Misty: Horror Comics for Girls was exactly what it sounds like, but not the way you think. They were not âfor girlsâ in the sense that their stories were built to appeal to young women, but rather that girls needed these stories so they could learn how to quit being so awful all the time. Misty thinks literally anything a girl might do is just terrible. If you learn every single moral their short twisty horror stories have to teach, you will sit patiently in a corner until something fucks you and then you will have the decency to die in childbirth. Quietly.
Misty writers only ever had time to think of one twist, zero good characters, and seventeen reasons to insult young women. The writing is breakneck, with every villain promptly explaining their evil plot in one speech bubble on the first page. This dude got a hold of magic pencils, which you might recognize as too dumb for a Twilight Zone episode and almost dumb enough for an Outer Limits episode. What does he do with magic reality-altering pencils? Does he draw himself with a bitchinâ jetski? Does he draw his enemies with floppy dick arms? Does he draw himself on a bitchinâ jetski mowing down the dickarms while pulling a sick Christ Air, like any reasonable person would? No, he uses them to draw rich girls, then explains to his victims exactly how his powers work and can be thwarted, and hopes itâs less effort to pay him than to punch him in the face and break his pencils.
Please notice:
I have condensed the entire ten page story into five panels and you have lost nothing.
By exorcising everything unnecessary, the hero of this story, a young girl, does not appear. This is considered ideal in proper English society.
The girl ganks a man by ripping his head completely off via magical paper assault and itâs still not enough to earn her panel time.
The story acts like the moral is that you should be wary of vanity, lest it consume you. But the girl didnât commission the portrait. Her family did. So really, she had the audacity to stand in a spot when told, and for that she was rightfully punished.
According to Misty, the ideal British girl lives in a closet where she practices not minding things and poops twice a year into a decorative scarf that she washes in a river on the solstice. No other activity is permitted, or safe.
Let Not Evil Flourish is about the great bell-ringing fad that apparently swept through the 1979 Brit Tween Scene like Les McKeownâs fingers through plaid knickers. That joke was just for you, British girls of the 1970s. It might be the only thing you have.
Please notice:
You can really feel how much the artist doesnât respect Carol. She doesnât need to say a thing and yet you instantly understand she has the vacant, uncomprehending worldview of a carnival prize goldfish in a milky plastic bag.
The British call counter-clockwise âwiddershinsâ because they have adorably quaint nicknames for everything. They call garbage cans âwheelie bins,â they say âitâs monkeys outsideâ when itâs cold, and they call a hearse full of disobedient girls âa bloody good start.â
No, Iâm sorry, that joke was in poor taste. They call it âa tin of clammies.â
Carol and her friends carefully scouted the most remote location they could find so they wouldnât bother anybody with their fuckinâ raging bell party. (Itâs the only instrument a young woman was allowed since Harlots and Harlotry declared the accordion âthe devilâs bellows.â) These girls risked catching greenlung in a dank ruin for the sake of courtesy, and still these dizzy idiots — Iâm sorry, I believe the British term is âbumspinny botchersâ — will burn for their love of bells.
It doesnât matter how innocuous a hobby sounds. Like ringing a small handbell? Have fun in hell. With all of your friends (also in hell). Enjoy standing in one spot for a length of time so a person can look at you? Standing is Satanâs posture, you visible slut. You should be trapped in a portrait and attacked by a magical art pervert. Like catching butterflies?
Now, itâs true that butterfly collecting is a pretty fucked up hobby. Why kill a beautiful helpless thing for no reason when there are so many beautiful things with fight in them, and so many reasons? But âdonât be cruelâ is not the lesson here. The lesson is: Donât look at things with your silly girl eyeballs. Seeing things is what gets you collected by purple giants out to invent a new fetish.
With all this in mind, can you imagine the pure venom Misty has in store for girls who question other peopleâs decisions? The worst crime! This is always punishable by death or, if the judge has just had his tea, mere disfigurement.
In this one, a young girl has the audacity to question why a man bought a rusting shell of a car he is not qualified to fix, and then named it âSatanâs Wheels.â On the one hand these are extremely questionable decisions. On the other hand, it was a girl that questioned them. She is to be sprayed in the face like a disobedient kitten, but with acid.
Itâs a Dogâs Life is a special episode of Misty Beasts — which is both my new Arthurian bulgecore porn handle and a recurring Misty feature where the girls are mauled by beasts. In it, a dangerously willful girlchild questions her older auntâs dangerous obsession with her little dog.
Give this to Misty Comics: No panel is wasted. You know that dog is evil right from the jump by the way it’s drawn, somewhere between a kitty-flipping gremlin and Chewbacca cumming. And thatâs before you realize its most precious toy is a hideous clown.
Please notice:
Jane doesnât even hate the dog. She only points out that maybe itâs a little crazy to buy the dog steak when you canât afford it. And itâs maybe a lot crazy to prepare gourmet meals for your dog when you donât have the energy to eat, yourself.
On the spectrum of rave goblin to orgasm wookie, Ling is skewing strongly Sweatpants Boner Chewbacca here.
Dogs speak English and understand estate law.
You see the mistake already: Jane repeatedly inquires about the welfare of an elderly person. Letâs see how that goes for her.
This is the only way it could end, from the very first panel: You never put a clown in a story unless itâs going to murder a child. Itâs your classic Chekhovâs Clown principle.
It doesnât matter how stupid or insane the decision might be,a young girl should never open her fucking mouth to say a word about it. I donât care if your dad promised your whole family a record player then got blasted on butterbeer and blew his whole check on garden gnomes, you will shut up and take it or die ironically.
That was not a joke example.
He got his big yearly bonus today and immediately raced out to the gnomery – every village has one – to spend eight hundred dollars on tiny men that stand in the yard. Despite the ruinous lunacy of this decision, the mother still displays all the proper etiquette of a British lady, in that she has no dialogue.
Lesley is upset by this, perhaps because her father didnât even do it for the sheer mad love of gnomes, but because of implied peer pressure from the neighbors. He deprived his whole family of a pretty basic appliance just so the insane neighbors building a garden army wouldnât look down on his ungnomed grass with scorn. Infuriated, Lesley does the ultimate sin: Something.
Sheâs going to die because she knocked over a lawn decoration.
âThatâs stupid!â Lesley thinks to herself, âjust stupid!â
And sheâs right, of course, but she has to be punished anyway because that thought bubble should have been empty.
Please notice:
That gnome did not break. It is pictured intact, post-kick. She didnât destroy all of her fatherâs gnomes, she just moved them out of place. For that, she is to be murdered by a horde of tiny stone men, their little concrete fists small in size but great in number. Her tenderized corpse looking like she was thrown out of a plane in a hailstorm; like she was locked in a giant dryer full of golf balls; she has to die like an airsoft war crime because thatâs what you get for being a girl and having an emotion.
It might have been okay to be British in the â70s, we donât know. Itâs probably even okay to be a young British woman today, who can say? But if you had the nerve to be a British Girl in the 1970s, it was really your own fault when the street signs came to life and bashed you into marmalade. You should have known better than to bother a man for directions.
I hope you enjoyed those specially tailored comics, girls! You awful, awful girls!
Hi, Internet, remember me from when there was still hope enough for laughter? Jump into the pop culture DeLorean, and letâs revisit an era when the exceptional assholes of yesteryear would have been aghast at the normal people of today.
Welcome to 1987. It was the tealest of times, it was the hottest pink of times, and Beverly Hills Teens had just gold-plated both. This cartoon was a blistering display of opulence masquerading as a wholesome alternative to the mire-poix of robots and soldiers firing lasers at each other, even though those armies had the same hit rate as Shaquille OâNeal shooting free throws during a Shaq-Fu battle.
Thus BHT featured â80s Americaâs two favorite non-karate pastimes: making fun of surfer speech, and drooling at exorbitant wealth as part of our broken national character. Its cast of doll-faced kids enjoyed the spoils of Americaâs flashiest zip code while scheming against each other: good practice for the games they would end up playing with our lives in just a few years.
Reader, I apologize. You come here for artifacts from Outside: cultural touchstones that could not have originated in our world. And yet here is a normal cartoon paradise wherein all teenagers own at least one savings & loan association. Let me explain that I’m not here to slag Beverly Hills Teens, which has a fun theme song by the Kirkwood version of The Bengals. This series holds up better than most of your fondly remembered shows like She-Ra, every episode of TMNT after season one, and Dr. Hypno-Spiralâs Shush You Will Not Nostalgically Recall This Show Except Mistakenly as Episodes of Beverly Hills Teens.
No, today we examine the break in reality that took us from worshipping Mammon to googling whether we can eat money. Recent research says the greatest measure of success is being born wealthy, which is why Hannibal, Alexander, and Caesar all conquered the globe at ages when you would still pay a hefty surcharge to rent a KIA Soul.
It stands to follow that the teens from yesterdayâs Beverly Hills are the predatory politicians and corporate ghouls defining our existences in todayâs America. Weâll follow up on where these no-good teenagers are now, how they let us down, and why they wonât invoke the 25th Amendment on President Fredo Corleone before weâre ashes on the nuclear winds.
Letâs meet our overlords!
The pilot starts atâŚa mansion? An academy? It’s uncertain, but we quickly dissolve to an art deco stage, where our first Beverly Hills Teen leads the others in aerobics: the yoga of Spandexâs brightest decade. Even the hallways here are ostentatious, because the literal hallmark of wealth is a building that requires full-time staff just to dust.
Playing piano synthesizer on electric guitars, itâs Jett and Gig, two masses of hair who are so glam rock they make Jem & the Holograms look like the opening act for Woody Guthrie’s death rattle. Jett hails from The Valley, a realm of porn stars and humidity. Gig is so non-denominationally BRITISH⢠his accent has a working holiday visa in Australia. He owns a sentient guitar that can transform into anything except a sentient guitar that doesnât have depression. Its fretboard may have 45 notes but it only plays the flats.
Come, let us leave them. Pour deeply from that decanter of tawny port, my friend; you shall need it to meet the wicked queen of Beverly Hills Academy.
Bianca is a Veronica Lodge in a world where all the Archies Andrews already exploited to death. With the dating etiquette of a monitor lizard, she hungers for loveâs validation but cannot conceive its vulnerability.
And yet! She is the roaring fire in the showâs engine. Our ostensible protagonist is Larke, a non-Newtonian blonde so baseline I canât make a joke about her â80s featurelessness stick. If Christie Brinkley and Kim Basinger had a head-on Corvette collision, Larkeâs silhouette would form in the negative space between them just before impact.
Sheâs a model, proving our thesis. All of these characters moonlight as rock stars and actresses. They have time and money to conquer lucrative, competitive fields. How I pity them. Not one will ever know the true character-building experience of accidentally inhaling while you clean a urinal with muriatic acid.
Larke is nice, but her biggest concern is getting skin as soft and smooth as her brain. Say what you will about Bianca, but at least she has ambitions. The need for attention boiling out of her neglected childhood distills the showâs best one-liners in her, whereas Larke floats through life, dreaming of Troyâs romantic presence the way unsalted white rice dreams of room-temperature water. (Just kiddingâevery one of these kids considers rice âtoo ethnic.â)
Whoâs Troy? Only the prize that Larke pines and Bianca schemes for, even though he has the head of a Ken doll and the personality of a Ken dollâs groin. The most substantial thing about him is his accidental blow for gender equality by proving male characters can also be blank slates without agency. Heâs never visited the dentist, because developing a thin layer of plaque on his teeth would be way too close to a personality.
All of which is to say heâs the perfect trophy for two hollow rich kids to battle over. And thatâs a shame, because Bianca could have true love if she wanted itâand from an absolute freak, offering a healthy, consensual outlet for her deranged need to dominate.
Her shadowâbesides the haunting fear Daddykins will forget her birthday againâis Wilshire. Named for the street where he was found abandoned, heâs Biancaâs chauffeur, butler, guy Friday, henchman, devoted suitor, and tragic reminder that she can only process affection transactionally.
And let me tell you for free, this is where things get weird. Wilshire is what the shitty kids call a simp. He thrives on her scorn like some kind of masochist jelly, telling her with a delicious quiver, âI love it when youâre masterful.â
Now thereâs nothing wrong with a respectful power dynamic, but weâre looking at two bad explanations for Wilshireâs inappropriate behavior. In option A, heâs a regular employee with no respect for professional boundaries. He hits on his boss every hour of the day, even though sheâs in high school.
But letâs assume all Les Teens Beverleux are 18 for proprietyâs sake. Itâs hard to tell, because there are no teachers, no parents in their world. Are all the adults who donât work in couture shoppes dead? Or do they merely travel the world, seeking double-breasted suits with ever-broader shoulders? Regardless, youâre still left with Wilshireâs gross disregard of a contractual relationship.
That puts us at option B: Wilshire is a fellow student whoâs doing all this for free because he enjoys the humiliation. Heâs pulling Bianca, against her wishes, into his public shame fetish. Making everyone else your unwilling audience is probably just gravy on your shame sundae, isnât it Wilshire, you leaky udder?
Leaving aside West Coast Anthony Wiener there, we meet Chester and Pierce. Chester is an underclassman whose primary function is âscience genie,â dispensing marvels without judgment or its sister, prudence. A less wholesome teenage boy would use his technological knowhow to exploit everyone, probably without their realizing, but Chester has no obvious cause to wield his algorithms against already-broken psyches starved for spiritual peace by material glut.
The only thing he canât invent is a means to touch the human breast. Here he is hacking the blueprint for the robot from Metropolis so he can have sex with it:
Chester is a plot device with glasses who makes story happen for the rest of the characters. Heâs old enough to drive, but because puberty eludes him, heâs treated like an adorable kid brother, a non-entity on the girlsâ romantic radar. To give you an idea of Chesterâs innate sexual charisma, there is a 0% chance heâs not rich because his dad developed UNIX, just like thereâs a 100% chance his mom owns more than one ankle-length corduroy dress. Like his friends, he displays a frighteningly idealistic trust in Bianca and the other naked wolf among this flock:
Playing the role of Riverdale Luxeâs Reggie, itâs Pierce, whose transatlantic accent hints at legacy wealth from New Englandâs bloody past. His family likely came up in stature from munitions, whaling, and deforestation, with side projects in Native American genocide. As befits a scion of exploitation, Pierce demands unyielding physical perfection in women. Other humans exist merely to elevate his status; inevitably he spurns us meat-shapes for exhibiting flaws. Watch as he rejects a talented surfing partner because she has a pimple:
Pierce owns the worldâs first smartphone, a back-talking computer called C.A.D. (Cranky-Ass Diodeface), who sounds exactly like Jarvis, if actor Paul Bettany werenât married to Jennifer Connellyâand thus, could grow world-weary. Pierce offers up C.A.D.âs database of women who fit Chesterâs list of âvital statisticsâ in exchange for mad science. Iâd say it horribly commercializes dating, except itâs how 90% of relationships form these days.
Okay, thatâs the main crew. Thereâs also Blaze, Tara, Character X, Character Like Y Whatever, and Nikki (because LA mandates you spell it that way), each of whom I would describeânot respectivelyâas Horse Girl, Muckraking Fink Journalist, Southernmost Belle, Aerobics Instructor I Guess, and The Good Kind of Drama Queen. Good luck figuring out who is which! None will be mentioned again.
So back in our plot, the big news down at the Gold-Flaked Malt Shoppe is that thereâs going to be a couples surfing contest, whichâyeah, sure, is a thing. The screenwriter for this episode worked for MAD, and you wonât catch me questioning my betters. Bianca wants Troy as her surfing partner for the status of it all, while Pierce just wants to win it to prove heâs better than everyone.
Ugh, itâs going to turn out at the end that every one of these characters is just a facet of a single mind in a mental care facility, isnât it? This is the Robin Leech cut of Identity.
Many hijinks ensue, including a scene where Bianca tries to buy a seductive swimsuit to impress Troy, except Larke is doing a photoshoot right there on the show floor, even though real-life beaches are just a short drive (9 miles/3.5 hours) down Santa Monica Blvd.
Thatâs when Larkeâs shitty longhair cat and Biancaâs shitty poodle get into a fight that destroys Biancaâs dream swimsuit, because even the animals are unlovable in Beverly Hills. With these monsters in mind, I said âostensible protagonistâ earlier because Larke is merely the POV character in a tragedy about the vanity of human wishes. In Beverly Hills, good does not triumph, evil merely falters. There are no heroes here, only degrees of terrible person.
The teens head to the beach, whereâoh shit, itâs Radley! Forget everything I said; Radleyâs so cool. He surfs, wishes harm to none, and thatâs about it. When the teens tell him heâs going to win, he says with guileless humility that anyone can surf to win if theyâre gnarly in the pipeline of their hearts. But donât take my word for it:
Even though Pierce is cheating to win with a self-surfing board, too much is never enough for him, and he has Chester build a robot shark that he can defeat to make himself look like a hero. Midway through his showboating, itâs revealed that the robot doesnât work, and weâve got ourselves a real-life shark rodeo! Unfortunately, Bianca taps on the sharkâs nose with all the force of Troyâs charisma, and the day is saved.
While the more ambitious Pierce is doomed by his own overreach, Biancaâs conniving comes to naught. Or it would, except Bianca commands Wilshire to set the seawallâs wave generator to âtidal waveâ in a sabotage bid that will surely kill Troy so that none may have him if she canât.
Wait one testicle-kicking minute! W-w-wave generator? Seawall? And are those snowy peaks behind Wilshire? Dear God, is this the dystopian Beverly Hills of 2087, where the tide comes up to Beverlyâs actual Hills? You maniacs! What kind of world have you created, with your relentless worship of consumption? IâŚI donât want to ponder this anymore. Ahhhhh God damnyoualltoHELL!
*sob* Letâs see where they all are today, in ascending order of influence, as measured by the worldâs only all-gold thermometer, kept liquid at 231.6 GPa by the power of Daddyâs influence in this town:
Poverty limited Wilshireâs budget to expand his popular, embittered Geocities blog to high-quality YouTube video; he retired in 2005 after losing most of his Menâs Rights audience to Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiroâs eyebrows, and a GIF of a woman falling into a cactus patch.
Briefly resurfaced on the cultural radar with his Tiger King appearance alongside his wife, Carol Baskin.
Kicked off of Real Housewivesâ most forgettable season, Bianca is trying to rebrand herself as an influencer on social platforms where the users are half her age. She posts selfies of herself without a COVID mask using hashtag #icantbreathe, and fights commenters who call her on it. Writes Botox off her taxes as a business expense.
Biancaâs chasing a tightening spiral. There are ice cream scoops that make more lasting impressions, and yet fonder memories.
Larke retires from modeling every few years to be a full-time home provider to her kids TraeylĂźr, JâBrayden, and Kaayelyeiegh (pronounced âMackenzieâ). Isnât anti-vaccine, but has a lot of friends who are. Severely misinterprets quantum physics to âproveâ The Law of Attraction. Founded a body-positive, fair-labor clothing line, but spends six weeks a year on vacation.
Could have led a sustainable revolution, but squandered her head-start. Still makes a half million a year without really trying.
The youngest lawyer to make partner at Diggum, Diggum, Troyboy & Goldencrisp, Troy was re-elected to Congress (D, CA-33) this November, despite wondering aloud at parties âwhether Black Lives Matter protests are doing their cause more harm than good.â Owns a boat, but only takes it out twice a year. Named his kids Hunter, Trapper, and Fisher without ever realizing the connection.
Never uses the firmâs box seats at Chargers games, even though he successfully pushed for $100 million in tax breaks to âbring our boys back to LA,â costing the city much-needed upgrades to infrastructure and education. Blanches whenever you bring up the hack on Democratic email servers, which is weird for a guy so publicly milquetoast.
Jett became JVP of A&R at BMG after luring P.O.D. from INOâs SRE. She stopped hiring Gig to produce albums after the rumors about his behavior with female artists, but still occasionally sleeps with him. Gigâs behavior is better now that heâs clean, but the guilt over pawning his guitar haunts him.
Jett can fairly say she helped create two musical genres. Gig mostly wanders his hillside mansion trying to get inspired, but Malibuâs perfect shores only make him restless, knowing heâll never again see Granâs cottage in Seasalter. The guitar resides in a Redondo Beach bungalow, and is currently plotting 2028âs robot uprising.
Definitely died in a Point Break-type situation. Fuckinâ Radley, yeaaaahhh!
Legends never die so long as they have a Facebook memoriam page for everyone you no longer talk to from high school to like. Radleyâs post-mortem sponsorship from Rip It energy drink inspired the tattoo on my left heinie: âRIP Radley, I will mourn U till I join U. [poop emoji | skull & crossbones | lightning bolt | Radley uppercutting God while the Devil watches in awe]â
Chester rides his bike to work despite founding a company worth $280 billion; doesnât seem to care that Pierceâs equity is three times his own. Has been steadily improving his sexbot designs for 30+ years. The pain they feel now is real to them when he spurns their advances.
His inventions touch every aspect of our lives, and yet Chester is diverted from many of his world-saving ideas by a corporate itinerary prioritizing video games, data farming, and private space exploration. Whatever happened to the brilliant young mind who patented the âhypno-marble,â the self-improving AI that drives C.A.D. and Gigâs guitar, and a bot that can falsify SQL authentication in seconds? Why are so many of these teens so under-accomplished, given their head start in life?
Despite his reputation as a clown and a conman, Pierce lured Chester away from a promising career at Boston Dynamics to co-found Spiral, an all-in-one, future-tech competitor to Alphabet (motto: âChase the singularity,â though Pierce canât explain what that means). Owns a storage locker with two locks under a fake name, and will never tell anyone about his âdark periodsâ when he canât remember where he was.
Plays golf with Troy fairly frequently, though theyâre not very friendly. Creeps out fellow tech investor Peter Thiel for reasons he can never quite name. Cheats on his wife with women under 25 like his life depends on it, but would be morally outraged if he knew what she does on her âspiritual retreatsâ to Big Sur. Pays extra to have his dental records deleted after each check-up.
With his 25-year head start on the smartphone and his insistence on physical beauty at a glance, Pierce chaired most of the dating apps of the past decade; transforming us all, through algorithms, into reflections of his repugnant soul.
Please note this extrapolation is only 70% likely. Thereâs a sizable chance that these same inputs instead lead Pierce down the path toâŚtoâŚdear God, no:
The story of Brides In Love begins where so many great love stories do– in prison. Charlton comics started when a guy who went to jail for selling books of song lyrics without the writer’s permission met a lawyer (presumably not a great one because he was also in prison). Together, they decided to start a publishing company that specialized in, among other things, comics for broads.
To decide on titles, they stuck the words love, marriage, teen, romance, bride, and secret into a sack, shook it up, and whatever popped out was the name of their next comic. What they ended up with were things like I Love You, Sweetheart Diary, Romantic Secrets, Romantic Story, My Secret Life, Just Married, Teenage Love, Teen Confessions, and Teenage Confidential Confessions.
I don’t know what gave Charlton comics the idea that this was what women were looking for in comic books. I would be way more likely to pick up a comic titled Teen Confessions: I Fell Into A Vat Of Nuclear Waste, or I Love You, and I Fight Crime, With My Six Extra Arms, or My Secret Life As A Six-Armed Monster Hunter.
However, a think tank of -certainly no women- decided that what ladies want in a comic book is a hero who is a woman, a villain who is her husband, and a solution to their conflict that is they have to stay married because it’s 1963. Instead of doing battle, they make up, and usually, the woman apologizes and admits that she was a dumb idiot all along. Then they all live happily ever after, which for them is, like, ten more years until they die of lung cancer, or gout, or one of those other diseases you get from having too much fun.
Since Brides in Love is an anthology series, we get to see this same scenario play out over and over again like we’re stuck in the misogynistic romance comic circle of hell– a magical land where a woman can go from wanting to end her marriage to being ready to apologize in one panel because she took a nap.
“I don’t know why I told my husband that I wanted to divorce him. Probably because I was on my period or some dumb shit like that; remember me from exactly two panels ago? What a friggin bitch!”
The story featured on the cover is called “JUST FOR KICKS,” but for some reason, they recolored the whole thing to change the woman from a redhead to a blonde.
The main character in it is super pissed at her husband because he keeps making her go to parties, and she’s tired. Which, wow, I would kill for 1963 problems.
One day she leaves her husband and goes to a hotel where she naps and eats a bunch. So basically, she’s living the dream, and all of the men around her are like, “A woman? Eating? Send her to the insane-atorium! Blast her with a firehose until the ghosts leave her uterus!”
But it isn’t a uterus ghost that’s making her crazy. It’s a baby, which is much scarier! She went to a hotel and ate hotdogs, not because she’s insane, but because she’s insane from pregnancy! Which is fine. When she finds out, she wishes her husband were there, and he is! He tracked her down and is standing over her bed in a posture that is not all threatening, calling her a little idiot.
It’s not just the writing that suffers in Brides In Love. They could have hired an artist who doesn’t use twins conjoined at the head as a model for two people kissing.
Seriously, that one is the most terrifying but all of the kissing pics have the same vibe as the drawings of elephants from the Middle Ages done by monks who had never actually seen one.
It’s like every illustrator for Brides In Love was a graduate of The Art Institute For Male Virgins Who’ve Never Even Met A Woman.
I look at this, and I can hear the artist saying, “Kissing? Sure I can draw kissing. That’s uh, um, that’s when the girl puts her whole mouth around the boy’s lips so that his mouth is in her mouth, right? No, I’m not sweating. YOU’RE SWEATING.”
This artist has a problem with mouths in general. For instance, there’s the last panel of the third story, which is about a woman who marries a much older man. Her new stepdaughter, who is her age, for some reason, refuses to call her “Mom.” The woman ends up inheriting a bunch of money, which she gives to her husband to help out his failing business. This convinces her stepdaughter she’s not a gold digger. Then they all do this for some reason:
You know, just a stepmom and her new daughter, hanging out with their mouths open and tongues slightly out. It’s like someone wanted to draw a comic for women but forgot women have eyes.
Since this isn’t your typical comic book, it doesn’t have your typical comic ads. Most of the ads in Brides In Love are for weight loss, hair extensions, and nursing school. But on the very back is the kind of insane ’60s shit that makes me vaguely miss a time when everything was legal. It’s an ad for a photography studio that promises to send you 20 coupons, and if you get them 20 clients, they will give you a live miniature monkey. The ad is sure to note the supply of monkeys is limited, which makes me picture a man sitting in a stinky room with nine monkeys begging God for some kid in Yonkers to sell enough portrait sessions.
Do I wish I were alive in the sixties? No. Nothing has made me happier to be born in an era where women have some creative say in their lives than reading this comic. But do I also wish I were alive in a time when you could win a free monkey from a comic book? Hard yes.
Lydia will send you a live miniature monkey if you follow her on Twitter.
Nerds! You god damn nerds! Paying money for jokes on the internet is the nerdiest thing possible, and thatâs including both card tricks and ukelele covers. But you nerds are precious to us. We appreciate every second you spend reading our comedy instead of a six-thousand word thinkpiece on which Doctor Who would fuck which other Doctor Who. We treasure every moment you spend with us instead of an anime body pillow that says your name in broken English when you squeeze it. We value every glasses-fogging, asthmatic giggle we tickle out of your soft bellies straining at the edges of T-shirts advertising old video games. This, then, is your day: Nerding Day. And these are the best Nerding Days youâve had all year.
There are, without hyperbole, several too many jokes about insects on pizza in this book. Something happened to this author, probably seeing an insect on pizza, that caused him to find insects on pizza outrageous. This information isnât particularly interesting or funny, but when someone does something as strange as drawing this many bug-infested pizzas, I take detailed notes. It might make for a bad comedy article, but it will definitely help catch the man authorities will one day call the Papa Johnâs Killer.
At least one time in his career, a cruise director has told Fred Newmanâs agent, âWeâve already booked our headliner and I donât think the ship needs a second Dave Coulier.â Jesus, I need to step away for a second because thatâs the fucking meanest joke Iâve ever written.
Sean has promised me that this wonât be one of our public columns, so I feel safe admitting this only to you, our loyal patrons: I have always wanted to be a magical girl.
Foam rubber muscle suits just donât hold up when theyâre flesh-toned. It looks like Lion-O is mostly tumor and sass. This is what the melty guy from RoboCop would look like if, instead of being hit by a patrol car, he was hit by the theater bug.
Itâs tough to do even one âHero Resists The Callâ right, and Jetman is doing four at once. The end result is less like weâre being introduced to a reluctant cast of would-be heroes, and more like everybody in the world is already aware of, and fucking hates Jetman.
Ultimate Tag was an idea so bad it wouldnât fly as a MadTV skit, and it was executed worse than Muammar Gaddafi, a Baltimore traffic stop, or a MadTV skit. Ultimate Tag sucks⌠but what weâre really here to do is make fun of the Ultimate Taggers.
Michael Caine is in The Last Witch Hunter for a grand total of about 3 minutes, before heâs put into a magical coma and replaced by Elijah Wood, who should also be too good for this film but is miraculously not.
For every second of his screen time, it is so very clear that Michael Caine just has no patience for this shit.
But no joke, that basically looks like a video game. Like if you showed this to your grandpa, heâd say itâs a videogame and then look at you pityingly, wondering where it all went wrong with our generation. Maybe it was a mistake to stop spraying pesticides over schools. Maybe it softened us up too much. âGrandpa?â youâd ask, but heâd just ease the brakes off his wheelchair and roll quietly backwards down a hill.
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsors and Hot Dog Supremes: Yannis Ioannidis, John McCammon, Armando Nava, Lyman, yossarian, Josh S, and Ken Paisley. Together they form Ultrazorb, who defends the cosmos mostly against Ultrazorbâs drunken rampages.
The definition for “nerd” changes 12.7(Ď)² times faster than any other word. For instance, in our lifetime it has bounced between “panty unmoistening,” “socially unacceptable,” and “dangerously obsessive.” It can be confusing! But good news: I think I’ve found the Center of Nerd– an activity so dorky it anchors all variations or nuances of Nerd to a single constant:
In 1997,an original copy of DEVIL STICK on VHS retailed for $20 at JUGGLING CAPITOL. I assume today this mint-in-plastic copy is priceless, or was before I unsealed it after 23 years. DEVIL STICK is the no-budget project of Neil Stammer, a man who brags how much he loves an old Chinese toy called “devil sticks” though he mentions there was a mistranslation and they are, um, technically “flower sticks?” Neil loves devil sticks so much he moved to China for the proudly stated goal of getting better at manipulating them. Which brings me to my first criticism: Never has so much work gone into getting good at something so unimpressive. If you went on a decades long pilgrimage through Ukrainian factories to become the greatest sex doll sterilizer, your story would have a broader appeal than the man who moved to Asia to dedicate his life to twirling carnival sticks.
The first twenty minutes of the video is Neil alone, far from any microphone, in front of a black curtain. He has all the charm of a forensic pathologist explaining a morgue’s policy on outside snacks. If this doesn’t sound unpleasant enough, the soundtrack is entirely harmonica. On top of that, the video includes a steady hissing noise almost as loud as Neil and the harmonica. If you could die from being bad at producing VHS tapes, Neil Stammer’s body would have shattered into parts the moment he thought, “I should make a vide–“
The basics of devil sticks are simple– you bounce the devil stick back and forth between the two hand sticks. Neil warns it should take you a few days to a week to get the hang of this, which should be enough time to decide if you should really dedicate all this time to eliminating all sexual opportunities. Neil, arguably the world’s leading enthusiast for this hobby, doesn’t bother selling you on it. All this struggle to get to the endgame of “being able to devil stick” is like saying, “Digging through the garbage can be sad and messy, but every 72 hours you find an old yogurt lid!” Fucking use that as a pull quote on the DVD release of DEVIL STICK, Neil. Or this: Neil juggles batons with all the lifeless despair of a Ukrainian sex doll getting unsanitized.
Neil gives virtually none of the tips or advice you’d expect from an instructor of such a delicate art. Instead, he silently completes all the several possible tricks you can do with these things. It’s barely, barely better than secretly filming some asshole at a Renaissance faire and nowhere near as helpful as asking him, “Yon juggler, mayhaps you can illuminate me in the ways of these witchful sticks in exchange for watching me lay with my wife in the drench of her moon blood?”
Okay, this Under the Leg trick is pretty good.
Oh shit, Neil. Have I been wrong about how cool devil sticks are this whole time? If you picked up three sticks in front of a girl and said, “Oh, hey, I’ve seen these before. You kind of hit them back and forth?” and then you pulled this high kick? She would howl. Her uterus would fall out of her trying to get to you. She would die confused and horny and when the paramedics asked what the shit happened you would say, “I’m not sure. I was just hitting these sticks together and did a little, you know, kick like this.” And they would see it and all the flesh of their genitals would engorge together, dragging their shrieking, pain-wracked bodies toward your enchanting expression of talent.
Twelve minutes in and Neil is still robotically powering full speed through tricks. In many ways it’s pretty impressive. He’s got a passion that helped him create what has to be one of the top five most important works of devil stick media. He’s the best devil sticker I’ve seen, the only one I can name, and I feel so fucking bad for him and every choice he’s ever made. And with every trick chained together like this, you start to see how limited your options are when clacking a stick around. He’s like a Taco Bell chef putting a burrito inside another burrito, adding Cheetos, and giving the various states of this process 73 different names.
After fourteen minutes, Neil has run out of ideas and he’s been reduced to doing kickflips with the small sticks. It’s cute, and technically showmanship, but feels desperate. I don’t want to diminish how uniquely lame this is, but it’s like watching a modern dunk contest. Mankind finished inventing dunks decades ago, so dunk innovations are limited to adding a pointlessly weird bounce or putting on a cowboy hat first. Tricks like this tell a story more about the performer’s creative struggle than their amazing ability. And in one quarter of an hour, Neil Stammer has convinced me, passionately, that he and now we have seen everything devil sticks will ever offer. It is a tragedy. We are watching a man’s soul crawl further and further away from all meaning and joy while giving the limp sales pitch of “This Could Be YOU.” This VHS tape should be called Le Vide de L’ambition and screened in the Louvre.
Sure, I guess you haven’t wiggled the stick back and forth with one hand yet, Neil.
The first surprise of the film comes seventeen minutes in when Neil admits he never had time to think of a name for this trick other than “My Favorite Trick.” Which is silly because this is obviously “Mr. Juggler’s Cry for Help” or “The Talented Masturbator.” Neil, “Advanced Useless Endeavor, Behind the Back Variation” was right there. You could have called it “The Virgin Helicopter” or “Release Me From This Terrible Cycle, Devil Sticks (8 Minute Scream).”
I’m not sure Neil meant for this part to be left on the tape.
After showing you, just, fucking every possible trick, Neil goes out with a flaming, showstopping finale combining some of them. It’s a triumph! An inspiration! If you start now and dedicate yourself to devil sticks, this is the life you could have! So take that with you as you jou– wait, hold on. We’ve got these fire sticks and this dark driveway. You know what would make a fucking sweet ending for this video?
Oh, yeah. That’s a finale, Neil. Fire blow to darkness, fade in on JugglingCapitol.com, and that’s how you devil stick the crowd. By the way, I checked JugglingCapitol.com to see how they’re holding up in this post-devil stick interest world, and it’s very strange. This is either the new headquarters of some kind of juggler alternate reality game or the site owner handed over control to a WordPress robot and let it run wild. Here’s what it looks like today:
Indrani is a boring supermodel child of divorce who can’t process food in the daylight and JugglingCapitol.com has put her in charge of defeating a killer shark? This is nonsense. It’s nothing. For this I screwed up Neil’s perfect ending? Let’s pretend this never happened and backtrack a little. We’re going to go out Neil style:
Fuck yeah! Awesome!!
UPDATE 12/16/2020 11:00am PST
Jesus fucking Christ, it turns out the story of Neil Stammer’s devil stick did NOThave an awesome ending at all.
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