Eye charts

Yet another cartoon meme, the Eye Chart, with an instance in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, set in the fictive city of Metropolis:

(#1) It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Superman (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

Yes, it’s also an instance of the “It’s a bird” meme. Memes tend to travel together, like elephants, or municipal buses.

It’s a bird. Two postings on this blog:

— from 10/22/16, in “Supercamp penguins”, about the meme

— from 5/11/18, in “Differentiae”, a Bizarro cartoon on distinguishing Superman from birds and planes

Eye Chart cartoons. There are a lot of them — the meme allows for all sorts of stuff to be packed into the frame — but almost all of them require a fee for use here, so I won’t be showing them to you, or even bothering to describe them, and anyway you can find them on the net. Here are three that I think I can use: one from my 8/14/09 posting “The eye chart”, with a Bizarro; one (an eye chart for dogs) from Dale Coverly’s Speed Bump strip on 2/14/15; and one (an eye chart for queers) I came across yesterday fortuitously, on the Peachy Kings gay-stuff site (having just gotten a 2022 Tom of Finland calendar from them, and then ordered up a Queer Rainbow t-shirt).

The 2009 Bizarro. A nightmare scene, of initialism run amok:

(#2)

An eye chart for dogs. From Dale Coverly:

(#3) woof ‘car’, yap ‘rabbit’, bark ‘cat’, growl ‘mailman’, bow wow wow ‘dog’ (we think)

An eye chart for queers. From the Peachy Kings site, where it’s available in several forms, including as a birthday card and on a t-shirt; but it stands on its own as a words-only cartoon:

(#4) Can you read me right? Can you see all of me?

Peachy Kings. An entertainingly sex-drenched Etsy supplier, especially devoted to Tom of Finland merchandise (for background, see the Page on my ToF postings) and Terry Miller muscle-daddy merchandise (for background, see the Page on my Daddy – Boy and DILF postings).

I’m guessing that the name Peachy Kings is supposed to echo the slang idiom peachy keen (see the note at the end of this posting) while incorporating the peach  as a pygic — buttocks — symbol, in this case standing for the male buttocks as an object of gay sexual desire.  In any case, I found the company in a search for a sexy-guy 2022 calendar that was viewable in my living room (which is heavy with male art, phallic symbols, and rainbow entertainments — as well as penguins, woolly mammoths, memorabilia, art, and cartoons — but draws the line at genitalia and sex acts, though I’m willing to go right up to the line on those).

The cover of the PK ToF calendar, which is in fact right on the line:

(#5) [shameless ad copy:] The new Tom of Finland 2022 Calendar by Peachy Kings is packed full of classic Queer art! Thirteen classic Tom illustrations featuring naked studs, cowboys, leathermen, muscle pigs, and a year’s worth of big butts & bulges! The calendar measures 9”x13” — and printed on a heavy paper stock.

Pleased with the calendar (which arrived yesterday morning), I went on to order myself a relatively restrained t-shirt:

(#6) Restrained in language (to start with, no fuck; as I type this, I am wearing a queer as fuck tank top), and not a single body part

And then, though muscle daddies aren’t my thing, and I could never have claimed to be one (I am an actual father; and I’ve been called upon to play the Daddy role in Daddy – Boy encounters; but I’ve never had the muscles to pull off Muscle Daddy, even if I’d wanted to), I browsed the Terry Miller Muscle Daddy section of the PK catalog, which has wonderful items like this one:

(#7) TM in his Daddy gym shorts (aka panties in butch faggy talk), showing off a body it took him years to achieve

Note the wedding ring. Terry Miller’s husband is the sex-advice columnist Dan Savage. Miller has always been what I would describe as pleasantly faggy in his presentation of self; it’s one of the things that attracted Savage to him. Then they married and became the fathers of a boy — Savage wrote a book about the experience — and  Miller began to develop his body, eventually becoming a serious leatherman, active and visible in the leather community (and — quite charmingly to my mind — folding his fagginess into the high-butch presentations of this community). Savage now posts hot photos of his husband in his gear.

Their son, who they’ve managed to shelter from a public identity as the child of highly visible gay-activist fathers — the co-founders of the It Gets Better foundation — is now in his 20s.

Meanwhile, Muscle Daddy TM produces frank gay porn for the ToF Foundation — I have just now ordered a set of seven porn postcards of his — and he’s proud of this association, as on this playful t-shirt:

(#8) Yes, a porn pun

From NOAD, the adv. hard as a modifier of the verb work; vs. the adj. hard as a subject modifier (of concomitant circumstance) in the complement of the verb work (compare: Porn stars work naked / in the nude / wearing nothing but socks):