Category: NERDING DAY

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: 101 Hamburger Jokes 🌭

Perfection. I’m speaking, of course, about the title of the 1978 book by Phil Hirsch and Don Orehek, 101 HAMBURGER JOKES.

101 HAMBURGER JOKES. There are no other three words so descriptive and fun, and I will say that right to an Aliens Versus Predator poster. If I was trying to come up with a funny name for a fake book and my brain landed on “101 Hamburger Jokes,” I would take the rest of the day off to buy trophies. 101 Hamburger Jokes is what we should have called this website. It’s a careless shrug from an accidental genius. It says both “keep your expectations reasonable” and “I’m from a better world, where Zany is the only language.” It is both a wink from a magical comedy pixie and a tired sales pitch from a man holding 70 hamburger jokes.

Betrayal. What is this? Phil Hirsch dressed a burger up like a cat. Then he asked you what he had done. Then he explains, yes, you guessed right: cat-burger, but not some kind of burger-cat like you’re thinking. He’s a cat-burger (burglar), because the burger part is a pun on a concept we didn’t establish. And how dare he. This is many things –many things– but a hamburger joke is not one of them.

Well, yeah. Sure. I mean, what else would it be? This isn’t a hamburger joke. It’s not even a hamburger riddle. This is what you would draw if you were playing a sad Pictionary game by yourself. Sorry, let me translate that into burger. This is a Pictionary clue Veal Armstrong would draw if Bun Aldrin abandoned him on the moon!

Phil published this the year “Cheeseburger in Paradise” was the 32nd most popular song. The song “I’m Your Boogie Man” was literally the number one hit while he was writing it. And there he was in a world of burger and burger soundalike songs expecting readers to think, “A hamburger’s most familiar song? Oh, oh! It’s got to one about range! Something about range, come on, think.” Get the fuck out of here, Phil.

They feel at home on the ra– oh, god damn it, Phil. So even the “101” part of 101 HAMBURGER JOKES was a lie!? Fuck you.

I really wanted to love this book. Let me see if I can find a good one…

No. This feels like the world’s greatest lawyer making a case for why puns should carry the death penalty. Someone really thought they could turn 40% of all words into forced meat references and simply carry on communicating like a human. Oh, and it looks like Phil tried cat-burger (burglar) again, somehow not making a reference to burglary a second time. Phil, if cat-burger (burglar) is your punchline, the set up is either “What kind of a burger steals?” or “What’s the most popular food (and most common occupation) in Cincinnati?”

Phil, you son of a bitch. Don’t make this about meat type.

Oh, very funny, Phil. You’ve made the hot dog the ugliest girl at the meat ball, over in the corner talking to ham. I’m not going to go back and forth like this with you. You know you were wrong for “cat-burger (burglar)” and for trying that desperate “Home on the Range” bullshit two different times. Can we get back to a normal article where we just enjoy your perfectly-named book, 101 HAMBURGER JOKES?

I’ll take that as a yes. Thank you, Phil.

Now that we’re being civil, I want to try to understand what’s happening here. There seems to be a way of things in this hamburger joke world. Is that a human priest marrying those food monsters? If so, it implies they live among us and we legally recognize their love. We share a God and can break His laws together. Maybe if we can understand this universe the jokes will start to make sense?

First off, let’s verify the scale of things. Is that really a full-size priest, or did these snacks climb to the top of a wedding cake to play make-believe with the topper? Is it a world where humans are burger-sized? Let me find one with some hard numbers.

Okay, this is great. I’m not sure what anyone would do with this in any other context. Not laugh, probably, but it does establish the burgers in this book are roughly human-sized and have combat sports. Does that mean a person can box a cheeseburger? If they get hurt do they go to a human doctor or are there meat medical scho– wait, hold on. In this world, do man and meat fuck?

Whoa, that’s closer to a definitive yes than I was expecting. You might notice there is no pun or wordplay in this one. Phil just changed an entire unrelated word to hamburgers, which is cheating even by his loose code of joke ethics. He had to keep those patty holes in his book at all costs. He wanted us to know they were there. Because a kid’s joke book could never come right out and say, “Human men sexually dominate these burger people, and here’s a picture of it.”

I was wrong. I’m so happy I was wrong!

This one is troubling. I think it’s a nightmare Phil has about falling and realizing everyone can see his tampon string (plus he’s a burger dog). We’re offered six (6!!!) choices for the “punchline,” and not a single one of them describes what is plainly a dog burger. If that thing walked onto a cartoon, you wouldn’t have to introduce it. That’s fucking Dog Burger, maybe Puppy With-Cheese. If anything looks at this and says, “Wow, a football stadium with the seats removed,” hit it in the head with a hammer. But forget all that. It’s frustrating and I hate it, but forget it. This one tells us these burgers have smaller, animal burgers as pets! And, maybe more importantly, you leash a burger by shoving one end of the leash inside them where an “asshole” might be found on you or me.

We’re learning a lot. Not about comedy, but about what it takes to build a world where meat can walk and love. Today, if someone started up a discussion about defining burger gender you’d brace yourself for something worse than shitty wordplay, but remember, these burgers live in 1978. And maybe a darker one than ours, because here’s one about blackface:

Let’s give as much credit to a man making blackface burger puns as we can– that picture of hamburger Al Jolson could have been a lot worse. Now, for a lot of reasons, I want to get back to burger fucking.

“Draw me a burger who fucks people,” said Phil, right before Don Orehek won nothing less than the Nobel Prize for Pervert Burger Illustration. Why do they sign headshots afterward? Patty, if you have to ask… look, the point is, anything goes in this world. All burgers are men, horny fuck-champion men, and they don’t care if you’re hot dogs or people.

Or barely lega– wait, oh no. I know how this question is going to sound, but what is the age of consent in a world where you can have sex with cheeseburgers? Because, and again I know how this is going to sound, I’m not going to fuck a burger more than 3 years old. 

Let’s ignore Phil’s sloppy reach for a pun here. Phil Hirsch couldn’t write a joke with a burger and a dick hole, and he’s proven specifically that. But he can offer up fascinating ideas. Does this hamburger joke mean the buns are women? How does that work? Is there penetration, or is their reproductive process more like hermit crabs changing shells? How do these living, working, sentient burgers make more of themselves?

Oh my god. Are the burgers made from the remains of the humans? I need to know if that hamburger is going to grind up meat that can beg him to stop or if being ground up is a normal part of a meat’s work day. Is this a ritualized death ceremony? You can’t casually draw a picture of a hamburger walking into a slaughterhouse.

So they’re meat made from flesh, but their blood is catsup!? And some hamburgers rise from the dead to feed on it? And they feed by freaking out at Burger King until someone gives them a medical ketchup transfusion! To think Phil created all of this, a sudden world of hungry burger vampires terrorizing fast food restaurants, just for that gasping beached whale of a punchline… it’s almost beautiful in its tragedy. It’s like lovingly nursing a sick tiger back to health only to sell it to Mike Tyson.

The rules of the hamburger world seem mostly defined by the whims of Phil’s strained puns. So burgers go to school, but either for 1800 years or just to get grilled alive for a few minutes. Their flesh comes from cows, but they have sex with teen humans named Patty. And speaking of, if you live in this world, know this about the burgers, and still name your daughter Patty, what are you doing? No, answer me. Why’d you name her Patty, meat fucker?

I guess the problem with a world built around a dumb idiot’s dumbest wordplay is that Phil keeps squashing meat into words where it doesn’t make sense.

See, look at this stupid son of a bitch. He added the word “meat” to a word but didn’t change its meaning or function. This is like saying “What kind of ball of meat did the meat become? A meatball (meatball)!” A regular thermometer will tell you the temperature of your burger, you fucking dumbshi– oh wait, I just now realized we haven’t established whether or not these burgers are still food.

They are food! But they don’t want to be!? Dear god, when people go through the buffet line, does that baby burger beg for his life? You might think I’m doing a bit where I’m overthinking 101 HAMBURGER JOKES, but I’m not. I genuinely think you need to establish the basic hamburger rules of life and death before it’s funny to kill them. Or maybe not, because look at this fun mess:

So that burger dressed up like a rooster to have sex with chickens, or maybe dressed up like a rooster for another reason and this is a happy accident, but then, in addition to that, a man is stalking him with an axe. To kill the intruder in his chicken coop? Or is he also fooled by the disguise and his intention is to eat what he thinks is a rooster? And if you do kill a chicken who happens to be a burger in disguise, are you disappointed? Do you say, “Oh, gross! It’s not a raw chicken, but a fully cooked cheeseburger! Aww man, and his balls are absolutely drained.”

Jesus Christ! So in the 101 HAMBURGER JOKES world everyone is food, including the reader?  This is… fuck. I don’t know what to do with this. It’s like a dad joke you’d tell if you and your son were eating a hitchhiker. Let’s maybe change gears and do a desperate overreaching pun one…

Unidentified? Phil, you have identified hamburgers twice a joke for over fifty jokes! And UFOs don’t “fry” unless… oh damn it, is this more racism? It was a bad idea to try to figure out Phil’s comedy. I’m going back to trying to figure out his worldbuilding. 

So hamburgers watch human entertainment, but weirdly translate actor names into their own language? Like Spanish class? What happens if someone has a name that can’t be meat punned like Mads Mikkelsen? Never mind, Meats MikkelSous-vide. One second, though; what happens if a different burger names him Wads Meatelbun?

Now I’m confused. This burger has a human name, but plays baseball in a burger-pun town, and he only throws fastballs? I’m never going to figure this out. Let’s skip to the last hamburger joke and see how Phil wraps this up.

I have to hand it to Phil. This has a clunky set up, but would not get you fired from a mid-tier popsicle stick copywriting job. And what’s this? Some kind of final hamburger joke quiz? Oh, hell yeah.

It’s pretty bold to open a quiz with a repeat of a joke the reader saw one page ago, but it’s even bolder to make the answer to every multiple choice question the write-in option of “I’m a fucking stupid meatball.” Phil Hirsch is an anti-comedy golem built from the sadness of a thousand war crimes, but I can’t remember the last time I read a book with this many surprises.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Chris Brower, the real meat broilwer who, lettuce say, char beefins the range-iest pickle hams we know!

Categories
NERDING DAY

Anime Week: How to Draw Sexy Anime Girls! 🌭

There are only two things I appreciate about anime– the high effort line art and the effortless horniness. So I’m very excited to learn about both from the 188 page art manual, the Sexy Anime DRAWING BOOK: EASY TECHNIQUES AND STEP-BY-STEP ON HOW TO DRAW 29 SEXY ANIME GIRLS by Melody Love (2020).

With that title and that cover, I imagine you have very specific expectations of this book: Melody is going to teach us how to make our own pornography at home. You’re not wrong, but I think there’s also a mystery story here. I looked up the author and despite her talent and shameless  love of thigh gaps, she’s not among the top four most popular Melody Loves. The first is a porn actress, the second is a Puerto Rican activist in Rhode Island, the third is a cosmetics company, and the fourth is a different artist named Melody Love. As far as I can tell, this Melody Love dropped from the stars two years ago to write this book and then went into hiding. Maybe we can learn more from the book’s weirdly long introduction?

This is a lot to go on. In only the first sentence we learn Melody hates drawing which is a strange revelation in a drawing book. Still in the first sentence, we also learn Melody doesn’t have a problem associating her sexy anime pictures with childhood development. Imagine if someone walked up to you and said, “Kids hate to draw, even sexy, writhing ladies, so you need to beg them. Now that I’ve established my deal, here is some parenting advice.” You don’t have to imagine it! Because that’s what happened!

This might be nothing more than poor phrasing. Let’s keep reading to see if Melody corrects herself.

No, Melody is in fact very specific that it is this book, The Sexy Anime Drawing Book, she wants you to give your child. And she assumes your child is a boy, specifically an insecure boy who really needs a win, even if it means you throwing the big titty drawing competition the two of you are having.

I have to be honest– this book’s introduction is so close to an unformed joke I would make about it that it feels like a prank. If I was sleepy and cranky and you handed me The Sexy Anime Drawing Book, I might actually say, “Ha ha what’s the book’s intro? Something like, ‘remember, perverts, to draw the little girl’s vagina bones wrong so you don’t discourage any nearby underage pornographers!’ Jesus, I went dark, sorry. I hate this anime shit.” And yet here it is. Melody Love sincerely said it.

Speaking of Melody Love, I’m starting to think the person named after a porn star who draws male gaze smut for little boys and uses “he” as the default term for people might not be who “she” says they are. And there are more clues found in the titty physics. These drawings are based around a lonely Playstation owner’s understanding of how boobs work, not someone who has successfully strapped and unstrapped them from a bra.

“Melody” continues “her” long sales pitch on why you should give topless girl drawing lessons to children. She admits some kids will defy you and draw “a flower and tree, etc” rather than a dirty shaved teen who needs it now. “Don’t scold him over this,” she says. Every boy goes through a phase where he prefers not to work in his father’s pornography sweatshop. She all but comes out and says, “Be patient with him, because that boy was me, dripping hole artist Melody Love.”

“Melody Love” isn’t done. She is at the point of every crazy person’s manifesto where her unspeakable ideals actually make her a hero? And maybe this weird guy named after a woman he sometimes masturbates to is right. Maybe these drawings are how we bridge the communication gap between the perverted and the disabled. I hope not, but let’s keep in mind how much we’re helping the children as we learn how to draw these naked ladies.

Like her thoughts on preschool art, Melody’s style is a bit strange. She puts drawings together by building them out of perfect silhouettes, like an animator who has drawn the same girl showing you her panties thousands of times. Her instructions always begin the same way: first you draw the red lines, then the green, yellow, and blue lines. Since the book was printed in black and white, this advice is less helpful than you’d think. This is someone who can do one thing right, draw children in underpants, and literally nothing fucking else.

Across steps 1 through 8, two full pages of text, Melody offers no useful advice. She has told us to copy six different colors of lines, five of which don’t exist, complimented herself on her great drawing, and told us to color it following the example provided which, of course, has no color. It’s like this guy heard there were a hundred ways a How to Draw Sexy Anime Girls book could go wrong and he thought, “I’ll triple it.“

Let’s take a look at some more of the other 29 sexy anime gi– hold on, these steps are exactly the same for every drawing! Look at this:

So this one is a busty girl in an American flag bikini with the body language and eyes of someone unable to move because of some paralytic agent. But instead of expert tips on adding fear to your subject, it’s the exact same steps, like almost word-for-word. Melody did 29 porno drawings and then slightly rewrote one set of instructions for all of them. Which means 58 pages of this book are basically identical. I don’t even know how to review something like thi– hold on, there’s an About the Author!

Ha ha ha this book was self-published in 2020 and “Melody Love,” the natural talent, thought she could create a backstory where she was “a world-known artist” who sold so many paintings she opened her own gallery. This is a huge accomplishment for a pervert flaunting their sex crimes. By the way, I couldn’t find any of her art online, but I did find a mention of her gallery after the words “boy long penis feet” on a dot mom website for business mothers.

Let’s read more about Melody Love’s very real origin story.

Melody, despite achieving all her dreams easily, wanted more. She wanted to share her talent with horny boys of all ages. To educate not t(h)rough lessons, but with step-by-step instru– hold on, that’s what lessons are, you fucking idiot. You goddamn fucking idiot, did you think spacing titty drawings out across several steps was an invention!? A beautiful dream to be pursued by an idle millionaire!?

Here’s my feedback: your book is fucking insane and terrible, you maniac pervert! Plus, your name is fake and you forgot to include an email, address, or website! It’s a true achievement in failure that you’re a hopeful child predator and yet most people will remember you for your stupidity. In the make-believe autobiography you wrote where you could be and do anything, you spent an entire paragraph begging to hear from parents who draw naked women with their kids. And thanks to your spectacular idiocy, you won’t.

I guess that’s it for this book? Is there something on the back cover that can help make sense of it?

No, just more stuff about drawing nude ladies with kids. Jesus Christ, do they ever shut up about this?

No! In fact, this person is so obsessed with children learning how to draw naked women they add “actually adults love them too” as a last minute sales pitch. Yes, Melody! We know! Normal people consider adults the default audience for “adult material.” This is nuts. It’s like if a  Pampers commercial said, “Eating cat food out of a wet diaper isn’t just for Naughty Andy anymore. Pampers are now available for… babies?”

I feel like this book was too troubling to be fun. Luckily, I predicted an anime drawing manual would be exactly that so I bought a backup. Let’s read THE BEST GUIDE BOOK TO DRAWING Sexy Anime: The How to Draw Book You’ll Ever Need to Learn Drawing Sexy Anime by Vivian Ice.

This seems more like it. It’s got the broken English I want in my manga lesson, and a bunch of fleshy shapes my brain recognizes as anime and thus ignores. The author’s name, Vivian Ice, is a little suspicious. She sounds like she should be catching Melody Love with her stepson in a movie called What Her Name FFM Boy Long Penis Feet, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she’s a real person giving real perversion instructions. Let’s skip the Googling and Introduction and get straight to the art:

Vivian takes a much different approach to her art lessons. She wants you to construct your porn girl out of crop circles for the first several steps. It helps to think of the female form as a very fussy BattleTech encounter. Vivian suggests drawing your lady’s bikini at this point, somewhere near the center of one of the larger circles. In both anime illustration and interplanetary travel, this moist gap is called the mons pubis sector.

After five more steps, you’ll see how your circles have turned into a cartoon girl, with more circles used to add terror to her eyes. Wait a second. This is going to sound crazy, but I feel like I know this girl.

Oh, that’s how I know her! This is the terrified American flag bikini girl from The Sexy Anime Drawing Book by Melody Love! Both books were published in 2020, so I’m not sure which anime author with a fake pornstar name stole this drawing from the other. Unless… no. No. I need to check this book’s introduction.

Oh my god, this guy made up a second fake name to write a second book for children about drawing naked women!? Wait, okay, let’s not jump to any conclusions. Maybe Vivian Ice is just a lady who loved drawing this porn book but wouldn’t want you to, like, use it with your son.

Okay, she does. Vivian Ice wants you to draw topless girls with your son, and she carefully mentions it several times during the intro and on the back cover.

Vivian/Melody even gives the same tip to let your son feel better about his pornographic illustrations by making sure yours are a little bit worse. I have literally never seen anyone lay out their criminal perversion like this. Vivian Ice is the kind of person who would get caught stealing your clothes at the laundromat and say, “It’s not what it looks like! Eating toddler underpants is the only thing that excites me!”

I’m bailing on this book too. Let’s never think about Melody Love and/or Vivian Ice again. Luckily, I have many more books in my How to Draw Only Fucked Up section of my library, so I’m going to pick one and do a whole new article starting now. It’s not a great time for this, but I want to thank beloved Internet artist Rusty Shackles for his amazing Anime Week art.

Welcome to Anime Week! Thank you, Rusty Shackles, for the custom header art! This book seems close enough to anime: How to Draw Sexy Women: Step-by-Step Guide (2019) by Andy Hopper.

Wait, what’s the fucking rest of that fucking title, Andy?

Best Sexy Women Drawing Book for You and Your Kids!? What the fucking fuck!? If this is Melody and Vivian again I’m going to fucking scream. Sigh, let’s look at the back cover. Of this titty drawing book:

Aiiieeeeee!!!! This is the exact same copy from Melody and Vivian’s books! Only sort of re-written to babble in different directions about how important drawing pornography is to kids!? If this wasn’t written from prison, why do we even have laws?

As if you didn’t know, the introduction is the same too, but also not quite. And sure enough, this is exactly what it looks like. “Andy Hopper,” sometimes known as “Vivian Ice,” once known as “Melody Love,” self-publishes hundreds of kids books on everything from Star Wars knockoffs to Disney knockoffs to porn illustrating. Andy, or a team of “Andys” blast online bookstores with painstakingly illustrated word diarrhea on the thinnest of profit margins. Ethically and financially, it’s the same business model as going door-to-door and offering to eat the tiniest underwear in the house for $11.74.

So it’s possible Andy is only a forgetful pervert, not a child predator. These strange intros about nude women being fun for kids might just be the generic boilerplate he puts in the front of all his books, right? No! NO! If that was the case, why would Andy rewrite it every time!? He has made at least three books about erotic art and written original copy explicitly stating they were for children at every conceivable opportunity. He did it on the front cover of this one!

Another funny thing Andy rewrites in every book (many of which are filled with stolen intellectual property) is his “Copyright Notes.” This one “hereto refers” to itself as The Book, a good idea when The Book’s full title is How to Draw Sexy Women Step-by-Step Guide Best Sexy Women Drawing Book for You and Your Kids. Andy makes it extremely clear that while he is trying to sell pornography to children, you assume all the risk and responsibility found or contained therein, penis feet thusly. Best of luck, Andy!

What the hell, let’s look inside:

In Chapter 2, “How to Draw Sexy Woman 2,” Andy shows us the proper way to build a dayshift stripper three weeks from retirement using mostly tubes.

She’s looking a little rough there, but wait until you see the colored version! And by “colored version,” Andy means the same black and white drawing from 16 pages earlier.

“She looks sad, daddy.”

“She is sad, sweetheart.”

“I want to stop drawing her now, dad.”

“I know, son, but look how ugly my naughty nurse is. You’re winning the naughty nurse drawing competition! You’re the best pornographer in the family!”

“And there it is. All units move in.”

“W-what? Son? You were wearing a wire!?”

Categories
NERDING DAY

Anime Week: JoJo’s Ape Episode! 🌭

Confession: I am kind of a dick about anime. I rarely follow up on recommendations from my anime-loving friends and never stick with a series long enough to give it a chance. I find the art style off-putting and the structure is often so haphazard that I swear some episodes end where they do because the end credits took them by surprise. I recognize this is partially due to my old, white midwestern narrow-mindedness and I’ll own that. 

Above: One of the first Google Image Search results for the word “anime”

But all of those are mere annoyances that I could in theory overcome, in the sense that I  enjoyed the last Spider-Man even though I believe depictions of a multiverse are in direct contradiction of the Bible’s teachings. No, what really turns me off is the fact that watching any anime I haven’t carefully vetted in advance is playing a game of Sexualized Child Roulette. 

“But Jason,” you might say, “all you have to do is avoid the shows set in high school or, even worse, middle school! Those are for horny teenagers anyway, not adult sex predators!”

See, you’d think that would work, wouldn’t you? 

Note: Jason’s next novel is called If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe and it’s available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold. It’s the next book in the John Dies at the End series! The movie is on HBO Max!

For example, let’s talk about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, currently on Netflix. No schoolgirls in sight: it’s a show about a crew of superhuman adults saying anime shit while doing anime shit while wearing anime shit.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is, in fact, one of the most popular franchises ever, of any kind, in the whole world. The manga has sold over 120 million copies over the last 35 years and it’s been adapted into so many different movies/shows/games that the series name requires a disambiguation page on Wikipedia. Memes from one of its two hugely popular subreddits hit the front page of reddit daily, each more incomprehensible than the last. This one has over 50,000 upvotes:

Statistically, this means there are probably JoJo fans reading this right now, and every single one of them is saying, “Oh, fuck, he’s going to talk about that episode, isn’t he?”

Yep! We’re discussing Episode 7 of the Stardust Crusaders part of the 2014 JoJo series. From here on out, please imagine you’re a new fan making your way through the series and, in order to help the people around you understand your fandom, you have invited all of your friends, family and co-workers to come watch this episode with you.

We begin with our protagonists adrift in rowboats with a pack of nameless sailors, having survived a shipwreck in the previous episode. Along with them is a frightened little girl in overalls named Anne. She’s drawn the size of a toddler but seems to be 10-11 years old.

JoJo (in the hat) and his crew stumble across an abandoned, clearly-haunted ocean liner and, with no other choice, climb on board. Here it’s obvious from a storytelling perspective what the child’s presence brings to the plot: This crew of superhuman monster-fighters now has the additional burden of protecting a kid who’s only as tall as the protagonist’s belt buckle. 

Instantly the clearly-possessed ship begins attacking the protagonists and one of the disposable sailors dies in gruesome fashion. Meanwhile, Anne goes off exploring on her own and immediately runs across an orangutan in a cage — the only living thing they’ve encountered on the ship so far. 

Via hand signals and grunts, he attempts to convince Anne to let him out and, when she refuses, he instead lights a cigarette and browses an issue of Playboy he had on hand.

It’s all goofy, imaginative, silly fun. All of the loved ones and acquaintances who’ve packed into your bedroom are probably having a good time. It’s even paced well! Just 11 minutes into the 25-minute episode, we’ve set up a mystery with a trail of delightfully intriguing elements: The protagonists have now searched every corner of the ship — no crew, no passengers, or any sign they were there. They try the radio — nothing. What happened to everyone? Why is this orangutan acting like a horny human? You know the answer is going to be some kind of silly anime nonsense, but hey, that’s what we signed up for! What could go wrong?

From a writer’s point of view, the challenge at this point is doing something the audience truly doesn’t expect. Ghost pirates, sea monsters and even time travel would all feel like cliches; this isn’t anybody’s first fictional haunted ship. Whatever happens here needs to truly take the audience by surprise. Let’s see what JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has up its sleeve!

(CONTENT WARNING: References to child sexual assault ahead)

We check in on Anne, who is alone again. She decides she is sticky from the salt water…

…and, with the lack of forethought that comes with being ten years old, decides then and there that she needs a shower. Fortunately for her, she finds a working shower with hot water and right about here, our hypothetical viewer is getting a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. 

“Oh…no…”

Look. I’m not here to “cancel” JoJo or anime in general, I’m not in the habit of trying to generate outrage clicks and I’m definitely not out to make our anime-loving fans feel bad about themselves. If I’m the one being weird here, just tell me. But it really, really seems to me like the following sequence is framed, shot and edited in exactly the way you’d do it if your goal was to titillate the audience. But, hey, maybe I’m just a prude, or maybe something is lost in the cultural translation or… I don’t know. 

Anyway, the camera stays on the child as she slowly undresses one layer at a time…

…then tracks her bare feet into the shower…

…at which point we cut to an oddly adult-shaped “hourglass” nude silhouette behind the shower curtain…

…and here you think, well, it’s still being tasteful, it’s granting the little girl her privacy and if that shadow on the curtain makes you imagine a naked child in your head, you’re the pervert! You glance over at your parents, who have been fairly into the episode up to now, but are beginning to have doubts. “Don’t worry,” you say to them, “this is JoJo, not one of those shows!” You didn’t mean for it to rhyme.

Then you turn back to the screen to find that in the very next shot, we’ve cut back inside the shower and, yeah, the camera just lovingly moves up across Anne’s naked, wet, completely uncensored ass. And while I’m not going to screenshot it because I think that would be against the law(?), I’ll say that the artist (both here and in the manga it’s adapted from) went out of their way to give Anne an adult’s woman’s figure, complete with sideboob, the nipples coyly covered with one arm. It’s basically this…

…only if it turned out that artist had been commissioned to draw a typical ten year-old girl and came back with the above. 

Side note: In the previous episode, Anne pretended to be a little boy, with her hair stuffed up under her cap. So upon seeing this the first time, I actually thought the whole point was to reveal that Anne was, in fact, an adult woman pretending to be a child. But, no, that’s just how they chose to draw her.

And now, things in your bedroom have become very awkward. “Did you… find this video on the deep web?” asks your grandfather, who’s squinting at the screen. “I think this is what Q was trying to warn us about!”

You just stay silent, hoping the scene will pass and the episode will move on to something else. 

It very much does not.

Instead, the orangutan breaks out of his cage, slaughters the rest of the nameless sailors, then enters the shower with the intention of raping little Anne. The cowering child is reflected in the animal’s eyes, a predatory glint tastefully positioned to hide her bare breasts.

The heroes intervene, at which point they are attacked and restrained by the ship itself, which has seemingly come to life. The orangutan now seems poised to rape the child in front of the helpless protagonists while they watch, but a clever scheme from JoJo, which I still do not fully understand, overcomes the beast. I would show some screen grabs of that action sequence, but I would have to carefully crop them because Anne remains naked for the rest of the episode, clutching a towel to her front but leaving her bare butt exposed. And it really does feel like they go out of their way to make sure said butt is in the frame, over and over. 

And that’s the episode. It ends with the status quo restored, the heroes back in their rowboats, having learned and accomplished nothing. A cynical viewer would suggest that the entire episode exists for exactly one reason, to serve a certain segment of the anime-watching audience.

So.

Here’s the thing:

Sexualization of kids is a very sensitive subject among anime fans (and a very bitter subject in Japan). They’ve been hearing the same complaints for decades, it’s not going to change, it’s baked into the medium. For example, the comic this episode was adapted from was published in 1990, this episode came out 24 years later and the only change they made to this scene was to increase the amount of child nudity. It’s a cultural thing, some fans insist, no children are being harmed (“it’s just a drawing!”) and if you think it’s wrong, you don’t have to look at it. 

In fact, loyal JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fans are probably more annoyed than anyone right now, because they’ll say that this is the only time we see anything like this in the series. But that is my entire point. Weirdly sexualized depictions of children are just scattered around the medium like dog turds in a park. And when it comes to anime, that is what I can’t get past. 

I know it’s not just me, because I’ve spent my adult life on message boards and have seen the same thread over and over: A fan asks for anime recommendations and then has to specify that they only want shows that don’t sexualize children. Respondents often find that somewhat difficult, with someone recommending a show, then someone else having to come in and say, “Well, there is that one story arc you’ll want to avoid, but remember the age of consent is lower in Japan…”

Here’s a random example from Something Awful years ago. JoJo is recommended as a safe choice multiple times (and since it’s on Netflix, readily available) and later someone has to point out that, quote, “The Jojo ape episode has a scene where the 11-yo girl is showering seductively for the camera lens” and notes that the show is “not perfect.” That’s a common sentiment among fans — here’s another message board comment: 

“I don’t really watch any anime but got into JoJo because it’s awesome, and that episode in Stardust Crusaders where a 10 year old girl is naked for most of the episode with a bunch of shots of her ass and sideboob almost made me drop the series entirely. Luckily there hasn’t been anything at all like that since. It’s kind of weird though that if I were to recommend the series to anyone that is put off by anime I’d have to be like ‘oh no, it’s not weird and pervy, there’s only one episode that fetishises a child.’”

“This!” would be my single-word reply to that post, if I was a certain kind of obnoxious message board poster. I mean, this is a sprawling franchise spanning every type of media, should this one episode really ruin the entire series for me? Because it totally does!

And what bothers me about it (aside from, you know, the obvious) is that it seems like there’s a real pressure on anime creators to throw this shit in there, a little nod-and-wink fanservice to that certain segment of the audience. But… why? I mean, how is that even good for business? For every one viewer who wants to ogle a child, aren’t there far more who are forever turned off by it? Or is it like the weird, lingering bare feet shots in Tarantino films, where fans just roll their eyes and decide it’s just something they have to put up with? “Yes, I know certain pervs are cranking off to this bit, but that’s none of my business.”

So, sure, feel free to recommend me some anime that doesn’t sexualize children or — and please also read this part of the sentence — any canonically immortal characters who happen to look and act like children. Put your recommendations in the comments, or send them directly to Brockway. Don’t email me. I’ll be too busy trying to unfuck my Netflix recommendations. Happy Anime Week, everybody!

Jason also writes columns at his Substack, his next novel is called If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe and it’s available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold. It’s the next book in the John Dies at the End series! The movie is on HBO Max!

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
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Joe 90 – The Most Special Agent

You know Gerry Anderson? Yeah, you know Gerry Anderson. You might not know his name, but if you’re anything like me, you think of the 1960s as “The Puppet Decade.” And that’s Gerry Anderson’s doing. Thunderbirds was his biggest hit, but he churned out series after series of hopping inhuman action and, like all puppeteers, he was secretly evil. To prove that, you’ll have to come with me to Joe 90.

You won’t have to come very far. 

The first episode opens on the Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record and Transfer, a computer that captures a human being’s entire essence and temporarily overlays it on another person’s brain. 

So far it’s only been tried on one person: the inventor’s adopted son, Joe 90. I assume the boy’s real name is Bradley or Terrence or Churwith, and calling all the orphans Joe # just makes it easier to track how many he’s burned through.

To reiterate: The acronym is BIGRAT and it is a computer for stealing innocence.

These are not the villains our heroes fight. 

These are our heroes. 

Puppet Jorah Mormont over here is Mack, inventor of the BIGRAT and a man on his fourth orphan punch card. Two more and he gets a free waif! It’s great villainous coding that in his very first scene he already has the “my god, what have we done” glasses pull out of the way.

I’ll come clean. I have an agenda. I have a theory that this show knows it’s evil and it just wants to see how far it can go before you catch on. Aside from the evil premise, the evil computer, and our first main character (evil), there’s Joe 90. 

Every single time we see Joe 90 we have to do a long, slow zoom on his obvious despair. 

Hey, can you read lips? Puppet lips? Because this is his first line in the show. In a timid English accent he quavers “is this it, dad?”

Joe 90 has big Social Services energy. He moves like a boy who once knocked over a vase and will die before he lets it happen again. I don’t need any more information to know that this child cries at loud noises. And we are going to steal his brain and send all 56 damp pounds of him into danger. Jesus. This is not a children’s show, this is a fable you show a scientist so he’s more careful with his monkeys. 

For the test run of BIGRAT, Mack recorded his own brainwaves and is going to put them straight into his son. I’m pretty sure that’s the plot of Friday Night Lights, and it’s illegal everywhere but Texas High Schools. Since the knowledge only lasts as long as the special electrodes are attached, Mack mocked up science glasses that keep his mind-theft going as long as Joe wears them. 

Every single episode starts like this – with Joe 90 getting into a funkadelic identity-erasing machine while wild ‘60s groove assures us it’s okay, and the camerawork promises it is not. 

That’s the actual title card! Just a long, slow zoom on quiet despair as the fake name given to him by science blocks out a frightened boy’s face. I’m telling you: This was not a show. It was meant to test the inherent morality of children. It was supposed to come with a little buzzer you hit when you spotted something wrong, only the lab shipments got mixed up. The Revlon guys got a bunch of NOT OK buttons and a generation of British children got this accidental Sociopath Guide and a free makeup bunny.

The bunnies did not last long.

There is a way to do this that makes a delightful premise for a kid’s tv show. Little boy temporarily downloads the abilities of specialists with a lifetime of experience? That rules! He can be a ship’s captain! A daring explorer! An astronaut! 

You deeply fuck up that premise when you include all of the adult’s memories. Mack is middle-aged and this takes place in the 1960s – I promise the 1941 version of Mack is squatting in a trench somewhere inside Joe 90’s head, just waiting for a whiff of mustard to unleash the time he gutted eight Nazis at the Somme. 

I’m just saying, unless the plan is to load little Joe up with the ghost of an enemy soldier and ship him off to kill Russians, putting complete adult brains in a child of the ‘60s has at least one pitfall.

Puppet Jerry Orbach here is Sam, a stooge for the World Intelligence Network who has sinister designs on the project. Sam is American, but they made up a fake organization to keep things apolitical… then Joe 90 straight up calls him Uncle Sam because we didn’t invent subtlety until 1973, and we didn’t use it until sometime in 2011.  

Uncle Sam is still not the villain! Our heroes love him! They know all about his plans to weaponize the BIGRAT! They think that rules!

Having agreed that possessing a child is great and should be done at least 90 times, our heroes leave the lab and emerge into an old-timey english cottage – 

Which Sam thinks is strange, but Mack answers, “that’s the way we like it, Sam. A combination of the old and the new!” He pats Joe’s shoulder.

The implication is not lost on Joe. 

Uncle Sam takes off to set up a meeting with his superiors, so Mack and Joe follow. They slip into a rustic garage that should house nothing but quaint pornography and possums, and out pops their flying car. 

The implication is still not lost on Joe.

“Do you get it yet, son? My experiment is like this, but backwards – I’m the OLD car and you’re my fancy NEW garage!”

Sam says the World Intelligence Network will buy the BIGRAT on the condition that nobody will ever know about it, and they get to use it at their discretion. It will “play a vital role in maintaining world peace.” You see where this is going – old soldiers’ skills are never lost, but transplanted straight into younger bodies. Every grunt is whatever specialist they need to be, just slap on a different pair of glasses and you can disarm a mine, fly a stealth bomber, break a code on the fly. 

You saw it all wrong. 

The WIN wants Joe, specifically. So far Mack has only tried the experiment on Joe, because he buys orphans in bulk. But at no point does he say it can only ever work on sad English boys who have forgotten the taste of hope. WIN just specifically wants a deadly child supersoldier and for nobody to ever ask questions about it. 

I know what you’re thinking, but no: WIN isn’t revealed to be an evil front using our heroes for dastardly purposes. These are still the good guys and everybody loves them and everything they do.

Uncle Sam sits Mack and Joe down, then says “let me describe what could be his first mission…” 

They’re going to load little Joe up with the ghost of an enemy soldier and ship him off to kill Russians. 

Welcome to Episode 1, everybody! The best way to debut this premise!

You thought this was one of those articles where I delve deep into a harmless premise and explore how fucked up it could be, if you think about it. 

No.

You’re going to watch a brainwashed 9 year old puppet put a bullet in a commie because his emotionally distant father told him to. It happens in every episode.

So the WIN needs this experimental new Russian plane, and unattended children are Britain’s greatest natural resource. The solution seems obvious. Luckily a Russian pilot is holding a press conference in London for no reasons that are ever explained – you know how Russian pilots are always touring the world, especially enemy territory, to give interviews about their secret technology? This is that! Mack and Uncle Sam use this opportunity to steal his brainwaves, which is another worrying revelation – it didn’t take Mack years of exhaustive cataloging to capture his entire personality on tape, and it especially didn’t take consent. Just a couple minutes near an antenna and the government can steal any brain. 

Then into the machine Joe 90 goes– 

You can really feel the reticence in that puppet. I will give Gerry Anderson this: Nobody puts existential discomfort into a puppet-child like Gerry Anderson, except maybe Mack.

It’s been five minutes since our last long, slow zoom of despair. Cue the Brainswitch Go-Go Kiddie Freakout song!

Easy as that! Joe 90’s innocence has been put on pause, and he’s ready for the mission. Let’s go over his kit: The brainwashing glasses-

With them on you’ll have all the memories and experiences of a Russian pilot in the 1960s – his extensive training, his deadly skills, his despair at being trapped as a living weapon in a crumbling empire. But don’t lose them or you’re just timid little Joe, alone behind enemy lines! Still with the despair of being trapped as a living weapon in a crumbling empire, just without the ability to find the eject button.

Next, the pistol-

Haha, your modern sensibilities thought they’d dance around this! No, when I said Joe puts bullets in commies, I mean we watch them go in. Uncle Sam explains it’s “specially made for Joe, it’s small, light, and will fire 200 times without reloading.” We made this gun just for you, child! So your child hands can hold it steady to deliver the killshot!

200 fucking times!

They expect Joe 90 to personally kill an entire battalion on this mission, and they will not be disappointed. 

And finally the communicator-

This was cool and high tech back in the ‘60s, but now it’s just a cellphone Joe 90 uses to call the men who stole his youth. If you’ve got your highschool football coach in your contacts list, you’ve got this bit of spykit in your pocket already. 

That’s it! That’s all you need to be WIN’s most special agent!

That’s… actually what they call him.

Somehow this is the most heartbreaking part, the way they’re playing with his little kid’s sense of worth. Pinning pilot’s wings on him because he’s being a brave boy on the plane, making sure he knows he’s Daddy’s Best Murderer so the fun little badge keeps his child warfare nice and gamified. Six more boxtops and you get a garotte! 

So what’s the plan? Easy, just sign up for one of the many tours Russians give foreign scientists of their top secret military bases!

No, really.

That is a Russian tour guide explaining to a bus full of foreign scientists that they “ordinarily don’t show people the top secret plane.” But this seems like such a fun group so let’s make some noise! I can’t hear you! All the capitalist pigs in the back say M-I-G! Now just the ladies – hey, 242!” 

While the party is bumping, Joe 90 runs off to hijack the plane – notice I did not say sneak, he does not think to sneak. His absence is spotted immediately, Mack has no cover story for it, and the Russians freak the fuck out.

The entire bus looks out the window to watch the Russian’s plane get stolen-

Then looks back at the empty seat to really appreciate that the only missing person is this child whose caretaker just admitted to stealing it.

I meant it when I said Mack doesn’t have a cover story. He tells the Russians everything immediately, and it’s important for you to realize this is not only a legitimate step in this plan, but an integral part of every plan in every episode of Joe 90: Much like a Scooby Doo unmasking, there’s a part at the end where Mack condescendingly explains exactly what’s going on, in detail, right to the enemy…

Then… waits for laughter! Because who would believe a government could use a child for warfare!

Mack admits everything, then tries on a smug little grin and waits shittily while the entire Russian airforce attempts to murder his son half a mile above his head. 

That’s it! This works! There’s no clever turn here to de-escalate the conflict. This is the format of the show: Have Joe 90 sprint into danger, explain to the men trying to shoot him that they are correct to do so, and then trust that the brain trespasser ghostriding the waif remembers how to kill. 

He does!

God, he does!

The Russians mobilize to shoot down the thief, but they don’t count on Joe’s contempt for human life. Again, the show wants to be very clear that this is fucked and you should know it. This is like a Highlights magazine Hidden Picture Game, but for basic human morality. It could not be made more plain that killing isn’t necessary here. Joe 90 radios Uncle Sam and says there are MIGs pursuing him, but they’re 200 miles back. Remember the entire point of this jet is that it’s faster than anything else in the air. That’s the only reason they’re stealing it. Joe 90 is reminded of this, and then says “I’m going to turn around and shoot it out with air-to-air missiles.” 

Even Uncle Sam, who has sent so many kids to the meat-grinder he’s come to love the taste of the sausage, pauses at this and says “Joe, isn’t that kind of… uh, dangerous?”

Joe doesn’t even bother to answer that nonsense.

It’s time to get some blood in his teeth. 

Drums of madness play as Joe gets lost in the bloodhaze, puppet eyes hard behind blocky nerd glasses. Look close, see any of that G.I. Joe shit? Little parachutes popping up? No, you do not. 

We even follow that first plane down until it eats dirt and explodes just so you can be sure the kill is confirmed, and Joe!

Isn’t!

Done!

He takes the jet into a nosedive… so he can strafe the base they came from.

Holy shit. The bodycount of the first episode of this children’s show is already in the dozens. Either the Russian pilot crawling around Joe’s brain has some deep issues with the Motherland, or those glasses are a placebo and Mack’s real experiment was mapping the Murderer Gene. 

Uncle Sam radios again, telling Joe to come home before he gets killed.

In a corpse’s voice, Joe 90 answers: “They can’t really stop me now, Sam.” 

To which Sam only has worried silence. There comes a point in any military operation where things have gone so sideways you realize you’ve accidentally made a Rambo. This silence is Uncle Sam filing the paperwork for a First Blood contingency, and then shakily scanning down to check off the PeeWee Division box. 

Finally, Joe lands the top secret jet back in English territory and runs off into the night, his mission accomplished. 

…and that’s how it COULD have gone!

Haha yes, the entire pilot episode of this show was theoretical. Remember when Sam opened the folder and said “here’s how his first mission COULD go?” This was all a godawful pitch the World Intelligence Network made to the boy’s father – this is how they WOULD LIKE to use his precious invention! This wasn’t a worse-case contingency, this was their ideal scenario! “Bear with us now: We put you and your child in mortal danger, the entire thing hanging on whether or not Russia believes children are our future, and only one thing is for certain: Your 9 year old son will take many lives.” 

And Mack…

Fucking…

LOSES IT.

The whole tone of the episode shifts as Mack slams his fist into the table. The animation kicks out and it’s just furious screaming over dramatic stills and quick-zooms while Mack takes these motherfuckers to court for the dumbest god damn idea he’s ever heard in his life. Joe straight up flees the room as his father invents new, more tearable assholes for these dudes and then bursts through them like a mascot at a homecoming game.

It is exactly how any sane parent would respond to this absurd pitch. Screaming. Crashing glass, fistfighting. Fuck you for even thinking it! Nobody finishes a line, it’s just a montage of hollering, each new quote cutting off the previous one-

NO! NO! NO!

DO YOU REALLY EXPECT ME TO ALLOW-

NOW LOOK HERE! NO YOU LOOK!

HE MAY BE MY ADOPTED SON BUT I LOVE HIM LIKE A-

OUT OF THE QUESTION! SIMPLY OUT OF THE QUESTION!


ARE YOU MAD? ARE YOU QUITE MAD???

…

And then Mack agrees to it.

What! 

Holy shit, what? Why, Joe 90? Why the fake-out? Why the double fake-out? Why have the whole episode be an insane pitch by a psychopathic government stooge? Why show us the huge, knockdown drag-out brawl that ensues as a father refuses to sacrifice his greatest invention and his child in one fell swoop? And why the freewheeling fuck do we cut straight out of that fight to exhausted men shaking hands like somebody just sold a lightly-used Ford Fiesta?

Why… if not for my exact theory? Joe 90 isn’t a children’s show. It’s a morality test that we all failed for 30 episodes. 

And I didn’t even talk about the one where they put a murdered special agent’s brain into Joe and he guns down 128 men with his Playskool Pistol for revenge!

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.