brag about having sex with all of your girlfriend’s friends because that would be gay. 

Your girlfriend (referred to hereinafter as the bitch) is the only one whose opinion should matter to you, which is why you should carefully construct a reality wherein everyone in her life who matters most to her is lying to her. Caring about anyone but the woman who you are cheating on with all of her friends is the gayest thing you can do. 

Check out Guy Blaze’s other books on Amazon, including How To Get A Fat Girl To Pay You, The Guy Blaze Interracial Dating Series, and How The Internet Killed Marriage. Oh, he’s named Guy Blaze because everything he says makes you want to set him on fire. I get it now! 

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Josh S, who always properly invoices his women, plus-size or not.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Dennis Miller’s The Rant Zone

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Categories
NERDING DAY

Anime Week: The Banned Sailor Moon Episode! 🌭

It’s Anime Week, and I am an anime person. By that, I mean my eyes are twice the size of my head, I giggle constantly, and there’s a pervy old man who follows me around to applaud when I bend over. It’s a tough life, but what can I say? I should have given that mysterious crone the DVD of Cowboy Bebop she begged me for in the forest that day instead of telling her to get a more productive hobby like doing cocaine or menacing a trampoline gym. Now I must live with this anime curse. 

I also mean that I have watched some anime. I enjoyed the heck out of Sailor Moon as a kid. It had everything I wanted in a TV show– girls fighting crime in fabulous outfits, and that was it. I had one criterion for a good TV show, and it was surprisingly difficult to fulfill in the early nineties. However, although I enjoyed Sailor Moon, I wouldn’t say I’ve seen all of Sailor Moon because it was so radically changed for air in the U.S. market. 

The U.S. famously made two lead characters, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, into cousins instead of lovers. Which, in turn, made a lot of little kids watch the show and think, why are those two cousins obviously fucking? A male character in a gay relationship was changed to a female character in the US to avoid another gay relationship. The superhero transformation scenes were censored to show less of the sailor’s bodies, and at least one episode was banned from reruns. 

I’m not exactly sure why it was banned, so I decided to watch the episode and see if I could guess. It’s Sailor Moon, season 1, episode 4, “Usagi Will Teach You! How To Lose Weight!” Sounds educational, like something you would show in health class. However, it begins Like something you would show in a different section of health class. 

Right off the bat, I’m going to guess that this one was banned because Usagi takes three different baths in a single episode. The girl is the cleanest crime fighter since Aquaman. 

Really, they had her announce in the opening that she is fourteen and then immediately took several lingering pauses over her body in a bathtub. That has to be it, right? The episode begins with Usagi (Sailor Moon’s alter ego) coming out of the shower and throwing herself on the ground, crying because she’s gained weight. Her parents tell her it’s fine because some guys like a lady with a fat ass, but Usagi doesn’t listen. 

Her whole family agrees she “spends more time eating than studying” and says in unison, “That’s why you’ve gained weight,” like pod people for fat shaming. Even Usagi’s magic talking cat gets in on making fun of her by drawing a shitty little cartoon.

Unable to handle the mental torment of her home, Usagi goes to school and shares her concerns with her friends. One of her friends tells Usagi, “the best diet is falling in love because then you want to look good.” Surprisingly, no one points out that you can’t eat love and need food to survive. It’s possible this was banned for implying that fat people simply haven’t fallen in love yet, as if you need a prince or princess to rescue you from the dragon that is your own metabolism. 

The episode then introduces a weird, horny little boy character who tells Usagi and her friends that one of the teachers at their school has lost a bunch of weight at a special new gym. He knows this because he stalked the teacher and took pictures of her while she was working out. This is definitely what got this episode banned.

Usagi and her 14-year-old friends decide to join the gym, something most gyms in America don’t let teenagers do without adult permission because sometimes horny perverts creep around gyms and photograph women while they exercise. Luckily this gym is a mystical trap for sucking the lives out of women, so their sign up policy is a little looser than non-mystical death trap gyms. 

A shadowy entity watches Usagi and her friends head toward the gym and mutters in an echoey demon voice, “Ha ha ha, more fools enter our lair.” This is what all gym owners say when they watch someone sign a gym contract, so there’s no red flag behavior yet. 

Usagi and her friends are all instantly attracted to the owner of the gym, an adult man who looks like he’s wearing The Joker’s high school band uniform. This man radiates evil. He says, “Welcome to Shapelin. Are you new members?” in the exact same tone as a serial killer might say, “You’ll never find their fingers because I ate them.”

Usagi and her friends all work out while surrounded by big muscular men in tiny unitards who supervise. Once they finish, Usagi goes to the locker room for yet another bath while her friends are led into the basement by the gym owner, where he tells them he has a special machine that will make them thin. Ok, this is for sure why it got banned. 

The machine is as blatantly evil as the gym owner. It’s a bunch of clearly alien pods with a glowing orb at the center. Nothing good has ever had a glowing orb at the center. However, this all encompassing chamber of star tampons seems legit to this group of teenage girls, so they climb right in and, twist, have a bunch of their life force sucked out. We know that’s what’s happening because the gym owner says, “Ah, the young and succulent energy of girls,” which, okay, is clearly why this episode was banned. 

The next day, Usagi passes out in the street because she hasn’t eaten and is rescued by a boy she has a crush on. He tells her that he likes women who aren’t all skin and bones, so now that she has a man’s permission, Usagi decides to eat some pork buns. Within moments her fat shaming cat shows up to swat that food right out of her hands. 

“He said he doesn’t like girls that are all skin and bones, but you can go too far the other way, you know?” the fat shaming cat tells Usagi. The woman ate one meal, and this cat showed up to remind her food is what makes you fat. Usagi starts picturing herself fat again and immediately runs to the death gym in horror. 

This time the cat comes with her, I guess to make sure she doesn’t try and sneak enough calories into her body to survive on the way there? The cat spots Usagi’s glamorously thin teacher looking like a zombie and heads into the basement, where the gym owner announces to no one that just one more treatment will kill her. 

The cat tries to get Usagi to go to the basement and save the teacher, but she’s too busy working out. It threatens to claw her face if she doesn’t go save the teacher. I’m starting to wonder if the cat represents the oppressive societal policing of teenage girls’ bodies? Is that why it was banned? Was this episode too political? Yeah! Fuck that manifestation of the patriarchy, Sailor Moon! 

Terrified of her violent, psychologically manipulative cat, Usagi goes to the basement, where she is attacked by buff bodybuilders being mind-controlled by the gym owner. Usagi knows, even as Sailor Moon, she might not win this fight against sleepwalking men with above average strength. She’s an unusual protagonist– a girl who, if she sees the villain has muscles, might actually run away rather than transform into a superhero.

If you’re not familiar with the Sailor Moon transformation sequence, it’s the classic magical girl anime transformation. It looks like she gets sucked into the cosmos so beings of beautiful light can do some tailoring on her skirt and put a pretty headband on her.

Now that Usagi is looking sharp, the evil cat reminds her that fighting is exercise. Well, actually, she says, “Remember, if you fight these guys, you might lose weight!” As we all know, there’s no better exercise for a fourteen year old girl than bare knuckle brawling with three adult bodybuilders. That and ribbon dancing.

Sailor Moon punches the glowing spit right out of those guys in the name of weight loss. Now obsessed with losing weight and only knowing how to safely do so by fighting, Sailor Moon rampages across the earth, brutally pounding anyone who dares cross her path to keep her abs cut as hell. I’m kidding. I wish the moral of this story was fighting is the best exercise. That would be dope. 

The episode ends with Usagi crying in the bathroom after yet another bath. Even with all of that ass kicking, she hasn’t lost any weight! So, the moral of the story is: teen girls, don’t be too skinny, but also definitely don’t be fat. However you feel about your body is bad because having a body is shameful, especially a body with the young and succulent energy of a girl. What a true nightmare! Hope you’re all having a good Anime Week. I’m going to go fight my mailman and take 11 baths.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Cooking with Garfield 🌭

My darkest secret is that for about six months I’ve been working on an article about the evolution of Garfield’s culinary palate and it has driven me to near madness. Six months of research on Garfield! Ronan Farrow took less time to expose Harvey Weinstein. Sure, I haven’t been staying up until five AM pouring over timelines and listening to witness testimony, but I’ve just been spending a lot of time thinking about lasagna. 

My original plan was to cook a bunch of recipes from all of Garfield’s cookbooks and try them, but things shifted a little when I recently learned I have sky-high blood pressure for a woman my age. I asked my doctor if it would be ok for me to eat roughly 12 to 25 lasagnas, and he said no. Well, technically, he said, “You know how when you put Mentos into a bottle of Coke, it makes a big geyser of Coke shoot out? The lasagna is mentos, your blood is Coke, and your heart will shoot out of your body into the sky if you eat that much lasagna.” Lame. 

So, here is everything I learned about Garfield’s culinary palate before I, like so many seekers of the holy grail before me, had to stop for health reasons. The first chilling Garfield cookbook fact I’ve learned is that one appears almost exactly every ten years like a witch’s curse. Once a decade, a Garfield cookbook must enter the world and sew chaos in our taste buds. 

Still, ten years is a long time, right? I expected to find way more Garfield cookbooks. Food is this character’s whole deal, so you would think he’d have more available. The first Garfield cookbook I was promised turned out to be a children’s book about Garfield and Odie trying to bake cookies in the microwave and accidentally creating sentient life in the form of a cookie blob monster. Garfield eats his nightmare child, and the story ends with a single recipe in the back for party cupcakes, which is “buy a box of fucking cupcakes.” I guess when you’re a cat and a dick you think this counts as a cookbook?

Yeah, Garfield learned about following directions the hard way. He almost fucking died. Garfield LEARNS ABOUT COOKING Any Cat Can Cook teaches children the exact opposite of the title. It should be called Garfield Learns About Cooking If You Do It Wrong, Your Food Will Come Alive And Try To Murder You, Also Why Cook You Can Just Buy Cupcakes, Dumbass. Gift this to a child if you want them to fear the act of cooking to their very core. 

Thankfully it was a full eleven years (from 1992 to 2003) before another Garfield cookbook was birthed into this world, I’m going to assume by being pulled from the bowels of Tartarus by Satan himself. This is a full cookbook with a few Garfield cartoons peppered throughout to remind you that Garfield very much likes food, so you should listen to his authority on the subject. It’s called I’m in the MOOD FOR FOOD: IN THE KITCHEN WITH GARFIELD.

This cookbook’s biggest crime is naming one of the dishes “Gonna Be A Hot Time In The Ol’ Mouth Tonight Cheesy Jalapeno Poppers,” and then telling you to deseed the jalapenos, which removes pretty much all of their heat and then not add a single other spicy element. Also, I wouldn’t normally associate Garfield with a dish called “Beat Me. Whip Me. Make Me Eat Rosemary Scalloped Potatoes,” but apparently, he’s a freaky little guy. This cookbook confirms it, Garfield fucks. Garfield naughty fucks.

I cooked up the “Life In The Fast Lane Deluxe Lasagna” from this book shortly before learning it was like juggling flaming chainsaws in my internal organs. The proportion of sauce the recipe calls for vs. the amount it expects you to use was way off. I had to desperately scrape half the sauce off the first layer and remove an entire layer of noodles to accommodate the proper sauce-to-noodle ratio. I don’t know what kind of Garfield vortex I was supposed to pull the rest of the sauce from, but in the end, it turned out to be a perfectly fine, if a little bland, lasagna. If you told someone you got the recipe from a cat, they’d call it “better than you made it sound.”

When 2013 rolled around, the curse of the Garfield cookbook struck again. America was in a great place. Barack Obama was president, Ironside was catching crooks Wednesdays on NBC, and Garfield produced his greatest cookbook to date, GARFIELD… RECIPES With Cattitude!

My copy of this book went through two different used book stores before it made it to me, and I have no idea why. I want to be buried with this Garfield cookbook when my terrible heart eventually goes full Mentos out of my chest because I won’t stop eating the incredible food from GARFIELD… RECIPES With Cattitude! 

I never thought I would be so evangelical about mixing mayonnaise and butter and putting it on a leftover hotdog bun. Some people might call this recipe peak sadness food, and they would be correct, but they would also be missing the hell out.

Did I burn it a little? Yes. Did it matter? Not at all. This recipe is the maximum amount of cholesterol you can legally feed someone without being charged with homicide. It tastes like winning the Nobel peace prize for fucking so good. 

The maker of GARFIELD… RECIPES With Cattitude! is Gooseberry Patch, who collects recipes by getting midwestern women to send them in for no payment other than a chance to win a copy of the cookbook they helped write. Then Gooseberry Patch slaps some sort of Garfield related name on the dish, and suddenly your mother’s cake recipe becomes “Garfield’s BDSM Chocolate Dom Surprise.” It’s the kind of cookbook where every recipe has five ingredients, takes fifteen minutes to make, and tastes like french kissing a butter sculpture of Julia Child. I mean every word of that in a good way.

This is where Garfield should have quit. The fact that a Garfield cookbook comes out every ten years chills me to the bone, but not as much as the fact that one recently appeared three years early, in 2020 instead of 2023. As is tradition for all things appearing in 2020, Garfield’s Guide To Lasagna, Cooking Nature’s Perfect Food is the most cursed Garfield cookbook. 

It’s a cookbook full of only lasagna recipes that is far too willing to play fast and loose with what is and is not “a lasagna.” According to this, any two or three things layered together make a lasagna. Layering flour tortillas, Mexican cheese, refried beans, and salsa in a casserole pan and baking it in the oven does not make a “Terrific Tex-Mex Lasagna.” That’s a culinary Frankenstein horribly offensive to at least three different cultures. Somewhere out there, an Italian has that recipe taped to a punching bag.

I’m sorry, but if lasagna noodles, cream cheese, ricotta, berry jam, and sliced berries qualify as a “Berry Breakfast Lasagna” then an orgy is a “Preeminent People, Latex, and Sweat Lasagna.” The word “lasagna” is not a toy, Garfield!

2020 was a big year for Garfield food, not only because of this horrendous cookbook. It was also the year that GarfieldEats, the world’s first Garfield-themed restaurant, closed its doors. GarfieldEats served the classic fast-casual restaurant fare of pizza, lasagna, and coffee, which it called Garficcinos. It was a restaurant that begged you not to leave on the front of the building, which felt a lot like a trap. 

The reviews were spotty at best for GarfieldEats. The only ones left on Yelp accuse the restaurant of giving them food poisoning with undercooked Garfield-shaped pizza and complain there were no bathrooms available to customers– two problems you do not want to combine. All of the food had to be ordered through an app which apparently didn’t work very well. One customer claimed they tried to cash in a 100% off coupon that was on the app and was denied because it had been uploaded in error. 

You would think that if you were going to base your entire ordering system around an app, making sure the app works would be your number one priority. However, GarfieldEats creator Nathan Mazri thinks outside the box! He was obsessed with making Garfield food the way Norman Bates is obsessed with his mother, and the results of his obsession were much the same. 

Nathan Mazari had an orange suit made and spent three years branding himself as the Garfield guy. After GarfieldEats closed down, he briefly attempted to make a line of Garfield frozen foods, until eventually, on Christmas Eve 2021 Paramount, which now owns Garfield, took the license away from him.

I can’t say for sure why, but Nathan tying himself so closely to the Garfield brand was probably becoming an issue. He got kind of Qanony for a bit about COVID. Then, When Chris Pratt was announced as the new voice of Garfield, he made an Instagram post that started with, “To Whom It May Concern, It should have been me,” Along with this photograph: 

He then spun out, attempting to do a full 180 from Garfield and becoming a Scooby-Doo guy. He started wearing a purple suit and got the license necessary to convert his Garfield frozen lasagna line into a Scooby-Doo-themed frozen food line called Scooby-Doo Eats. You know, the famous lasagna loving dog, Scooby-Doo! 

While I was collecting these nightmare Garfield cookbooks, I was also checking in on Nathan Mazri’s Instagram, which means I’ve been slowly watching a man without a brand spiral. Who is he, who is anyone, without Garfield? The Scooby-Doo thing fell through pretty quickly, and Mazri decided his next personality relaunch would be structured around updating the brand of celibacy. I have no joke to put here that would ever be better than these photographs:

Unbelievably, Mazri then turned back to Garfield in 2022, even after shunning him for Scooby-Doo AND the act of not fucking. He tried to sell GarfieldEats NFTs even though he still didn’t own the license. At one point, he attempted to sell a stylized photograph of his Garfield frozen lasagna for $70. 

You’ll probably be shocked to hear that this also did not work out, which made Nathan pull a villain turn no one could have seen coming. Nathan decided that if he couldn’t have Garfield, he would become Garfield. He created his own character, a brown cat in an orange suit who loves cheese, hates boomers, and promises to “cleanse this bitch of an Earth.” Garfield shattered this man. 

If you go to Nathfield’s Instagram profile, the first thing you’ll learn is that “Unlike Garfield Nathfeld is not lazy.” Other than his hatred of Garfield, Nathfield’s personality seems to be built around some kind of unspecified superpower that he’s gained from his orange suit. There’s a lot of talk on the Nathanfield Instagram page of a 2027 apocalypse that Nathfeld is trying to stop, which is either a pitch for a TV show or a legitimate attempt to start a cult around an off-brand Garfield. 

So, there you have it. I set out to learn about Garfield food tie-ins, ruined my health, and ended up heavily invested in what might be a Garfield-adjacent religion. Please respect my journey. It was all totally worth it for that garlic bread. 

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: AnAndy, inventor of Andyfield, the sassy cat who will burn the world.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Alpha Flight vs. Pink Pearl!

When I was a teenager, there was one comic book I wasn’t allowed to read. I assumed it must be because it was the darkest, most disturbing, perverted comic book in existence. It was about Canadians, and it was called Alpha Flight. I recently got my hands on a single copy of this perverted orgy of sin, and it was the most polite orgy of sin I’ve ever experienced. 

Alpha Flight is both as Canadian and as disturbing as I expected. It’s as Canadian as Wolverine and as confusing and violent as Wolverine using a machine gun even though there are weapons built directly into his body, and he can’t die. 

So, it turns out I was not allowed to read Alpha Flight because it is the one comic book my mom likes, and she did not want me touching her precious Alpha Flights. I checked, and she is aware that other superhero teams exist but cares for them not at all. “You can shove your X-Men right up your ass. Alpha Flight is the only team for me!” is a direct quote from my Mom, probably at some point. 

My Dad has a large comic book collection he’s now passing down to me with some really cool, rare comics in there. My Mom still will not let me touch the Alpha Flights. She doesn’t trust my sticky 33-year-old hands. I mercilessly teased her about this until she relinquished one Alpha Flight, her least favorite, and she didn’t want it back after I infected it with my cooties. This is what I learned from my single Alpha Flight. The story opens with extremely French Canadian twins Jean-Paul and Jeanne-Marie apologizing to each other a lot. 

Wait, no, I need to go back. It actually starts with Jeanne-Marie showing up at her brother’s place in the middle of the night in a bikini under a beefy title reading “Stan Lee presents: RUB-OUT!” It’s what’s known in Stan Lee’s imagination as a “Canadian Jackpot.”

Jeanne-Marie’s half-nudity and confusion can be explained by her dissociative identity disorder, and her haircut can be explained by 1983. But like with all mutants, there is a lot of backstory we can’t get into. As quick as possible, Jean-Paul doesn’t get along as well with Jeanne-Marie’s superhero Persona, Aurora, so instead of calling her Alpha Flight teammates and letting them know she’s okay (naked and disoriented on a couch with her brother), he decides to keep her for a bit and let them wonder if maybe she died. You know, like a fun sister prank.

For a guy whose look says “I make toys for Santa but also fuck my sister,” Jean-Paul seems weirdly concerned about Jeanne-Marie’s haircut. Maybe? He wonders why she would “pick a hairstyle her superhero persona could make no use of,” which is kind of what I’m talking about with mutants. That’s madness. Far too much to unpack or make sense of, and we won’t try. Then suddenly, Jean-Paul is like, “you know what would be a great place to take this woman in the thick of a mental breakdown? Someplace calm and relaxing with no loud sounds or sinister connotations. Ah, I know! She needs to go to THE CIRCUS.” 

It’s only been twelve hours. Jean-Paul barely let her take a nap and shower, and then he took her to a circus where he knew there was danger. He took her to a danger circus instead of to her home, or a doctor. Don’t worry; it’s not that big of a deal, though. They do a little investigating and quickly discover that the danger circus just turns out to be also full of terrorists. 

These are not mutant terrorists, so it should be fine. You would think that two superheroes would be able to take down a bunch of regular terrorists easily, but it turns out Northstar’s one weakness is being indoors. People give Aquaman shit about being useless on land, but this comic makes kind of a good point about speedsters. In a circus trailer, it’s pretty difficult to use run-fast powers, but I would hope he would be able to defeat Bones, a tube sock man whose superpower seems to be malnutrition?

The terrorist cell is headed by Pink Pearl, who is not, in fact, as nice a lady as the cover suggests. She’s from a weird time in Marvel comics history where they thought being fat was a superpower. She’s not a mutant or an inhuman or an alien, she’s just a big lady, and according to this comic book, she can withstand being stabbed in the heart because “all her fat cushioned her from a killing blow.” Yikes, Marvel. She also defeats Jeanne-Marie by simply stuffing Jeanne-Marie’s head into her tits and holding her there until she passes out. This is also how I’ve requested to be put to death should all of the terrible things I’ve done ever come to light. Do you hear me, Future? I choose to die by titties!

It’s worth mentioning how she also makes it kind of motherly? Sexual? It’s hard to understand what motivates her, but she delivers the titty choke with the confidence of a woman who has bosom-killed at least a few people before this.


I don’t know why Marvel decided not to give Pink Pearl any superpowers. At least The Blob, the original super-powered fat person, had skin that couldn’t be penetrated by bullets and a whole deal where he could affect gravity somehow? Basically, nothing moved him and they figured out the rules backwards from that. Yet, when he lost his powers, only the fat in his body disappeared, which means that was the source of his abilities, right? Do we have a clip?

Yikes. Anyway, I’m sure the pitch for Pink Pearl was Lady The Blob, and then they forgot to give her blob powers. Whoever at Marvel was supposed to develop a superpower for Pink Pearl took the day off, and nobody noticed or cared. Luckily, that doesn’t matter! Even without powers, Pink Pearl defeats two A-List members of Alpha Flight very quickly, via indoors and titty.

She reveals that she’s taken over the circus from Jean-Paul’s friend Clementine by injuring the performers and slowly replacing them with members of her terrorist cell in order to use the circus as a cover to get close to an ordinary old farmhouse which is actually a cover for a very very very special old farmhouse. It’s what Stan Lee’s imagination calls “A Canadian Plot.”

They could have made this something cool like a secret lab or a portal to the dimension where Alpha Flight is cool. No, it’s still very much a farmhouse, but it’s a farmhouse that has been chosen as the location for a meeting between the president of the United States and the prime minister of Canada. Pearl’s elaborate plan keeps the circus close to the farmhouse so they can blow up the entire circus with a bomb large enough to affect a three mile radius and take out the farmhouse as well. She hopes the explosion will be blamed on Clementine, because she is a former militant Quebec separatist. It’s both very focused and outrageously sloppy– the kind of plan you’d come up with if your superpower was eating six thousand chili dogs.

And she would have gotten away with it too if she hadn’t made the mistake of moving Jean-Paul to a second, larger location for no reason at all where his powers are now relevant. His sister switches back into her Aurora persona and suddenly takes control of the situation, reminding Jean-Paul that he can now use his speed powers and remembering she, herself, can fly. It’s worth saying again how these are two X-Men-trained supersoldiers with amazing abilities dealing with two people any doctor would call “soon unable to walk if they don’t drastically change their diet.”

Even though everyone who has superpowers now remembers that’s the case and they can use them, they still don’t defeat Pink Pearl themselves. She captures Aurora out of the air, and her sidekick Bones is about to stab her when Clementine jostles him slightly, sending the knife toward Pearl. In the end, it was not following circus safety protocols put in place for a reason that caused Pearl’s demise. Remember, kids, always throw knives at the right people. 

I have to respect the writing on this comic. Clementine yells “NO!” Bones replies “NO!” Pink Pearl yells “NO!” Shakespeare wept. And I think it’s worth taking another look at the font choice for Pearl’s last word.

When you’re so chubby your words form sausages, that’s art. Of course, I ruined the ending for you at the beginning. This is the issue of Alpha Flight that tells you it’s okay to stab fat people directly in the heart. “All her fat seems to have cushioned her from a killing blow.” 

Pearl survives the encounter and goes on to fight Captain America as a member of a group called the Femizons. Eventually, she retires from the terrorist life in the most glamorous way possible by running a male strip club. So, yeah, overall, I think I love her? But also, maybe not the best idea to tell children that fat people are indestructible monsters like werewolves or vampires? 

The story ends with Aurora revealing that she has figured out Clementine and Jean-Paul knew each other because he was also a member of her militant Quebec separatist group in the past. Aurora is appalled by this and only this, not the fact that he dragged her to the terror circus while she was in the middle of a mental health crisis. Maybe my mom was right to keep this comic away from me.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: WIZARDS

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