From Steven Levine, this remarkable advertising image:

Elsie the Cow, in a maid’s apron and nothing else — yielding a racy image — offering a very substantial breakfast. Smiling and dancing.

More on Elsie here.

An AP story from the 16th: “Pa. exhibit traces history of female comic artists” by Kevin Begos:

It took a war to let the country’s female comic book artists break character.

A new exhibit at Pittsburgh’s Toonseum is celebrating the history of female comic artists, including those who began laying the groundwork 100 years ago and the female artists of the 1940s, when World War II sent many male artists overseas.

(A familiar story: World War II opened up niches for women’s achievement that hadn’t been available before, as men were sent overseas or into other military units. Then after the war, the men came back, and women’s opportunities contracted again in many areas. But not all.)

A photo and its caption:

In this photo made on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014, a display of books about women cartoonists and female characters in cartoons is part of an exhibit at the Toonseum in Pittsburgh that documents female comic artists over the last 70 years. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

The Dork Tower cartoon (by John Kovalic) from the 24th (a bit fuzzy from being blown up):

xx

Geoff Nunberg writes with this Google Ngram:

This shows the usage of gay (at least in the books Google samples) gently declining until roughly 1980 and then zooming up. The interpretation I’d provide here is that “old gay ‘merry’ ‘” was declining very slowly (it became “old-fashioned”), until “new gay ‘homosexual’ ” eventually took over massively. But others might have other interpretations.

Two cartoons today — a Zits and a Bizarro — about communicating:

(#1)

(#2)

In #1 we see the stereotype of the (male) teenager as extraordinarily taciturn, especially with his parents, but quite communicative in some other contexts, especially is social media (where he’s all thunbs, but in a good way). The contextually taciturn teenage boy is a frequent theme in Zits.

In #2 we see the expectations and conventions of the grade-school classroom (where “talking in class” is seen as disruptive and meriting punishment) carried over the business meetings, except now it’s electronic communications (especially texting) that’s the issue. The grade-school punishment is to separate the offender from the others in such a way that they cannot communicate with classmates. Or in #2, with others who aren’t in the meeting.

Three cartoons today, on diverse topics: Calvin and Hobbes on explanations, Zits on means of communication (again), Bizarro on word play turning on ambiguity.

(#1)

Inventive but screwy explanation, plus an appeal to the (claimed) superior reasoning ability of men (vs. women).

(#2)

Jeremy and Pierce mockingly catalogue obsolete means of communication that they would never use, starting with the telephone. A recurrent theme on Zits.

(#3)

Language play turning on two different slang uses of hooter: ‘nose, esp. a large nose’ (as in the cartoon) and ‘female breast’, as in the dining establishments Hooters, featuring women with large hooters.

Gillian Burlingham writes to say that her partner Sariya has figured out why dinosaurs went extinct: they were all “he” and “him” . Just read any kids book or watch any kids’ video on dinos and you’ll see, Gillian says.

(I know, I know, if you asked the writers they would probably say that using forms of HE — he, him, his — in such cases is just treating HE as the 3sg generic human pronoun. But that’s a usage practice that has been very hard to justify for many decades, especially in children’s books, where the readers will take HE to denote males.)

So the dinosaurs in the world of children’s fiction endured their celibacy or enjoyed their same-sex revels (discreetly out of view of the kids, of course; think of the children!), but just as anti-gay groups warn about same-sex partnerships in real human beings, the dinosaurs had no way of reproducing, so the species died out.

So sad, and so unnecessary.

An unusually big crop of cartoons this morning, including one (a Rhymes With Orange) on stereotypes about men’s tastes (for Fathers Day). Plus another Zits with the stereotype of chatty teenage girls; another strip (a Mother Goose and Grimm) on Yoda’s syntax; a Zippy on synonyms for disapproving; and a Bizarro on the extension of metaphors to simulacra.

Comestibles for Dad in chocolate. A Rhymes:

(#1)

Liqueur-filled chocolates are commonplace; but beer? The rest are mostly meaty items. Then there are the nacho clusters.

Those chatty girls. Zits goes back, tiresomely, again and again, to the stereotype of teenage girls as prattling on about matters of no consequence, in a torrent of speech. Meanwhile, Jeremy is barely verbal at all:

(#2)

[Added 6/16/14: Mark Liberman has picked up this one on Language Log ("Sticky stereotypes", yesterday), with links to other LLog postings on chatty girls and laconic boys in Zits. On this blog, on chatty girls in Zits: 2/18/10, "Chatty Cathies"; 11/8/12, "Breathless". And on laconic boys there: 9/26/12, "Monosyllabism"; 4/5/13, "Finger talk"; 3/23/14, #2 in a collection.]

Again with Yoda. Mother Goose and Grimm on this durable topic:

(#3)

An earlier posting on Yodaspeak, with links to still more, is here.

Disapproving vocabulary.Zippy and Zerbina spin through a series of synonyms:

(#4)

What a turn-on!

Non-literal horses. Another very silly Bizarro in the desert:

(#5)

Carousel horses are only metaphorically horses.

(Note cowboy morphology (them ‘they, those’) and phonology (cain’t ‘can’t’).)

Bonus ‘toon. A Bizarro from the 12th that I didn’t get around to posting then:

(#6)

Instead of the command Speak!, the up-to-the-date alternative Text!

Speak!, as a command to a dog to bark is idiomatic (which is part of what makes the cartoon funny; but a command to a dog to text is funny on its own) — it’s metaphorical in origin, but has become conventionalized in this special use. (It can, of course, be created as a fresh metaphor at any time — Fido spoke fiercely — but then requires some interpretive work that Speak! ‘Bark!’ does not.)

Recent bulletins from the world of commerce: cricket chips, bed-hair mousse.

Cricket chips. From the 5/25/14 New Scientist (p. 14), “More legs, more flavour” by Hal Hodson, about crickets:

These are the first insects in the US to be farmed for human consumption. Big Cricket Farms, the company running the warehouse, is working with insect food start-up Six Foods in Boston, who will make the cricket chips … – which they call “chirps” – and cookies. They are among many adventurous eaters hoping to carve out a niche for a protein-rich, environmentally friendly food source that could transform the modern diet.

The brand name chirp for ‘cricket chip’ might just work, given its comfortable distance from actual insects. And the chips look like, well, ordinary (taco) chips.

Bed-hair mousse. At first I thought this was a joke, but then I’m not plugged into the fashions of the young: AXE (the personal-care company) Messy Look Paste, sold under the brand name Whatever. From a men’s fashion site:

AXE Whatever Messy Look Paste

Messy Look Paste takes all of the guesswork and time out of creating “I-just-rolled-out-of-bed” hair that, in reality, can often take more like 30 minutes to style perfectly. This is one time where the label “whatever” is appropriate and actually a good thing. Unlike other bed-head products, Messy Look isn’t greasy or sticky and doesn’t leave behind a waxy finish or sheen. The color of the product is complemented by a soft yet masculine scent. The fragrance for all of AXE’s hair products was formulated using a cedar wood base with distinctive fruity tones and the relaxing aroma of birch leaf. [$6.99 a tub]

Yes, there are competitors in the domain of bed-head products. Messy-look hair, some facial scruff — for that masculine “whatever” look.

The product:

(#1)

and a messy-haired guy:

(#2)

Yesterday, it was The Advocate; today, it’s another LPI publication, Out (or OUT) magazine, again with two pieces of interest for this blog in the latest (October 2014) issue: one on straightsplaining, one on gay bookstores.

Background. From Wikipedia:

LPI Media (formerly Liberation Publications Inc.) was the largest gay and lesbian publisher in the United States. The company targeted LGBT communities and published such magazines, books, and web sites, with its magazines alone having more than 8.2 million copies distributed each year. The Advocate and Out magazines were the two largest circulation LGBT magazines in the United States, each with corresponding websites; Advocate.com and OUT.com, respectively. [The magazines continue, as do the websites.]

Additional publications included Out Traveler, HIV Plus, and LGBT penned titles through Alyson Books making it the “largest publisher of gay and lesbian print publications” and thus the largest print voice of the LGBT communities

… They were also parent owners of Specialty Publications, which produces adult (pornography) publications MEN, formerly Advocate Men, FreshMen, Unzipped, and [2]. Specialty Publications was one of the largest gay adult erotica web and video production companies in the world.

… [an] agreement was completed in August 2008, with Here Media Inc. the new owner of LPI, Specialty Publications, and LPI’s book company, Alyson Publications

LPI was for a considerable time very much male-oriented. The newsmagazine The Advocate has with some success embraced a larger lgbt readership, but the style magazine (offering fashion, entertainment, and “lifestyle” features) Out is still notably male-focused; Wikipedia reports that it has

the highest circulation of any gay monthly publication in the United States. It presents itself in an editorial manner similar to Details, Esquire, and GQ [note: all with a male target audience].

Straightsplaining. On p.41 of the latest Out, a piece by R. Kurt Osenlund, “I’m so happy for you: When well-meaning sentiments are actually straightsplaining in disguise”, in which out gay man Osenlund bridles at “I’m so happy for you” from well-meaning straight people, who are apparently offering congratulations to him on having survived so far and managed some degree of success in life, despite the gross handicap of his being gay.

Osenlund sees these occasions as “straight people aiming to make sense of the gay experience through their straight lenses” — straightsplaining, in the terms of Gawker writer Rich Juzwiak in his 2/7/14 piece “A Field Guide to Straightsplaining”, who classified 12 levels of ascending toxicity in the phenomenon. (Osenlund saw “I’m so happy for you” as at the lowest level.)

Juzwiak’s intro:

If you want to know about gay people — their lives, their desires, their ideas, their cultures — listen to gay people. If you want to know about straight people, listen to straight people talking about gay people.

Straight people have a lot to say about gay people. Of course they do. Everybody talks about everybody. The growing acceptance of homosexuality/queerness means that gays have more of a voice than ever, but also that straight people have more to say about gay people than ever. That’s a recipe for a screaming match.

The term straightsplaining is modeled on mansplaining. From Wikipedia:

Mansplaining is a portmanteau of the words “man” and “explaining”, coined around 2008-09 to describe a well known social phenomenon commonly experienced by women, whereby a man who describes some topic to a woman, habitually does so in a patronizing and condescending manner, perhaps unwittingly, and often despite having limited knowledge himself, because of the gender assumption and stereotype that a woman needs matters explained much more simply or must have far less background or technical grasp and knowledge than a man would.

Mansplaining also covers a heterogeneous mix of mannerisms in which a speaker’s reduced respect for the stance of a listener, or a person being discussed, appears to have little reason behind it other than the speaker’s assumption that the listener or subject – being female – is not expected to have the same capacity to understand as a male would, or their views are not given the same respect a male’s would be given. It also covers situations where it appears a person is using their conversation primarily for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, by holding forth to a presumed less capable female listener in order to appear knowledgeable by comparison.

… The word is thought to have been first used in 2008 or 2009, shortly after San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit published an April 2008 blog post titled “Men Explain Things to Me; Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way”. In it, she did not use the word mansplaining, but defined the phenomenon as “something every woman knows”.

Gay bookstores. On p. 46 of Out, “Open Books” by Colin Crummy, beginning:

British author Philip Hensher first visited Gay’s the Word, now the U.K.’s only gay bookshop, when he was an Oxford student in the 1980s.

… He … thought someone ought to write a book inspired by the shop, which, since it opened in 1979, has withstood a customs raid, storefront vandalizations, and the bottom falling out of the book market. Gay’s the Word celebrates its 35th birthday this year, and Hensher has written the very book he’s longed to read [the novel The Emperor Waltz].

(Hensher then supplies a list of “10 must-read books” — all of them fiction about the gay male experience.)

I was bowled over to read that Gay’s the Word (with its direct, in-your-face name) is the last remaining gay bookstore in the U.K. Bookstores (of all types) are, of course, disappearing everywhere, but gay bookstores (or, more generally, bookstores with some lgbt focus) are vanishing especially quickly, as lgbt people are increasingly diffused geographically, while being absorbed, gradually but unevenly, into the larger society.

Some of the fallen: Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, A Different Light (several stores in California, with the one in the Castro district of San Francisco the last to go under), Lambda Rising in D.C., the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in NYC.

A bonus. An Out piece on Scottish actor James McAvoy (who has taken several gay roles) entitled “James F*****g McAvoy”, for his inclination to use fucking as an intensifying modifier all over the place, starting with (on p. 78):

“If you’d have told me about my career as a wee boy, I’d have been really fucking surprised”

and going on from there, including “everybody fucking else” and “a guy standing still and fucking whispering to himself” on p. 81 and on p. 82 a series: “fucking pointless”, “their fucking independence”, and “a fucking mental case”, concluding with

“If a director doesn’t want me, that’s their fucking loss.”

A fucking bravura performance.

In today’s comics crop, a Zits on language and the sexes (once again), a Rhymes With Orange with language play, and a Bizarro metacartoon on the visual conventions of the comics:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

Love talk in Zits. #1 has Jeremy and his girfriend Sara, communicating in grossly gender-stereotyped ways: Sara highly verbal (and focused on feelings), Jeremy monosyllabic (and focused on sexual attraction). Jeremy, in fact, falls back on primitive Tarzan-talk (“Me make lousy love talk”), as does his buddy Pierce (“Join club”); they have apparently devolved.

Damnesia in Rhymes. #2 has Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara from Gone With the Wind, seen here in declining old age. Rhett, in particular, can’t recall the conclusion of his famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”. Amnesia for damn: so the portmanteau title “Damnesia”.

Crosshatching in Bizarro. In #3 the patient presents with something that at first glance appears to be a rash, but on closer inspection turns out to be the crosshatching used by cartoonists to convey shading or texture. Clever of the doctor to realize that he’s confronted by someone who’s not only by a patient but also a cartoon.

From The Advocate website on the 17th, this death notice:

Transgender Pioneer and Stone Butch Blues [1993] Author Leslie Feinberg Has Died

She was a pioneer in trans and lesbian issues, workers rights, and intersectionality long before anyone could define the phrase. Her partner [of 22 years], Minnie Bruce Pratt, and [her] family [of choice] offered us this obituary:

Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on November 15. She succumbed to complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica, after decades of illness.

Feinberg was born September 1, 1949, in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Buffalo, NY, in a working-class Jewish family. At age 14, she began supporting herself by working in the display sign shop of a local department store, and eventually stopped going to her high school classes, though officially she received her diploma. It was during this time that she entered the social life of the Buffalo gay bars. She moved out of a biological family hostile to her sexuality and gender expression, and to the end of her life carried legal documents that made clear they were not her family.

Discrimination against her as a transgender person made it impossible for her to get steady work. She earned her living for most of her life through a series of low-wage temp jobs, including working in a PVC pipe factory and a book bindery, cleaning out ship cargo holds and washing dishes, serving an ASL interpreter, and doing medical data inputting.

… From 2004-2008 Feinberg’s writing on the links between socialism and LGBT history, “Lavender & Red,” ran as a 120-part series in Workers World newspaper. Her most recent book, Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, was an edited selection of that series. Feinberg authored two other non-fiction books, Transgender Warriors: Making History and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, as well as a second novel, Drag King Dreams.

… Feinberg’s spouse, Minnie Bruce Pratt, an activist and poet, is the author of Crime Against Nature, about loss of custody of her sons as a lesbian mother. Feinberg and Pratt met in 1992 when Feinberg presented a slideshow on her transgender research in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the local Workers World branch. After a long-distance courtship, they made their home for many years in Jersey City, NJ, where, to protect their relationship, the couple domestic-partnered in 2004 and civil-unioned in 2006.

Now to the linguistics. First, from the Advocate story:

to protect their relationship, the couple domestic-partnered in 2004 and civil-unioned in 2006

(Hat tip to Ben Zimmer.) Here we have the verbings to domestic partner ‘to become domestic partners, to enter into a domestic partnership’ and to civil union ‘to enter into a civil union’.

And then the editor’s note on the Advocate story, about the pronouns used in referring to Feinberg

Though we have often used “he” in reference to Feinberg at The Advocate, we recognize that this obituary was written by Feinberg’s wife, Minnie Bruce Pratt, while at the author’s bedside. Thus we are using her preferred pronouns here, despite our previous reporting.

Feinberg’s own opinions:

She preferred to use the pronouns she/zie and her/hir for herself, but also said: “I care which pronoun is used, but people have been disrespectful to me with the wrong pronoun and respectful with the right one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.”

Posted on Facebook recently by Susan Fischer, this photo of her ca. age 3, in her blonde phase, with her mother. Her mother in a 1950s-era housedress, something you don’t see a lot of these days.

(#1)

(I noted that at this age I was blond myself. However, Susan’s and my blond(e) days are long in our pasts.)

From Wikipedia:

A house dress is a type of simple dress worn informally in the mornings at home for household chores or for quick errands. The term first originated in the late nineteenth century to describe at-home garments designed for maximum practicality and usually made from washable fabrics. It is directly descended from the Mother Hubbard dress. Such dresses were a necessary part of the housewife’s wardrobe in the early twentieth century and could be widely purchased through mail-order catalogues.

Although an informal garment, the house dress, particularly during the 1950s, was intended to be stylish and feminine as well as serviceable. The concept of attractive house dresses was popularised in the late 1910s by Nell Donnelly Reed, who established her house dress company in 1919. The company, renamed Nelly Don after Reed’s retirement, quickly became one of the most successful American clothing manufacturers of the 20th century. Some designers became known for house dress designs, such as Claire McCardell, whose 1942 ‘popover’ wrap dress was equally wearable as a house dress, a dressing-gown, a beach cover-up or even a party dress. The house dress version of McCardell’s popover came with a matching oven glove.

So what happened to the housedress? Nothing, really; you can still buy them. What’s mostly disappeared, however, is the housewife to wear them, someone whose mornings are taken up with doing household chores and running quick errands. A classic housewife:

(#2)

From Wikipedia:

A housewife is a woman whose main occupation is running or managing her family’s home—caring for and educating her children, cooking and storing food, buying goods the family needs in day-to-day life, cleaning and maintaining the home, making clothes for the family, etc.—and who is generally not employed outside the home.

… By the 1960s in western countries, it was becoming more accepted for a woman to work and be a “career girl” until she got married, when she should stop work and be a “housewife”. Many western women in the 1970s believed that this was not treating men and women equally and that women should do whatever job they were able to do, whether they were married or not.

At this time, women were becoming more educated. As a result of this increased education, some women were able to earn more than their husbands. In very rare cases, the husband would remain at home to raise their young children while the wife worked.

In the late 20th century, it became harder for a family to live on a single wage. Subsequently, many women were required to return to work following the birth of their children; however, they often continued the “homemaker” role within the family. It is becoming more commonplace for the husband and wife to be employed in paid work and both share in the “housework” and caring for the children. In other families, there is still a traditional idea that housework is only a woman’s job; so when a couple gets home from work, the wife works in the house while the man takes a rest.

Today’s Zits:

Once again, the strip turns on the overwhelming chattiness of teenage girls. Or so it seemed to Jeremy.

In last week’s New Scientist (1/3/15), a story by Dan Jones — “Booming voices are no boon for male lawyers” (in print), “Masculine-sounding lawyers less likely to win in court” (on-line) — about a paper to be presented at the Linguistic Society of America meeting that begins today in Portland OR. The research is interesting in its own right, but the way New Scientist frames its results, in terms of a rigid gender dichotomy, deserves comment on its own.

Here’s the entire article, with two passages boldfaced. The first I take to be a characterization by the reporter, Dan Jones; the second I believe to be a direct paraphrase of what the researcher said to the reporter.

In the often macho environment of the courtroom, a booming voice might seem like a good trait for a lawyer to cultivate. Not so – men who sound very masculine are actually less likely to win a US Supreme Court case than their effeminate-sounding peers.

It’s well known that our voice shapes how people perceive us, which in turn may affect how successful we are. Men, for example, are more likely to vote for other men with deeper, masculine voices, and CEOs with deeper voices earn more money.

To explore whether the vocal characteristics of male lawyers affect trial outcomes, a team led by linguist Alan Yu of the University of Chicago collected 60 recordings of lawyers in the Supreme Court making the traditional opening statement: “Mister Chief Justice, may it please the court”. Then 200 volunteers rated these clips according to how masculine they thought the speaker was, as well as how attractive, confident, intelligent, trustworthy and educated they perceived the voice to be.

After accounting for the age and experience of the lawyers, statistical analysis showed that only one of the traits could predict the court outcome. Lawyers rated as speaking with less-masculine voices were more likely to win. “It was a surprise to all of us,” says Yu, whose results will be presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Portland, Oregon next week.

Although legal systems are based on the principle of objective trials, we know that obscure factors, such as whether the judge has eaten recently, can bias a case. Yu’s results suggest that the masculinity of the voice is another source of bias. In future work, Yu wants to explore whether the perceived likelihood of winning may affect lawyers’ speech.

If there is a genuine bias, it could be hard to overcome. “You could have legal writings without oral arguments, but that’s not a feasible change,” says Casey Klofstad of the University of Miami. Rather, you could make people aware of the bias, and hope they bear it in mind, he suggests.

Note the restrictions of the study. Yu solicited judgments of “masculinity”, thus tapping into stereotypes of masculine speech, which identify very marked speech styles as masculine (and favor working-class varieties as especially masculine). But the speakers in this research (all lawyers qualified to argue before the Supreme Court) will have varied relatively little sociolinguistically, and so presumably did the volunteer judges. So everyone involved was probably within a very narrow band of masculinity in speech — what we might think of as “ordinary masculinity”. Yu is careful to make this clear, in his reference to “lawyers speaking with less-masculine voices” (as judged by the volunteers); he did not say that these lawyers had un-masculine voices.

It’s interesting that even within this narrow band of variation, there were still significant differences in the judgments.

Also interesting, to me at any rate, is that the New Scientist reporter converted these relative differences into absolute ones, opposing masculine-sounding men and “effeminate-sounding” men. This incorporates a bit of gender ideology that posits a rigid opposition between masculinity and femininity, so that any deviation from (high) masculinity is interpreted as femininity. But I very much doubt that any of the 60 lawyers actually sounded effeminate.

Joe Dator’s January 9th New Yorker daily cartoon:

(#1)

Extreme manspreading on the New York subway.

The MTA launched a campaign a while back to curb the practice:

(#2)

Meanwhile, the Word of the Year (2014) news from the American Dialect Society meeting in Portland OR, in the NYT yesterday:

#Blacklivesmatter, which became a social media rallying cry following the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island, grabbed 196 votes, far outpacing rivals like bae (a sweatheart or romantic partner, 3 votes), columbusing (cultural appropriation, especially the act of a white person discovering supposedly unknown aspects of minority culture, 11 votes), and manspreading (sitting with one’s legs spread widely on public transit, 5 votes).

The WOTY selections — there are a number of categories — are made by the votes of those who turn up at the ADS session. The voting is generally light-hearted, but sometimes has a serious purpose, as in this case. Manspreading is a cute coinage, but how could it compete with #Blacklivesmatter? The votes are rarely this one-sided.

(Oh yes, #Blacklivesmatter is the first hashtag to be selected as WOTY. And “word” for ADS purposes covers phrases as well as words proper.)

Today’s One Big Happy:

(The strip appeared in my feed today, but it’s dated December 25th, in keeping with its content.)

In any case, both Ruthie and her older brother Joe seem to be fully satisfied with their (stereotypically gendered) Christmas presents.

Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse (on-line here) has the superhero Colonel UnitedStates woken from 70 years of sleep:

Of course, not to their faces! Insults go behind people’s backs!

Passed on by Tim Wilson on Facebook, this Danny Shanahan cartoon from 8/17/98, with Popeye and Bluto holding hands at a cocktail party, talking to a bemused woman:

(#1)

Background information: on Popeye; on repressed homosexuality; and on Danny Shanahan.

Popeye the Sailor Man. Take 1: mostly on the comic strip, from Wikipedia:

Popeye the Sailor Man is a cartoon fictional character, created by Elzie Crisler Segar, who has appeared in comic strips and theatrical and television animated cartoons. He first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929; Popeye became the strip’s title in later years.

Although Segar’s Thimble Theatre strip was in its tenth year when Popeye made his debut, the sailor quickly became the main focus of the strip and Thimble Theatre soon became one of King Features’ most popular properties during the 1930s. Thimble Theatre was continued after Segar’s death in 1938 by several writers and artists, most notably Segar’s assistant Bud Sagendorf. The strip continues to appear in first-run installments in its Sunday edition, written and drawn by Hy Eisman. The daily strips are reprints of old Sagendorf stories.

Take 2, on the animated cartoon. From Wikipedia:

Popeye the Sailor is an American animated series of comedy short films based on the titular comic strip character created by E. C. Segar. In 1933, Max and Dave Fleischer’s Fleischer Studios adapted Segar’s characters into a series of Popeye the Sailor theatrical cartoon shorts for Paramount Pictures. The plotlines in the animated cartoons tended to be simpler than those presented in the comic strips, and the characters slightly different. A villain, usually Bluto, makes a move on Popeye’s “sweetie,” Olive Oyl. The villain clobbers Popeye until he eats spinach, giving him superhuman strength. Thus empowered, the sailor makes short work of the villain.

In the cartoon versions, the antagonism between Popeye and Bluto has to do with ther competition over Olive Oyl. The characters — Popeye and Olive, Bluto and Popeye:

(#2)

(#3)

Antagonism and same-sex attraction. Somewhere in David Sedaris’s writings he reports harassing other boys as queer, as a strategy for deflecting attention from his own susicious mannerisms and interests and indeed from his same-sex attractions (which were perfectly clear to him but which he could not conceivably admit in public). That was antagonism in service of consciously suppressed homosexuality. But at least since the time of Freud, people have suggested that antagonism towards homosexuals can result from unconsciously repressed same-sex attraction (in general, or towards specific people who arouse these attractions). From Wikipedia:

Latent homosexuality is an erotic inclination toward members of the same sex that is not consciously experienced or expressed in overt action. This may mean a hidden inclination or potential for interest in homosexual relationships, which is either suppressed or not recognized, and which has not yet been explored, or may never be explored.

… [ a] 1996 study conducted at the University of Georgia by Henry Adams, Lester Wright Jr., and Bethany Lohr…  reported that 24% of the non-homophobic men [in the study] showed some degree of tumescence in response to [a] male homosexual video, compared to 54% of the subjects who scored high on the homophobia scale.

So it’s possible that Bluto and Popeye’s intense antagonism towards one another may be concealing an intense sexual attraction. That’s the idea that Shanahan explores in #1 (which appeared not long after the Georgia study got a lot of press). So Bluto and Popeye admit ther attraction and end up as a happy, hot, and really butch couple.

Danny Shanahan.Two Shanahans with puns appeared on this blog on 7/15/12. Here are two more with linguistic content:

(#4)

(note gender stereotypes)

(#5)

On the cartoonist, from the New Yorker site:

Since 1988, Danny Shanahan … has contributed nearly nine hundred cartoons and nine covers to The New Yorker. His cartoons have appeared in several collections, including four of his own: “Lassie! Get Help!,” “Innocent, Your Honor,” “I’m No Quack,” and “Bad Sex!”

And from an Ink Spill interview:

This year [2013] Danny Shanahan  celebrates the 25th anniversary of his first contribution to The New Yorker (the issue of September 19, 1988). He’s in that small group of the magazine’s cartoonists who’ve done just about everything that can be done in The New Yorker, cartoon-wise: spreads, single panel cartoons, covers,  and illustrations.

Today’s Dilbert, one in a series:

Wally [um, no, the CEO] explains to Catbert that height and gender determine how much people get paid and complains that Alice just refuses to understand this. Meanwhile, Alice has a plan to remedy things.