Author: Brendan McGinley
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Nerding Day: Buster Brown đ
You know how our grandparentsâ Halloween costumes are chilling for the wrong reason these days? Some kidâs rabbit mask was cute in the Depression, but looks like the hotel-ghost of a serial killer now. That was Buster Brown. He was early 20th century’s first go at a gleeful twerp, but modern eyes have seen enough internet obscenities to recognize a psychophage. I donât know why weâre making horror movies about lovable teddy Winnie the Pooh when Busterâs been the creepy giggling coming from the public domain attic for years.
Created in 1902 by R.F. Outcault as a reversal of his popular slumrat The Yellow Kid, Buster was an apple-cheeked rich kid whose beauty belied his insufferable antics. He assuredly grew up to be the jerk who tosses women into the pool at Gatsbyâs parties. Busterâs sidekick was his Cheshire dog Tige, and there were a bunch of other characters we donât care about, because none of them is seventeen poltergeists fighting to animate the corpse of a drowned child.
Not counting that one nightmare you keep having, the Yellow Kid is most recognizable these days as the inspiration for Sin Cityâs sexually undeterrable Yellow Bastard. Let me tell you the original kid, aka Mickey Dugan, was way more prone to racism, considering he was an Irish stereotype whose appearance barely qualified as human:
These two imps first appeared together on a 1904 postcard, but by that token, Batman and Superman first teamed up for a Worldâs Fair cover even though they never dueled over Martha within its pages. So it wasnât until 1907 that Buster and Mickey met in a dream-tale that is likely comicsâ first crossover and also its first homage to Little Nemo in Slumberland.
If you only read the normal comics, youâd think Buster was just a fancy Dennis the Menace. But by 1907 the comics would be the last way to encounter him, because Buster was the Garfield of his day. Pick five random Buster Brown comics, and six of them will advertise Buster products and productions. See, speaking of the Worldâs Fair, Outcault had spent 1904 in St. Louis at the peak of its âMeet Me inâŚâ popularity, where he sold Buster out as an ad mascot to 200 licensees.
As 1-900-HOTDOGâs own Lydia Bugg conclusively proved, cartoon licensing scours a mind of sanity. For every one of these products, Busterâs glazed stare says chloral hydrate, but his wicked grin says cathinone to the grave. Whatever they dosed him with to move product, it opened The Red Door. Buster in the strip is drawn as a normal kid, but Buster in ads looks like the meat-stuffed gunny sack you give to a couple mourning a misplaced reborn doll. Whereas The Yellow Kid had dots for eyes in his goblin pug-mug, Buster was a perfect child, and therefore bore the smooth features of White God Himself: pert jowls, the least amount of nose possible, and huge, expressive eyes.
In fact: too much expression and eyeball for comfort. First stop: the famous Buster Brown Shoe Co.!
Is Buster tweaked out of his gourd or do these shoes come with a free case of Gravesâ disease? If his eyes open any wider theyâre going to turn into hyperspheres, yet theyâre sunk so deep in their sockets time slows down near their surface. Itâs almost like the devil-skeleton inside canât grow his flesh past the age it possessed him. Thereâs nothing here but stretched skin and glazed jelly.
To avoid selecting for bias letâs start with a control: Wikimedia files. This is a crowdsourced series of exemplary images measuring Busterâs life and crimes. Leaving aside the strip where he talks about dead souls, there are eight gallery images:
Right out of the gate comes thisâŚwell, I guess you canât call it a threat, since once youâve seen it nothing can save you. Relax: the violence is already done, the chaos egg laid within your brain. Close your eyes while their lids still work. Youâll see his leering face slowly become your own. Youâre a vector for Bustration now. See that flesh-colored wall behind him? Nobody ever said he was bursting through plaster lathe.
Oh. Okay, this is pretty normal. This is just a comic strip about a boy and his talking dog mailing out party invites. Hey, do me a favor real quick: start enumerating people who talk to a dog that only they can hear?
I made that list in under a minute and 75% of it was murderers, 2.5 of whom were satanically motivated. Behold their Gilgamesh. Still: this being a strip and not an ad, itâs not explicitly terrifying.
Maybe I spoke too soon! Maâs face twists with revulsion: no! No, not a second one! What if it grows up to be the antichrist to Busterâs splendid blond beast? Or worse, what if itâs normal but one day, her attention slips long enough to leave it alone withâŚthis elder thing? Too late! It has seen the bundle at the door. âIâll take care of her,â the unchild tells her, attempting to calm her in as much as it can understand human emotions. After all, it wouldnât do to have the neighbors making note of her increasing instability. Not yet. No, not until the blood-moon eclipse. But still: the phrasing is deliberately ambiguous.
I donât care what time, place, or cultureâanyone who came home to find this dripping down the walls would understand too late what the iron scent in their nostrils had already warned them about: Buster has breached the circle of salt, and now we comprehend why so many corpses around Murray Hill have been found with their hearts removed.
âIâm not a Pinheadâ is EXACTLY what a Cenobite would say, and Hellraiser II already proved theyâre not above recruiting kids for their prog rock album.
And just like that weâre back to normal, even if Buster still hasnât grown a nose. Itâs nice that this victim of the worldâs first acid-on-baby attack still loves Christmasâperhaps because the soft, twinkling lights are easier on his vision? It takes his eyelid muscles ten times the force you humans use to blink.
Honestly? This is the best one. Itâs a sweet picture of three friends sharing a laugh. Unless that kid in the porterâs uniform is weeping. Why? I donât know, maybe his parents were found with their eyelids gnawed off by two sets of dental prints, one canine, one human. These are the possibilities.
This looks like a menu but itâs the French cover to one of the earliest comic books, a collection of Busterâs mischief (painting resolutions on walls). Please note that size and scale have no meaning, because reality breaks in the Demon Tigeâs personal distortion field.
Okay, with that baseline, letâs study the clearest scans from image search:
Tigeâs wordplay canât distract from this child with an elephant gun. Buster is barely old enough to read. His mother still dresses him in dandywear. How did he get this rifle? What is he going to kill? This pun only works if Buster will be shooting within range of Jack, or the police will get involved. Nothing about this is okay.
Buster grins maniacally at you, patient zero of a laughing disease that ends with you drowning in your own tears.
âOh, hello! I didnât see you there. Why yes, this marvelous red liquid blackens as it dries! Itâs the first of seven riddles that will unseal my true fatherâs prison when the submind corrupts itself to comprehend them.â
Most real-life productions either give normal Buster with sex-party Tige, or normal Tige with David Lynchâs Buster Brown. When they cast an actor without proptosis, proptosis will be given to him. (Protopsis means âexplosive eyeballsâ in Dutch.)
Despite this, we know the twerp has eyelids because the Buster Brown Shoe logo winks at you badly. He’s not used to closing his eyes because Buster never sleeps.
âResolved! That the prettiest girl is the one I want to pin my tie onâŚBuster Brown.â âBuster Brown
âFunny place for a necktie!â âTige
âSaliva samples tie the Brown boy to this series of corpses with their tongues pulled through their slit throats. GUILTY!â âJudge Parker
Every time Buster writes on a wall his facial topography averages out a little more. When the final trumpet sounds, heâs just going to be a volleyball with a pageboy haircut and a deadpan leer. But I guess I shouldnât make fun of a kid with whatever the opposite of ichthyosis is. Letâs just be thankful the crew of the Event Horizon did such a good job gluing his eyeballs back in place after Buster gouged them out to stop the visions.
At first glance, it seems like Tige ate a child. But those are all Busterâs trademarks, and the longer I stare at this, the more I think heâs ghost-riding his familiar.
In a vanishing instance of Buster [With Nose] but a recurring one of Buster [Without Eyebrows] we see that he becomes a haunted marionette of every woman on an over-50 dating appâs Duluth results. The real error was giving him irises to emphasize his pinprick pupils. Buster is higher than Godâs hairline. His peepers look like the painted stones Romans used to keep rigor mortis of the eyelids in check.
Not all of these were drawn by Outcault, but itâs telling that all artists characterize Busterâs as different stages of unembalmed corpse. This is a before and after argument for Botox treatment of Cushingâs syndrome. And let me save you some googling on that joke: Buster is allergic to oxygen, since in his dimension they breathe ultra-condensed sulfur. The result is a Tales From the Crypt where the disobedient kid who wanders away from the tour group ends up stuffed in the museum exhibit.
Poor fool, his mark is upon you now. You will pray for death as the world turns its face from your decay. You are become unto The Brown Men, and hell followeth.
Buster goes to see the Buster Brown musical, which itself was an ad for Buster Brown-Branded Great War Throwing Grenades. Tige attacks Stage-Tige, because the Left Hand Path demands one destroy oneself to obtain worldly desires. The Rite of Capitalist Sin-Ergy is complete.
Jackâs gun wasnât a one-time thing. Buster is armed at all times, but itâs not what you think. He keeps trying to kill himself only to wake up surrounded by torn pieces of meat.
The shattered heart, the fresh, dripping red medium, the declaration of inarguable intentâŚif you have virgin daughters, kill them now as a mercy.
This is a later work, after a surgeon split Busterâs corpus callosum in a vain effort to isolate his evil right brain in sensory deprivation forever. Tige, being an extradimensional entity unbound by laws of space, shrinks here to dance quite literally on the head of a pin.
Jesus, he looks like the grandchild spawned from two Dick Tracy villains marrying off their kids in a failed bid for peace. This is what that Samuel Johnson meme looked like back when he was young enough to believe this shit.
Gaily marching to our destiny, la di da! Suddenly, Busterâs eyes swell as his neck swivels to shatter the fourth wall. âNothing can stop us,â he chuckles. âNot even the fiction-membrane.â An icy finger traces your spine like a whispered promise.
Buster makes each pair of shoes himself, using locally sourced leather from previous customers. Say what you will about the ethics, but itâs ecologically admirable. Until 2010 you could still find Buster Brown Shoes not far from where Outcault lived in Queens. This blog wants you to believe it closed in bankruptcy, but isnât it more likely it was one of those magical shops that vanishes when you go back to return the Wishing Spats that have killed the very sweetheart you wished to impress with your foot speed?
Come Christmas, even Buster thinks he might have oversaturated the market. As his comp merch piles up, compare the normal kid with his cardboard cutoutâs thousand-parsec stare. Ad Buster has watched universes die in a sandbox of dust.
Oh no! Heâs out of paint! Winking at you like a stroke victim trying to morse code âRunning makes your fear taste better,â he then stretches his neck to unnatural lengths. The form of a python is the only way he can crush you for easier draining. Behind him, Tige has shrunk small enough to climb down your throat and begin extracting your bones for his own purposes.
Come on! Itâs not even in its socket at this point! Kill the boy! KILL HIM FOR ALL OUR SAKES!
Oh God, no. You shot it six times, but it sat right back up, laughing. Quickly, reload the cylinder before it cackles the true name of despair. Our troubles have just begun!
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Christmas is the time for tantalizing visions of sugar plums choking our unwanted loved ones. Unbound by mighty Death from our obligation to care for them, we enjoy our freedom as mail couriers riding the rails of the American west. Though trains frequently arrive weeks late, it is no great matter. We spend the days dog-earing the pages of our main delivery: copies of the annual Pumblechook & Figgâs sister catalog dumbed down for American release. We alone know its treasures, till we dispense a shared copy at each lonely waystation of the last frontier. It will be a merrymost Christmas!
âBut it is January!â bemoan the meaningless lives brightened by our tidings of consumer satisfaction. What about it, hayseeds? Society moves at the speed of the steam train, and Christmas waits on the timetables of man. The LORD is mighty, but His hand may not move the engines of the American-Track Rail Line faster than an Irishmanâs ability to shovel coal. You celebrate St. Stephenâs Feast in Spring now, and be grateful of it, you cat-yowling clutch of curmudgeons! Let us peer into its pages and see what devices you will order to slaughter buffalo and hooplehead farmers.
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Itâs 2022! Bivalently vaxed, youâre cleared to celebrate Thanksgiving with elderly family at last. As you carry sweet potatoes âcross the strangely dim threshold of their home, the door slams shut behind you. âIâm sorry, my lovely child,â you hear Fatherâs mournful voice. â âTis for your own good.â But what is this? Where are Nana and Peepaw?
A lone light bulb switches on, revealing a blotchy man in a denim button-down beneath a black sweater that cannot slim his paunch. Gummy wads of foam worry the corners of his dry mouth like a bridle bit broken by this wild stallionâs ceaseless jaw, this white horseâs pestilent thoughts. âWelcome back to The OâReilly Factor for Kids!â he bellows gently. âIâm here to âfreestyleâ some âstraight talkâ in your ear about Your Private Life.â
Outside, Motherâs guilty sobs are choked off abruptly by hands not her own. With her blood, we pay our passage into The No-Spin Zone, that habitat of blustery, wrong uncles, for another Thanksgiving. Maybe this year weâll learn to listen up and fly right.
We begin, as always, with letters from a blend of real teen narcs, some dorky attempts at an authentic âkidâ voice, and a few future Antifa Molotov Brigadiers. Most of these kids want to help their parents endure the fine-grinding wheels of capitalism. Not Chris. Chris has life figured out:
Bill tells a boring story about damaging a customerâs bushes while painting his house, yelling at his klutzy friends, and lying to the homeowner. It has nothing to do with money except heâs shaken by the first glimmer of self-recognition that heâs a man without integrity.
Like most people who graduated into a post-9/11 world, I can only imagine what a career looks like. The year this book was published I was working dawn shifts on boats and painting houses. Both jobs ruled, and I have no idea what Bill is crying about here. I got paid to climb ladders, farmerâs-carry weights, and listen to comedy albums all day with my best friend. I would quit all the not-this-one jobs of my life to paint houses again, so study if you want to, but in the 21st century every job title is Product Owner. Weâre about four years out from ComedyBot automating Hot Dog production, and by that time the Boston Dynamics Paint-O-Tron will have cornered home improvement. My point is Bill OâReilly is so consummately cranky, he managed to turn even the last great job into scolding teens.
He reveals that the billionaires of his acquaintance are miserable because their lives are an endless chase for money. Take a moment to savor the Wertherâs Original of the soul that is knowing Rupert Murdoch will die with an unfillable chasm where his heart should be, because youâre about to get yelled at by the observational comedy of the blotchiest Boomer:
He starts referring to himself as OâReilly, so you adolescents know heâs real down. Thatâs crunk! Maybe even mad crunk. Of course, everything Bill does, he does mad:
He obviously snipped the money parts from Poloniusâs speech to Laertes in Hamlet. And like that pompous pecksniff, Billâs a moralizing blowhard who will soon insert himself into womenâs bedroom conversations. But before sex comes cigarettes, because Old Man OâReilly canât do anything correctly.
Guh. This is a hamfisted simile to draw even if you havenât mobilized support for igniting those fields, but Bill has gone so far as claiming Iraq was linked to 9/11, and calling for Baghdad âa place where very many human beings lived!â to be leveled. Now heâs cavalierly using the flames he packaged and sold to the American people as poesy. I was insufferably straight edge for about five years, and even school-age me would back away uncomfortably from this guy who breezily bombs other nations but moralizes about a pack of smokes.
Speaking of cool, Bill told The Man off once:
Goddammit, I hate how often Book OâReilly is reasonable and cognizant compared to TV OâReilly. I have $50 says Bill âwroteâ this book by dictating his Factorial thoughts on the table of contents for co-author Charles Flowers to nervously infuse with quality life advice. And Iâm going double-or-nothing on famous exaggerator Mr. No-Spin conflating a local billboard offer with getting cast as The Marlboro Man.
After admonishing you for not paying attention, he recounts the time a hot stewardess who chain-smoked wanted to kiss him. He complains about it, but notably skims over whether his speciesâs penis has taste buds.
What other vices can Bill OâReilly ruin for you? How about Americaâs deadliest drug? No, not white supremacy, the chemical one.
Whatever parties Santo isnât getting invited to, you can pinpoint exactly where his imagination consoles him. I donât want to pick up the pro argument for teen alcoholism, but I spent my entire freshman year of college getting prank-called over a comedy piece I wrote about âI donât need to drink, homework is my drug.â I have room to stretch in the space where Santos lives and seethes unironically. And it sounds like his schoolâs problem isnât an abundance of alcohol but a shortage of health class. Obviously a 12-year-old shouldnât be having sex or drinking, but just because booze is a liquid doesnât mean itâs going to fill in your gaps as a parent.
I hate it so much when I agree with this asshole, because he always finds the least agreeable way of stating truth. This page exemplifies Uncle Billâs unearned, patronizing smuggery. Heâll remark on the obvious, tell you to do the work of proving his point for him, and treat it as a rhetorical victory. If you dropped an ice cream cone in front of him, he’d find a way to mansplain gravity to you before it hits the ground. As heartbreak floods your vision, heâd sneer, âIsaac Newton: Look him up!â already strolling away to the hot new segment producerâs cubicle before you could reply.
What? No way. Bill OâReilly is the likeliest guy in any bar to throw an empty glass at the bartender for not stocking the cheaper brand of scotch. Heâs a liver spot that taught itself English by watching Father Knows Best in hopes of seeing beer commercials. Heâs the embodiment of every mediocre man in the tristate area whose idea of kink in the bedroom is sobriety. I canât accept clattering teakettle of rage Bill OâReilly is not, at the very least, a dry drunk. As this bookâs made-up chat abbreviations would say, SMHID (Sorry, my headcanon is drinking).
Do you know what this means? This is the best version of Bill OâReilly. We live in the greatest of all Bill OâReilly universes, and his functionality is directly inverse to the quality of life for everyone else. There are worlds where he drank himself to death the night after recording his âFuck it! Weâll do it live!â meme, and in them a not-dead Iraqi physicist just published her breakthrough for cold fusion.
He might have later amended his ways. IRMC. (Imbibing rye manhattans, clearly.)
Uncle Bill made the decision in high school to never have any fun, and now heâs here to shake his finger under all your stupid, coke-dusted noses. Hereâs a letter from a 12-year-old who has never done drugs and never been offered drugs, but is very worried about drugs.
Bill, who has also never done drugs, is going to solve this very serious problem with you in the most OâReilly way possible: trying to convince you that you arenât enjoying yourself, that his reading bestows more expertise than your practical experience, and that these fallacies are objective reasoning. Billâs fondest memory of 1969 was attending Woodstock just to repoint the road signs down the wrong fork of the road.
He admits marijuana is non-addictive and less likely to cause car crashes, but you donât want other teensâ respect because itâs uninformed. Throughout this book he eschews solid arguments to seize on the only one he can conceive: he knows your opinions better than you do yourself. In Billâs world, pot lasts for days, is safer than booze, and makes you laugh, but is not cool even if the cool kids think itâs cool.
Again, I donât want to endorse kids being rad before their time, but I donât think anything could push drugs better than the grouchiest forehead on TV trying to veto cool. Not even Guitar Chris could make marihuana-devil-tea look as cool as your friendâs angry dad inventing reasons not to toke up and rock out. This anti-weed argument is the most devastating campaign ever conceived against alcohol.
The thread eludes Bill as he explains: pot, which is less addictive than booze, is fine if you consume it in thoughtful moderation, just like booze. Donât do it. Period. Then he lists all the smart, athletic, creative leaders in your class who smoke it with no problems.
This is my favorite quote so far, because it led to Old Man OâReilly getting his ass handed to him by this cool, composed 16-year-old who has read more of this book than its author did. It will please you to learn that kid grew up to have what looks like the sweet life youâd want for anyone who humiliates this blowhard on his own show, and with even more knives.
The problem with the âjust stopâ addiction argument is that even for black tar heroin, somebody has to want to stop to prove you right. Otherwise youâre just haranguing them. Nobodyâs going to make high school duller to deliberately lose a book argument with a guy who actually believes enough children watch cable news prime time to know his catchphrases.
To recap: all drugs are bad, pot is more destructive than you think it is, all the cool kids are doing it, theyâre wrong to like you for doing it too, donât let it stop you from embracing life, but the cool kids are using it to enhance life. Billâs never tried it, and all his friends who have tell him heâs the smartest man in Levittown. I think Bill was on drugs while he wrote this meandering mess. If you flowcharted his argument, it would overlay perfectly with a map of beesâ dance steps after scientists give them a speedball.
Bill, nobody knows where to find you or what that means, and not because theyâre on drugs. Is that an offer of assistance? Does anyone here believe a wayward junkie approaching Billâs mansion gates wouldnât be torn open by extremely patronizing Doberman pinschers?
This bookâs clumsy attempts to rap with the teens is encapsulated by the sex chapter arriving a single turn of the page too late to begin on 69. Leave it to this shambling echo of masculinity to fail at sex before it even starts. Itâs like he has face blindness but for the clitoris. Heâs never gone down on a woman except to taste a subordinateâs fear, and the most Bill OâReilly ever gave a woman in bed was $50 for the morning-after pill. Hi, Iâll be here all week, try the veal, which Bill has microwaved and cut a slit in, insisting itâs a much-healthier outlet for The Curse of Adamâs Desire.
At the risk of phrasing this wrong, around the time this book was being written I was dating more extremely legal teens than ever smiled at Bill OâReilly in his life (one). She nearly broke up with me because this Irish-Catholic dummy here wanted to wait. In the ensuing decade, I took a Fox News producer and a New York Post reporter on unimpeachably consensual dates, so Iâm more qualified than Bill OâReilly to advise you on â00s dating even if you never leave the News Corp offices, and thatâs his only expertise. Iâm the world authority of this truth: ignore anything Bill OâReilly says about how to fuck.
The man who spent $45 million unwelcomely penciling his brain-penis into a decade of subordinatesâ work calendars is going to lecture us about controlling our sexual urges. If you wanted to find someone less qualified to navigate the intersection of responsibility, money, and sex than Bill OâReilly, you would first have to sculpt a fuck-golem out of the urinal cakes from a Goldman Sachs executive bathroom and scrawl âUNSOLICITEDâ on its forehead.
Forty-five million! Itâs a lunaticâs labor to pretend any sexual wisdom may come from a man who spent the opening weekâs take of Spider-Man: Far From Home begging his phallus to predict six more weeks of winter. For that much money, you could not only buy an army of escorts for life, you could equip them into an actual army. You canât lecture kids about responsible spending when the standard unit of your sexual repugnancy is a yacht.
âGet a handle on your emotions before you have sex with someone,â says a man whose wife never led him up the stairs without fear he might drag her back down them. The best love this wobbling failure of the human experience ever made to the mother of his children was âworking too lateâ to get home before she fell asleep. His idea of foreplay is a neck massage that hurts and his idea of an argument is a neck massage that hurts.
And the worst part is this is wise counsel! Even his sensible sex advice is so joyless, itâs a jerk-off jeremiad.
At last the message becomes clear: you no-good teens stop trying to fuck Billâs daughtâWait, I looked it up, and both of Billâs kids were in nursery school when this got written. What lunatic neighbor spent dinner with this grouchy predator elaborating on their teen daughterâs peer pressure to spread?
Once again, Dour Dad canât commit to any argument beyond pooh-poohing your judgment. He thinks kidsâ religious beliefs are authentic and deeply held, despite the pressure to hold them from parents who control lifeâs necessities. But if youâre not religious, he thinks youâre just being edgy to impress Chris into writing a song about you.
Can you believe coeds in the peak â60s didnât want to spend two minutes of their newly won sexual liberation being lectured by a naked twerp? Of course he had no moves; it only takes three things to be good at sex, and heâs incapable of listening or loose joints. Bill OâReilly considers it edging to wait for a woman to requite interest.
But seriously, this is a vulnerable admission. As someone who also intends to lose his virginity at an advanced age, I applaud his honesty. 1-900-HOTDOGâs thoughts are with the young woman or enchanted frog who deigned to let him access their person.
Ugh, this guy talks to young people like the Steve Buscemi âFellow kidsâ meme waking up from having its wisdom teeth pulled. MOST pregnancies? Bill, what kind of Promise Keeper debutantes are you creeping on? Most women can enjoy sex on its own merits if itâs not with the male lead in Irish-Americaâs production of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
First off, that songâs pre-radio working title was âAny Dick Will Do,â but Bill stopped paying attention to lyrical relevance when he realized thereâs no guilt to savor in what these humans call dancing. More importantly, I donât know why Iâm writing jokes to compete with the juxtapositions between the manâs book and his entire angry life:
Sex is complicated, but shouldnât be so complicated itâs newsworthy. Nothing burdens a life like the nation learning you spent $45 million to keep your dick in your pants. He could have bought every strip club in Manhattan for that price, not gotten in trouble for staring, and earned some of his money back.
Except it wasnât his money, it was corporate coffers, clipping the rest of the companyâs War on Christmas bonuses. Bill OâReilly is a money-pig with other peopleâs wallets. The lawsuits against him exponentially raised the payout for a lesson this carnal toadstool refused to learn, and the only uplifting part of this story is that some women are taking luxury vacations with money that homunculus Rupert Murdoch had earmarked in Excel for âThought-Virus, Spreadable.â
Leslieâs going to burst into tears when she learns Robin Williamsâs best joke writer was his coke dealer, but to the point: every one of these cranky gosling-steppers is a giga-dweeb. Yes, I am here to mock the children.
They are Brittany, who in 2022 posts hustle memes conflating her MLM with a small business, Leslie, who can conceive neither children nor a life without a TV set, and Brian, who isâIâm sorry, this is just the way the world worksânowadays dealing poppers at a club called Bone Dawg Daddyz. I canât tell you if the God of Brianâs fathers is real, but I can say with certainty He loves irony. If you raise your child to fear MTVâs The Grind, you move the zero-points of their eroticism/forbidden axis to a place where a hangnail is considered dangling flesh.
This soothsayer, though:
I think this is our first documentation of âHey, none of this feels rightâ in Fox News consumption. Bill ignores it, but I guess brownie points for picking up opposite from Rush Limbaughâs âIâll tell you what to thinkâ stance:
If I werenât confident itâs preemptively thwarting our biggest criticism of Fox Iâd say this OâReilly guy really digs, or understands, what Millennials like me called âthe tubeâ in reference to cathode-ray technology prevalent at the time.
Now that weâve connected with kids over their hemorrhoid cream and second home purchases, there were just two kickass female protagonists on TV at this time; Buffy was the one JJ Abrams didnât put in a gratuitous lingerie scene to nab post-Super Bowl views. Itâs weird to pretend the thrust of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was her beauty, but not as weird as watching 24 for the cars. Is this Mad Libs? Are we doing Mad at the Libs?
I canât take another minute of Bill interrupting himself to remark on how much he runs his yap. He canât be pretending books donât have editors, because theyâre the harassable producers of print.
Billâs only advice is the same âThis thing sucks but itâs fine in moderationâ grousing as every other topic, with exceptions for the him-parts. So to burn page count, he revisits observational comedy. Itâs all just spinning the wheels until he gets to his favorite non-teen-sex finger waggingâŚ
Two very real children push open Billâs favorite thing in the world: a side flap on the âIâm not racist butâŚâ tent. This guy got rich tilling the earth for historyâs most successful gangsters, so I donât know what his issue is with people who just pretend to be one in song. Oh wait, yes I do: Blackness is the crime.
I know about as much of Allen Iversonâs rap career as I know about Allen Iversonâs basketball career: which is to say, twice as much as Bill OâReilly knows about being a decent family man. But I see his argument, you donât have to enjoy the things you enjoy if you donât want to. For example, perhaps your selfish tastes upset your TV-commentator father?
U.S. avocado consumption only began surging in 2005, so look how much money those of us born in the â80s had! Why, we were practically swimming in birthday sawbucks thanks to rising lifespan rates of our grandparents. Away, my friends, to the not-dying mall! There we will buy CD backups of our favorite MP3s, and the Mr. Coffee Tamagotchi-alarm-stereos to play them.
Here are the three things I know about Mariah Carey: She left Sony because working for your ex is awkward, she wrote the greatest Christmas song in half a century, and when she was a kid growing up in the same part of Long Island as Bill, racists poisoned her dog. Leave that nice lady out of this, and donât try to pin her tribulations on me.
IRMC.*
*Itâs racist, misogynist crap.
Wow, imagine an anti-authoritarian genre about obtaining material security in an implicitly persecutional system that disproportionately impoverishes and incarcerates Black people finding an audience among men deprived of same by same. But something something, real music has harmony. Hey, being a Fox News commentator is easy!
And lucrative. This slouch-joweled smuggo canât get through two chapters without bragging about how much money he gets paid to talk. If Billâs not racist towards rappers heâs professionally jealous. He really thinks heâs going to pressure kids into changing their tastes by pretending their friends are the ones hectoring them? Name a more pathetic way to get rich than One-Way Telegraph Child Bully.
Oh, wow, screamo, that was a flâHey! Did this motherfucker just capstone six pages of âBlack people: why donât they try harder?â with swiping the United Negro College Fund slogan? Jesus Christ, the part of America thatâs this white would pry your fillings out with their fingernails if they werenât superstitious that a bite could turn them.
Nonfictional children Jason, Jennifer, Jenna, and Jeanette write in to say theyâre too stressed with school to have fun. Billâs first and only response is to enumerate all the ways that fun isnât fun. Then he gives you extra homework of writing an exhausting list of things he can help you stop enjoying. FUN!
âYou know what I meanâ is Bill OâReilly for âI canât be bothered supporting my argument. Why do you have to be such a little shit as to question it?â This is another chapter where Bill has nothing to say other than âFun: stop having it,â because he looks exactly like a Mother Superior whoâs suspicious of anything you canât offer up to Christâs suffering.
On the one hand, heâs not wrong about moderation. On the other hand, which is stroking Billâs semi-turgid sex organ while telling a producer heâd like to lather her boobs, heâs not the guy to say whatâs cool. Heâs gonna try anyway:
Thatâs bullshit: the joy of hooky is like nothing else in this world. The nervous energy of being out of bounds is the closest our frontierless existences come to riding for a horizon, beholden to none. If I were going to explain it to Bill in terms he understands, Iâd say âPicture the second you release your wifeâs neck but gravity has yet to take hold of her. In that instant, your phone rings. Itâs your sexy employee calling to ask if she can move to a hotel room that isnât accessible via yours. The universe is a wild place, but there is a balance within it.â
âYou make the callâ is another lazy aside when this XXL water bear canât be bothered to have a point. Nearby, Charles Flowers wrings his hands nervously. This yearâs tough talk has gone long, but almost too well. We are all tired. Can we make it through pie without a fiery rant about âbeepers (the cell phone for thugs)â? Only the quick-hits section knows for sure.
There are many reasons not to shoplift from our wage-thieving overlords, but Bill implores the youth to have social consideration the free market lacks. This mother-hen spent five pages shaking his head at all the fun you thought youâre having but only expends 85 words on âDonât steal.â
The positive feedback loop that is Bill OâReilly getting rich nagging society, then bragging about the money he made doing so has sealed itself. I am exhausted. You are exhausted. Neither of us has any money. We should drag him from his home and dance in the light of his burning mansion.
Wait a secondâŚIYNWIM? If youâŚNOâŚwhat I mean? Let me look up Billâs fictional ch@$p3@k.
No. No, that canât be it. Thatâs a whole cloth invention, a cybersteampunk paleologism. Let me just quickly don these 1D double-red-lens specs I bought at the Charles Flowers estate saleâŚ
AhâŚthat makes so much more sense.
If Twitter still exists in your timeline, these are Brendanâs best jokes this month.
Greetings, future civilizations of the next species to rule the earth (Magpies? I bet itâs magpies). Congratulations on finding and deciphering this article deep within the 1-900-HOTDOG archives here in the beautiful Mountains of Madness. You surely have questions about todayâs video, âDogs of Glory,â a song ostensibly for children by Christian musician Jim Steager. I can contextualize it for you as the owner of a very smart puppy that is part Chihuahua, therefore at war with the entire physical world, and thus a presumable Christian.
I know it sounds like the rad battalion that will clinch Union victory in 2029âs Civil War II Da Streetz, but the dogs of glory are simply a metaphor in song for the devotion required to follow Jesus Christ. Steager wants listeners to trust and admire their savior with the same faith a dog would. Just not my dog, who will tow me three blocks to sniff poop, and pointedly ignores me when I tell him to stop barking at every living being in the universe.
Ah, sorry. He was the human version ofâŚI guess the nearest phrase your language has for messiah is Death Migration Victor Prime. Jesus was a Judean carpenter with a side hustle as the Son of God. His message of peace has brought comfort to the billions blessed by the violent sacrifice required to spread it.
Itâs a forgivable misunderstanding, but Steager does not begin the video as a hybrid human-dog chimera. His face has been painted to resemble a dogâs by a talented artist, so that when children contemplate his performance, they will wither to know this world is broken. Only once their souls know true terror will they cry out for a savior, and they will become faithful servants of THE LORD THEIR GOD.
First off, Iâm sorry that your ancestorsâ bones made such delicious stock. Second, Steagerâs awaiting eternal salvation, a feast of the soul given after you die. Iâve never met a dog who would turn down a bone now for the promise of two bones later, so mark these as the last fully human words Steager will ever sing.
Immediately after, at the 34-second mark, you can see his eyes flash with hidden knowledge when he beholds his new fursona staring back at him. Poor fool, his invitation is accepted, and his face-sac deflates slightly as The Dog of Glory pries him open from a side we cannot imagine. The paint is a veneer on a collapsed wall now.
Yes, but never in a worldly manner. By donning the skin of a Christian Canine and howling the sacred invocation âHallelujah,â he had constructed a transformation spell in the name of Christ, and powered by the rocket fuel of childrenâs faith. I donât care how you dress it up in pet shop sounds and facepaint, âDogs of Gloryâ is not a childrenâs song, except in the sense that adults canât hear its backmasked message to shred flesh for the Blood God. It starts off as a beautiful meditation on faith you would play at the funeral for a beloved civic figure who died of Old Personâs Diseaseâsuddenly itâs ripped open by the guttural cries of starving beasts. Steager has let trust in a higher being deceive him into chasing the invisible bone of salvation.
Bewildered, Steager now cascades back and forth between dog and human skills. For the rest of the song, Steager is now a manimal.
It is actually better to be a dog than a human! The whole world is your toilet and strangers love you. You have no idea what an influencer is. Nobody tries to convince you to go to church, because they think you donât have a soul.
Watching a manâs personality disintegrate in real time, we realize they may be right. Before weâre one minute in, Steager spits hot fire about looking both ways before crossing the street, which is not a famous quality of dogs. My pooch is terrified of cars, yet frogger-lunges every busy corner. Perhaps Steager is a seeing-eye dog? Is that what this is now? God is blind and we are leading Him?
Oh boy, just wait. God throws the stick of salvation into traffic as a test of faith, but also keeps Steager on the Leash of Love (not what it sounds like, unless it is). Then heâs let off-leash to dance a mad farewell to his humanity. Are you confused? I spent high school Friday nights at Catholic youth singalongs, and I am goddamn-dogman baffled.
Which brings us to another point in our Christian faith: God spelled backwards is dog, soâŚyâknow. Right there, that whole thing. What does that mean for us in our lives with Jesus? Discuss quietly in groups while I slip out for definitely not a cigarette.
But seriously, itâs like heâs losing his literacy as the dog side consumes himâ
There it is. As Yrolg the Dog-Thing consumes his very being, he loses his ability to read, and can only pine forlornly for the Bible that once comforted him.
Basically, Godâs love is the only true peace, but also anyone full of it is spiritually on fire and can only be soothed by the same cause ofâIâyou know, Iâm still lost. Werenât we just in a flowered pasture by a pond? Then a street, but now back at the water? Look, the best I can figure is Steager wrote this song while walking his dog to the park and back.
Magpies, I donât know what kind of theology youâve constructed for yourselves, but I hope it doesnât require you to constantly affirm that Nestfather is perfect. Frankly, I think itâs weird that His mighty wing will only shelter you if you praise His flawless plumage. I donât have all the answers, but it seems to me that a perfect magpie deity would neither need nor want constant adulation from lesser birds.
Iâm going to be honest with you, magpies. Thereâs a reason my society has vanished from this earth. Weâre so busy trying to become Dogs of Glory, weâve let malevolent forces consume our abilities to read and reason.
I know, and the dumb part is we had actual dogs the entire time! Are there still dogs in the future? Theyâre great! You donât need to pass a devotional test to be happy in their presence. My dog is an absolute jerk to other dogs and people and my cat and squirrels and birds and this rad wooden statue in my office he thinks is a burglar. Socially speaking, heâs as flawed as a person can be. But thanks to him I enjoy all the benefits Steager sings about, and I donât have to die to receive them. I donât need to convince myself my obnoxious dog is a perfect entity. He loves me right now, and keeps me from losing my goddamn mind every time Twitter tells me the Ku Klux Kaukus just approved $32b of my taxes for a migrant orphan trebuchet.
Hunh. You know, now that I think about that makes so much more sense about His message and sacrifice. The only thing I can tell you about the historical Christ is that He definitely wasnât a Chihuahua.
Brendanâs beyond saving, but you can still help out friend of the site and very funny comedian Vanessa Guerrero with an emergency donation.
Magpie credits: Ken Billington
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Seanbaby and Brockway started 1900HOTDOG as a way to grift government processed meat subsidies, and along the way accidentally assembled the best comedy team in novelty phone number history. This week all articles are free in honor of the fantastic columnists that make this site a place to be treasured and feared in equal measure.
Categories
Fucking Day: Nash đ
Wrestler Kevin Nash is many things: Tall. Diesel. Super-Shredder. Probably not the bad guy from Avatar. Last of the giants from the frozen North? I leave it to wrestling fans to answer these mysteries, because my nerdery is comic books. That means I only know Nash as one thing: a man who will pleasure tattily clad women. The Gospel of Nash tells us of his almighty cocksmanship in 1999âs Nash, written by, and starring, Kevin Nash as Kevin Nash, and drawn by the many-headed dragon of the â90s known as Not Quite Rob Liefeld.
If Snake Plissken and Mad Max had a baby, Nash would be the poorly shot home movie of that babyâs conception by your hot wifeâs bull lover. Itâs your standard post-apocalyptic One Man action-adventure dystopian western, except its title character is only here to bone down; fighting oppressive regimes is just his love language. Nash doesnât fail the Bechdel Test so much as seduce it with a swaggering confidence that all lesbians havenât met the right penis yet.
âBut what is the plot?â I hear you asking. And if I ever find out, you will hear my cry of disappointment. Baby, the Nash simply is. Like the heroes of antiquity and City Dragons of our childhoods, fights are merely inconvenient interruptions to his partying. The best I can tell you is sometime before the comic started, Nash got sick of doing The Manâs dirty work and became a folk hero outside of the domed cities where REAL America scrabbles to suck nutrients out of the dust.
Our protagonist is a sensitive, indestructible lay-about who has Supermanâs fortititude and Batmanâs skills, but devotes his life to kumbayah down by the fire. If he saves your settlement, youâre stuck with him. He only moves on to the next village after heâs fully impregnated the last one.
Nash has no objectives, motives, plan, or prophylactics. His nemesis finds him more useful alive, and his ex is too hung up on him to risk his ire. As long as he repels the occasional attack on the village thatâs passive-aggressively hinting he should move on, itâs all repartee and orgies, you groovy cats.
Obviously I love this comic.
Letâs meet the characters!
A+ villain name, take a cookie. Our evil mastermind of this hellworld is a complete cipher. The book tries to keep him in the shadows as a big bad while his daughter runs his empire, but sheâs plainly covering up that her dad is brain-dead. If there had been an issue three, Nash would have revealed Cyrus to be a husk in a life-support pod, which means he could be played by almost any wrestler over 30.
Cyrus Stormâs daughter and Nashâs former lover. Sheâs blonde, busty, and cokerail-thin, but even that is describing more personality than she has. To call her tits on a lighthouse would suggest she projects anything useful. Yet somehow, sheâs the most morally complex character, musing that good and evil are a useful illusion shared by a selfless freedom fighter with a dick straight out of Sumerian myth and a puritanically authoritarian hypocrite who bombs whole towns in the desert. IâIâŚwait, oh dammit, Nash really predicted the New American Century.
All the bad guys in this book have widowâs peaks and slicked-back hair, but only Parch has Alex Jonesâs gorilla-tits torso. We meet him molesting an altar boy for laughs. He rules over an entire city of religious fanatics, and weirdly, itâs not Birmingham. Los Angeles has changed in the futuristic world of 2023.
Heâs positioned as the right-hand manâs enforcer, but will actually turn out to be the main villain, Robocop-style. Trax is made of chewing gum and heavy. Sometimes he looks like The Rock, other times he resembles Walton Goggins. The only constant is his scowl for all the world. He doesnât love power, he just hates all things that are not Trax.
Donât get too attached.
Jaredâs uncle and leader of this ragtag passel of human vermin. And yetâŚthey have pride and self-restraint. Perhaps enough to make an army that will yet topple the Citadel. If they find one true man to lead them. No!…one LEGEND.
Sheâs sultry, sheâs Asian maybe, sheâs a hired killer. Nash has sex with at least four women in two issues and even the one who tries to kill him doesnât get a name. Iâve decided to call her Nadia, though Nash simply refers to her as Bitch.
Look, thereâs no easy way for 1999âs Nashiest comic book to tell you this: 2000 was the beginning of the end. That was the year Cyrus Storm culled humanity, via some kind of selective nanotech plague, to prevent the food shortages that happened anyway. The elite survivors erected massive globes over major cities, while shipping food from farms in the wastelands, where everyone is starving, and I already have so many logistical questions about how this world works before the comic actually starts.
Honestly, youâre only selling me on this Storm visionary who tried to stave off world hunger. Iâm going to need to hear more about his eugenics programâs criteria before I disapprove. For all we know he selected for altruism and empathy. Like, are all the billionaires dead? He seems to have condensed all of the worldâs religious fanatics into a fishbowl under an ineffectual clown, and theyâre not allowed to leave. So far, Iâm an admirer.
Through this dark future world of 2023 strides Nash, ex-agent of the Citadel, which is either a place or a group. Itâs unclear, and frankly a mistake when it could have been called The New World Order. Get it together, Nash. Vince McMahon canât sue you when youâre an outlaw of the Wastelands.
Showing up seconds too late to save an old woman from being shot in the face, Nash force feeds her killer a plasma grenade while her grandson Jared watches with an eerie cheerfulness. Itâs like other people arenât real to him. Thatâs when the little psychoâs uncle shows up, cursing the murdered woman (his own mom?) as a fool. But hey: free food truck!
Back in the City of Faithful, Deacon Minister Parch is furious about the stolen food shipment. His right-hand man is Trax, who hates Nash, despises Parch, and wants Nashâs old job working directly for the Storms, even though nobody else seems to have it? This is all getting a bit Game of Thrones. Parch orders retaliatory troopers into the wasteland to reclaim his food even if he has to obliterate it. Compounding his foolishness, he strikes at dawn, meaning thereâs a 105% chance the attack will interrupt Nashâs most important meal of the day: sex.
Sure enough, we get our first Nashfuckface. The concentration of this man on her pleasureâby God, Iâve never seen its like. This is sexual solicitude of the first order. Nothing canâ
PAAAAAARRRRRRCH!
Death from above should have thought twice before interrupting Nash pre-ejaculation. Thatâs just going to make him mad. Your only chance of survival is striking in the afterglow, when all men know the unbearable sadness of clarity.
Using his grappling disc, Nash takes to the skies and bombkicks through the hydrofoil cockpit of a hoverjetcopter. Itâs pretty flippinâ sweet, you guys! And I know from sweet; I bought a used BMX when I was 33.
To keep things fair, Nash kamikazes his skyjacked deathcopter into its helibuddy. He then skydives without a chute to extra-murder the freefalling pilot, because Nash is a perfectionist who worries his foesâ last minutes will be spent in terror instead of agony. Orgasms, a horrifying deathâŚboth get Nashâs fullest effort as long as someoneâs screaming.
The remaining chopper, terrified that Nash will turn his rage on gravity itself and punch the primal forces of the universe to death, bravely sacrifices itself to distract him. Its pilot? None other than Mr. J. Hieronymous Trax, Esq.
Nash fight-plunges seven stories for the second time in as many minutes, only this time he hits the ground. Donât worry! The ground is okay. So is Trax, who shoots Nash, but all that happens is he gets blown through a wall. The banter isnât memorable, but even the non-fucking parts of this comic are fun. Weâre having fun. This is fun. Is this kayfabe?
Nash fights some hovermonks, and in the time it took your brain to respond, âWhat a great concept!â he wrecked their shit for them. Ha ha ha! Who else ya got, God?
But! That is when Nash is perforated by bullets. And the comic ends, gaspingâŚâWh-who?â Stay tuned for the big reveal in Nash #2, coming at youâŚRIGHT NOW!
Who could have gotten the drop on our hâoh, itâs Trax again.
Our cliffhanger was just the unvanquished foe that Nash had turned his back on. Fooey.
Pulling anti-tank ordnance out of hammerspace, Trax shot Nash with harmless âmercy bullets.â We never find out how they harmlessly puncture a man! Donât look back, focus on the road called Nash. Trax wants Nash to take down the non-Trax parts of the system so that Trax can rule it.
Killing Parchâs hovermonks is a classic Starscream maneuver, and I think we have a pretty intriguing setup here. There are four bad guys, each of whom is about a third allied with any two of the others. Itâs a Michigan standoff, boys!
Trax teleports home while the villagers begin to rethink their âWe need a heroâ policy.
In half a day the settlers go from welcoming the legendary Nash to hinting that he ought to leave. We can all agree their fears are bullshit. They knew repercussions were coming the minute they swiped a SysCo-brand comestibles ânâ combustibles conveyance for the noms inside.
Tara is watching this unfold through some kind of Eye of God camera that can see anything. Perhaps itâs mounted on the monksâ armor? But this means she must know Trax slew Parchâs men? None of my questions about this backstory are answered by my questions about the now-story.
Point being, the year is 2023, and without smartphones, technology has advanced at an incredible pace despite social collapse. You switch to a sandwich-based economy, and everybodyâs capable of great things. Great things indeed, like Avalon, the flying city! Its teleporter beam! The invulnerable Nash! And of course, his six-minute refractory period.
Which is how we know their real problem is Nash eating all their food and banging every woman in the village. Look at this panel:
Every single man is glowering at Gilganash here. The conversation orbits around Nashâs groin, because his balls exude gravitational waves. This comic waxes romantic on his Kegel muscles so much, it was named 1999 valedictorian at esthetician school. Comic Book Nash could find a way to brag about his dick game while helping you select a child’s casket. And this universe agrees with him! Itâs the horniest apocalypse since 1994âs Dr. Strangelove 2: The Strangest Love.
Tara and her daddy issues teleport Kevin up to Avalon without his consent to let him know that no man, no legend, will ever fill the internal demolition he left in her heart. It goes well:
Back at camp, Nash and more nameless women who exist only to jump on his lap are having a foursome. Nash asks one why he hasnât seen her before, but forgets to ask why no one else in town has either. It will surprise you very little to learn sheâs evil, and even less to learn nothing else about her.
Nash wakes to find that she has slain the other women and drugged him after partaking of his post-apocalyptic phallus. The women of the future sure act like the men of the now.
There is a hotly contested pistol that vanishes and reappears while they brawl. It ends when she suddenly gets really religious and points the gun at Jaredâs temple. Nash talks her down, like the hero hâ
Wow! Okay, this book really has a handle on America in the 2020s. She shoots Nash next, but come on, itâs Nash. He has so much muscle mass his internal organs are safe from radiation. Anything under .50 cal is, relatively speaking, a mercy bullet.
Oh, and all of this infanticide makes Nadiaâs nipples so tight aerospace engineers copied their design for rivets. This is the apocalypse we could have been living through.
Nash banters with this despicable woman, but his heart isnât in it, since Jaredâs one intact eye is staring at him accusingly, and itâs been at least two hours since our hero drained his balls.
Nashâs agony is such that he can barely muster quips while we leer at this child murdererâs smoldering breast. He vows vengeance to you, our reader, and it turned out he was the monster at the end of this book all along.
And thatâs it! Both issues of Nash, a comic that showed up, charged $100 for a platinum foil edition, and vanished with all our questions compounded like Nashâs last six simultaneous lovers. It is a bafflement where this story is goingâor rather, where 80% of it went before we got here. This bookâs editor interferes only slightly less than the average WWE referee.
Fortunately, editing comics well and drawing them badly are two of my four non-sexual skills as well as both of my sexual skills. And I have two decades of experience in 21st-century apocalypses ruled by the 1% in partnership with theofascists. I think thatâs all we need to divine the ending we were denied. I canât draft sci-fi vehicles, or even any car that isnât a VW Rabbit, but I can trace a potato, so Iâm more than qualified to draw every one of these characters.
Yes, that tingle below your navel is correct. The story of Nash will not stand incomplete. No longer will you toil through life with uncertainty gnawing at your soul: resolution is here, my Hot Doggos, in a satire that, for legal reasons, I should probably call Nâash. Itâs HAPPENING! RIIIIIIGHT! NOOOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!!
Thanks for Nashing with us, Nashsters!
Brendan has a store now if youâre itching to buy the original art to this comic, prints, sketches, script, and more, or just commission a drawing to woo your one true love. (Seriously, thatâs a real thing people have hired him to do.)
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: M Jahi Chappell, who is known as the Kevin Nash of the local 4-H Club.