"Muddy Max: The Mystery of Marsh Creek"

I didn't expect much from the graphic novel Muddy Max: The Mystery of Marsh Creek.  Judging from the cover,  a boy/best friend gay subtext disrupted by The Girl.  But it turned out to be quite a bit more queer.

Middle schooler Max has overprotective parents who can't abide the slightest bit of mud.  So why do they live in Marsh Creek, the muddiest place on Earth?

Mom is a soil scientist.  She works with mud all the time.  It doesn't make sense that she would disapprove of Max getting muddy.

And why do Mom and Dad go jogging every day wearing heavy backpacks containing food, water...and scientific textbooks?

And what about the mysterious photo of a baby that Max found in the attic?

Max sleuths out the answers with the help of his buddy Patrick, a stereotypic black nerd with a bit more androgyny in his dress and mannerisms than one would expect.  The two have an unselfconscious physicality; after all, a lot of their experimentation involves applying mud to Max's body and then washing it off again.

Turns out that, due to some mishaps in  his mother's soil science experiments before he was born, Max acquires superheroic speed and strength from applying mud.  But it is also becoming more and more difficult to get the mud off, and he's being drawn to the Marsh, as if he belongs there.

The first two chapters involve Max finding the answers and saving the schoolbus from a mudslide.  In the third, we discover that he has an older brother, Milo, who was also drawn to the Marsh, and finally got stuck there.  His parents tried everything to get him out, but it was no use.  They built him a small mud house (inspired by a real-life Anton Gaudi house), and bring him books and food every day (in the backpacks).  Thus their refusal to leave town.

They were desperate to save Max from suffering a similar fate.  Thus their paranoia about mud.

Discovering that he has a brother, Max wants to reconnect, "hang out."  But his parents forbid it, for fear that the mud will take him.  They even try to separate the two by sending Max away to Death Valley (no mud).  A nice "forbidden love" gay subtext.

The girl (I don't remember her name) is a minor character, mostly an onlooker.   But she adds to the gay subtext by asking Max out twice.  He refuses. Not into girls, Max?

Beefcake:  Max is in middle school, and Milo about five years older, but they both develop chests and biceps when they're covered in mud.

Color Pallette:  All browns and blacks, which isn't as boring as it sounds.  The backgrounds are cleverly applied.

Activities:  This is a book for middle-schoolers, so it contains several pages of factoids and activities that are actually quite interesting. Did you know that 1 acre of mud typically contains 1,000 pounds of earthworms, 15,000 pounds of bacteria, and 2,000 pounds of fungus?  Or that nematodes (ringworms) are the most common form of animal life on the planet?  2 out of every 5 animals is a nematode.

My grade: A.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

When I was growing up in Rock Island, we were constantly policing ourselves and each other for lapses into the feminine: even seemingly minor deviance, like buttoning the top button of your shirt or failing to cut off the "fruit loop" on the collar, revealed that you were not a "real man."  Your friends would forever be ashamed of you, and you would never get a girlfriend (we assumed that all boys wanted girlfriends).

But even real men were shamed by the "he-man," the super-strong, super-powerful übermensch who sneered and strutted across the quad as he tried to decide which twelve girls he would steal from their boyfriends tonight.

With all the negative connotations to the term, I was not at all interested in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (how's that for a pretentious title?), a toy series spun off into a Saturday morning cartoon which ran 65 episodes from 1983 to 1990 (there have been a lot of spin-offs since).  Gender stereotyped macho alpha-male nonsense!

The premise: The ruling house of the planet Eternia (which is not eternal, in spite of its name) is bedeviled by various mages and monsters, with a big bad named Skeletor (because he has a skull face).

Skeletor wants the power of the Castle Greyskull (because he has a skull face?), which will allow him to take over Eternia.  He also tries various subsidiary schemes to make the royals and their subjects miserable.

Enter Prince Adam, heir to Eternia.  When trouble brews, he lifts his sword, yells "By the power of Grayskull!",and...um... takes his clothes off?  And becomes He-Man.

I guess it's a Clark Kent-Superman thing.  As a member of the royal family, the Prince wouldn't be allowed to fight the forces of evil on his own, so he has to adopt a secret identity.  Except he doesn't even wear glasses; no one would doubt for a moment that He-Man is Prince Adam doing Conan the Barbarian cosplay.

He-Man's posse (the Masters of the Universe?) are not at all beefcake-heavy, maybe so no one draws attention away from his magnificence.

1. Cringer, his Snagglepuss-like pet, who transforms into Battle Cat (and actually looks different).

2. Man-at-Arms, a middle-aged warrior who invents the team's non-lethal weapons.

3. The Sorceress

4. The comic relief Orko, a bumbling magician from another planet who has no legs and never shows his face.

Later they added Princess Adora, Prince Adam's twin sister,who morphs into She-Ra (not She-Woman?).

Every episode ended with a 1980's "the more you know" moral, usually connected to the plot, like "friends who laugh at you for doing the right thing aren't really your friends."

It sounds dreadful, but I have an open mind, sort of, so I watched an episode on youtube: "The Good Shall Survive"

The Bee-People, who look like muscular bald drag queens, produce honey for sale.  But the Tycons, evil wasp-creatures, emerge from the caves and eat all their honey, which will cause an economic crisis, maybe even a Stock Market crash.  Skeletor is there, egging them on.

He-Man to the rescue!

He subdues Skeletor by pushing him into a stream (off-camera).  Sort of a wimpy villain.  Then he uses his sword to deflect the beams of light emerging from the Tycons' eyes.  But he is hit and falls asleep. 

When he awakens, He-Man returns to find the Tycons sick from over-eating.  He easily convinces them to make friends with the bee-people and ask to share their honey.

The owners of the means of production are always happen to share with the proletariat.  No problem at all.

Representatives of the two species confront Skeletor, because he's been taking the honey, I guess. They deflect the light beams coming out of his hands, and he cringes in defeat.  Again, wimpy villain!

He Man announces the moral: don't take things that aren't yours.  Ask to share instead.

I was right; this was dreadful.  But at least He-Man doesn't display any heterosexual interests.

Oh, wait...I  understand that he sparks a bit with Teela, Man-at-War's daughter.

Well, he's nice to look at anyway.

A 1987 movie brought He-Man (Dolph Lundgren, top photo) to Earth, where he helps some human teenagers (Courtney Cox, Robert Duncan McNeill)

A new movie is scheduled for 2021, with Noah Centineo as He-Man.

He gets a girlfriend.

The Top 6 Beefcake Stars of "Power Rangers Beast Morphers"

The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers premiered on the Fox Kids Network in August 1993, when I was living in West Hollywood and a big fan of some of the classic kids' shows like Tiny Toon Adventures, Rugrats, Doug, and Rocko's Modern Life.  So I watched.  For about 10 seconds.

Teenagers from a contemporary American high school get assignments from a....a nightmarish disembodied head with bulbous lips floating in a vat of opaque jelly.  They turn into costumed superheroes -- action sequences actually borrowed from an earlier Japanese series -- and the superheroes in turn merge into mechanical creations.  They fight a number of ridiculous monsters sent to destroy the world by the over-the-top Rita Repulsa.

Ridiculous premise, disturbing, disgusting images -- sorry, I can't get over the horror of the opaque-jelly vat guy.  Click.

Who knew that kids would like it?  That there would be years of spin-offs and sequels?

The latest, Power Ranger Beef Morphers, which has just premiered on Nickelodeon, is about...um....

I am copying the premise directly from wikipedia.  I can't understand a word of it:

Set sometime in the future, a secret agency in the city of Coral Harbor known as Grid Battleforce combines a newly-discovered substance called "Morph-X" with animal DNA to create a new team of Power Rangers known as the Beast Morphers. The Beast Morpher Rangers must defend the Morphin Grid from Evox, an evil sentient computer virus that creates evil avatar clones of original Beast Morphers candidates Blaze and Roxy, who have been rendered comatose as a result. When the three of them are transported to the Cyber Dimension, Evox, Cybervillain Blaze, and Cybervillain Roxy gain its de facto ruler Scrozzle as an ally as he helps them in their plan to return Evox to Earth

Holy cow.  I just want to know if there are any cute guys in the cast.

1. Rorie D. Travis stars as Devon Daniels.  I couldn't find any beefcake photos, but this one of him and a buddy is evocative.  I wonder if he's gay.

2. Jasmeet Baduwalla,aka Jazz, as the Blue Power Ranger (top photo).  At least he has some abs.

3. Abraham Rodriguez as Nate Silva.  Cute, but I could use some biceps.

4. Colby Strong as Blaze, the one who is comatose while his cybervillain double tries to take over Scrozzle or something.  Cute, but haven't any of these guys heard of a Nautilus machine?

5.  Cosme Flores as Ben Burke.  It's nice to see plus-sized actors being cast in action-adventure roles, but I'm still holding out for someone who can bench press his body weight.

6.  Reid McGowan as Steel.  Finally, some muscles!

Now,  is a shirtless shot too much to ask for?

The Top 10 Hunks of Shazam

Captain Marvel (1941-53) was DC Comics' attempt to circumvent the obvious homoeroticism in the 1940s superhero-teen sidekick relationship by making the two the same person.  14-year old Billy Batson transforms into adult superhero Captain Marvel when he says the magical word Shazam.

Which, by the way, is an acronym for the magical beings who bestowed the power upon him: Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, Mercury.

It's all very silly, and it provides a new problem: how to give Captain Marvel a girlfriend, when he's really a teenage boy with muscles?  He can't very well be dating Lois Lane.

The 2019 movie has Billy (Asher Angel) turning into an unnamed superhero (played by Zachary Levi).  But it also gives Billy a sidekick of his own, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer).

And, in the absence of a girlfriend, they have a gay-subtext romance.

Plus one of his foster-home buddies, Pedro (Jovan Armand) appears to identify as gay when they hide out in a strip club and he says "not my thing."




The result is a pleasantly non-heterosexist superhero movie, which also has a surprising number of hunkoids in the cast.

1. Adam Brody, Freddy's adult superhero alter-ego (left).

2. Zachary Levi.

3. All of the other residents of Billy's foster home morph into superheroes.  Eugene (Ian Chen) into Ross Butler

4. Pedro (Jovand Armand) into D. J. Cotrona

5. Instead of a whole fraternity of immortals from the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology, Shazam is a single person, played by Djimon Hounsou.

6. Cooper Andrews as the beefy foster father to the superheroic crew.

7 Mark Strong plays the Big Bad, Dr. Silvana, who unleashes the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth, Lust, Envy, and so on) onto the world.  What's with all the villains with Ph.D.s?  Part of the culture of anti-intellectualism?

8. The teen idol set is already familiar with Asher Angel.

9. Evan Marsh as the main bully who is terrorizing Freddy.

10. Landon Doak as the bullying brother who terrorizes a teenage Dr. Silvana.

Pallance Dladla: Biceps,Bulge,Gay Character, and Braggadocio

Of course I'm going to watch Shadow (2019), an action-adventure tv series from South Africa, set in Johannesburg, where half the cast speaks Zulu half the time.  You've got to love those Zulu names: Zekheteholo Zondi; Didimalang Moagi; Bhekisizwe Mahlawe;Thembalethu Ntuli.

Especially when it star the biceps of Pallance Dladla (left).

Until I discover that it is a rehash of all of the cliches of the Marvel tv universe: a brooding vigilante with a tortured past (probably a dead wife) and a trivial superpower that's not really necessary  (the plot could function perfectly well without it).

In this case, brooding vigilante Shadow (Pallance Dladla), recovering from his tortured past, is living with his wheelchair-bound sister and their boarder, no doubt his future girlfriend.  His superpower:  he's impervious to pain.

Wait -- wouldn't that be a disability?  Don't we need pain to tell us that our bodies are injured?  How else would you know that something needs fixing?

Shadow has a buddy, Max (Khathu Ramabulana), so there might be some gay subtexts, but I'm not going to stick around to find out.

I am, however, going to research  Pallance Dladla's biceps and bulge.

According to his offical website, Pallance was born in 1992 in Soweto.  While attending the Parkland Boys High School, he won "Best Actor" and "Best Original Script."

Bragging much?

In 2011 he appeared on the tv talent show Class Act, where "He reached the finals and earned worldwide acclaim for hisincredible performances." 

Oh, don't be so modest.  When you have muscles, you don't need to know how to act.

Pallance's credits include

4Play: Sex Tips for Girls (2010), a sort of South African Sex in the City. He played Jimmy in one episode. In 2010 he was barely 18, so I'm wondering if he was qualified to give any of those sex tips.

Wild at Heart (2012), a long-running British series about a veterinarian and his family running a game preserve in South Africa..  He plays Mohato in one episode.

Avenged (2013), a crime drama.  He plays a character far down in the cast list.

Intersextions (2013), a tv series that examines "life, love, and relationships).  Pallance plays a gay man, and gets an on-screen kiss.

Afterwards many fans thought he was gay. He said "I didn't know how to handle that,but I tried to make it clear that I wasn't gay without being rude."

Hard to Get (2014), a romance about a young man from the townships who falls in love with a gangster's girlfriend and travels to Johannesburg to rescue his stolen car. That's what the plot synopsis says.

The Message (2015). A special-ops team is sent to save Soweto from a nuclear threat.  Their names are Reaper, Mother, Crowbar, Sideshow, Zinzi, and Joker (Pallance).  Please tell me that this is a comedy.

Tempy Pushas (2015).  A soap opera about jealousy, greed, and revenge in the multi-million rand South African fashion business.  Pallance plays X in one episode.

To be fair, Pallance didn't write this heterosexist "every woman's fantasy" tripe, but he did ask for comments on Facebook. 300 agreed, one said "unless they're lesbians," and another said "Even straight guys go crazy ove X's body."

Is'Thunzi (2016), a South African teen drama about a girl with big dreams.  He's not on the cast list.

Madiba (2017), a mini-series about the life of Nelson Mandela.  He's not on the cast list, but he says he played someone named Tokyo.

Zulu Wedding (2017).  Feisty choreographer is engaged to an American named Tex, but still feels compelled to go home to South Africa,where she is engaged to a king. Zulu (Pallance) plays the palace guard who she falls in love with.

This ad makes it look like Zulu falls in love with Tex.

She also has a gay best friend, by the way.

The Protector: Turkish Superhero TV

The new Netflix series The Protector (2018-) is set in Istanbul, which is sort of interesting, but not very.  This is an Istanbul with no sign of Islam anywhere, which is almost as annoying as the standard gay-free San Francisco of American tv.

It's filmed in Turkish but dubbed in English, specifically an annoying colloquial "hey, dude, whazzup?" American.  Netflix uses subtitles for Basque, Catalan, and Hebrew.  Why Turkish?

I like Cagatay Ulusoy, but I do not like his character, Hasan, at all.  He's an annoyingly chipper post-teen operator with Big Dreams.

He and his buddy Memo (Cankat Aydos) hope to get the contract for renovating Hagia Sofia, the former Greek Orthodox Cathedral that is the most famous landmark in Turkey. 

Fat chance.   Turns out that rival contractor Faysal Erdem (Okan Yalabik) is killing off the competiton. 

Hasan keeps butting heads with his traditional father, who owns an antique shop: "We've got to be modern!"  I've only seen this a thousand times before.

And he's a stereotyped 1970s horndog, double-taking and jaw-dropping at ladies every five seconds, and getting cruised constantly with the absurd intensity of a shaving cream commercial, where the guy has to fight off armies of women driven to a sexual frenzy by the sight of his clean-shaven face.

But on to the plot:Hassan finds an ancient talismanic t-shirt which names him the Protector, a superhero destined to protect the world from the evil Immortal.  En route he has to find several more emblems of power.  He is assisted by a pharmacist named Kemal (Yurdaer Okur), the standard hero's mentor (think Mr. Miyagi and Yoda) and his daughter Zaynib.

Meanwhile the mysterious Leyla, who works for Erdem, joins the team, and...well, I don't need to finish that sentence, do I?

I don't expect any gay characters in a tv series filmed in the Middle East, but there isn't really much buddy-bonding, either.  Other than Memo, who is killed early on, Hasan's associates are all women or elderly men. 

Beefcake is also rather limited.  Hasan takes his shirt off a lot, to show the talisman burned into his chest, but the characters are usually shown in business suits.

I suggest skipping the stream and going for a pin-up of  Cagatay Ulusoy and a Google Earth tour of Hagia Sofia.

Black Lightning is Back

Black Lightning is back.

That's the premise of the new Netflix series based on an obscure DC comics character from the 1970s.  The only problem is, Black Lightning has never appeared on screen before, so the constant references to past incidents and situations are all immensely confusing.  It's like coming in during the third act of a play, except there were no first two acts.

But apparently about ten years ago, mild-mannered school principal Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams) became Black Lightning, lowering his voice and putting on an electricity-funneling suit, in order to kill a bad guy who killed his father. Being a superhero caused too much tension in his family (and family is everything), so he retired.  But now he's back, a superhero vigilante who literally does nothing but beat up bad guys and people he thinks are bad guys.

As principal, Jeff promotes a "respect yourself" and "make positive life decisions" philosophy to help his students overcome the drugs, crime, and racism of their society, especially police targeting of young black men (this is definitely the Black Lives Matter era).

But as Black Lightning, he's a throwback to the 1970s "violent thug" era:  all of these problems are caused by a gang, the 100, led by big bad Lala (William Katlett, seen here in the play Heat and Hostility, about two porn stars comparing endowments).

No, Lala has a boss, Tobias (Marvin "Krondon" Jones), the "albino" big bad who Black Lightning thought he had killed.  An albino in real life, Krondon tries to ensure that the show gives factual information about albinism, and doesn't suggest that it is responsible for Tobias being evil.

But it turns out that Tobias has a boss, Lady Eve (Jill Scott).

And Lady Eve has a boss, Martin Proctor (Greg Henry).

And there are probably a few more big bads in the hierarchy.  I haven't gotten to the end of the series yet, but who wants to bet that the Biggest Bad is the school lunch lady?

Anyone can see that Black Lighting is Jeff in a mask, yet he manages to keep his identity secret from all of his friends, allies, and family.    The only two people who know are:

1. Elderly tailor Peter Gambi (James Remar; photo from a few years ago), who designed the suit and has a secret connection to the hierarchy of evil;

2. Ex-wife Christine (Lynn Stewart), who divorced him a few years ago for no apparent reason other than to reconcile now.

Other characters include:

1. Anissa (Natessa Williams), Jeff's daughter, a medical student and high school science teacher, a lesbian, and a superhero named Thunder.  She's out to her parents as a lesbian but not as a superhero, which leads to her father thinking she's a villain and beating her up.

2. Jennifer (China Anne McClain), Jeff's other daughter, a high school student and party girl, who has superpowers of her own but hasn't settled on a superhero identity yet.

3. Jennifer's ex-boyfriend Khalil Payne, who is paralyzed by a bullet meant for Black Lightning and becomes a cyborg super-villain named Painkiller.

Well, basically everyone is wandering around with superpowers, except for Billy (Damon Gupton), Jeff's friend on the police force, and I'm sure he'll get some soon.

The Blonde Phantom and the Hunk in Distress

With the glut of superheroes during World War II, comic book companies were experimenting with new types of characters.  DC had Wonder Woman, so Marvel got the Blonde Phantom.

Louise Grant is the secretary to private detective Mark Mason, but he stumbles into so much trouble that she has to get him out, so she adopts the Blue Phantom persona.  She doesn't have superpowers; she is more of a masked vigilante, like Batman. 

She is romantically interested in Mark -- what secretary in 1940s fiction wasn't into her boss?  But Mark is more interested in the Blonde Phantom.

The duo first appeared in All-Select Comics in 1943, and soon spun off into their own series, which ran for 11 issues (1943-1947).  They also appeared as supporting features in Marvel Mystery Comics, Sub-Mariner Comics, and elsewhere through 1949.  Then they were forgotten.

In some 1989 issues of She-Hulk, they are retrofitted: it appears that they married in 1949, Louise retired from phantoming, and they raised a daughter, Mason, who became the second Blonde Phantom.



You're probably wondering what this overtly heterosexual relationship is doing in Boomer's Beefcake and Bonding:

1. Mark Mason as hunk-in-distress is rather gender-bending.

2. Do you want to see him with his shirt off again?

Captain Tootsie

Captain Tootsie is one of the more interesting  superheroes of the Golden Age of Comics.  Debuting in 1943,  he sold Tootsie Rolls, those brown sugar-corn syrup concoctions, which gave him the "quick energy" to save the day.  His half-page adventures appeared in hundreds of comics, from Action Comics and Captain Marvel to A Date with Judy:

Captain Tootsie Battles Monster Man!
Captain Tootsie Tames a Tornado!
Captain Tootsie Traps Killer Bear with Invisible Light!
Captain Tootsie and the Return of Dr. Narsty!

Sometimes his adventures were a bit less urgent:

Captain Tootsie Saves School Party!
Captain Tootsie at the Winter Carnival!

 Here he saves the world from Dr. Narsty, who has stolen a kid's toy cannon (it takes an evil genius to do that?).

Captain Tootsie was drawn as a very muscular blond in a red shirt, yellow belt, and blue pants, which didn't look anything like the familiar brown-and-white tootsie roll.







I don't have the next frame in this sequence, so I'm wondering myself what Captain Tootsie intends to do next.

His most frequent sidekick was Rollo ("roll-o", get it?), a miniature version of himself with blond hair, a red shirt, and pecs.

Sometimes he also hung out with Fisty, a petite black-haired boy wearing a suit; and Fatso, who had curly orange hair and wasn't very fat by today's standards.




Two issues of a full length comic were published by Toby Press in 1950, with no tootsie rolls in the actual story.

#1: Captain Tootsie and his Secret Legion (Rollo, Fisty, and Fatso) go to Venus, where they initiate a slave revolt and overthrow the evil Nagara.

#2: They investigate "The Stone that Lives" and "The Victory Vibrator."

I'm interested in knowing more about that Victory Vibrator.

His last appearance was in an ad in 1953 ("Try these delicious Tootsie Pops!").

Forgotten for 60 years, Captain Tootsie was revived for a story in Savage Dragon #199 (2014), along with such other forgotten 1940s superheroes as Lash Lighting, Rex Dexter, and Captain Freedom.


But it's not just his corporate job and his crazy adventures that draws my interest.

Tootsie is a girl's name.

It's derived from "tootsie-wootsie,"  a childish term for "foot."

Leo Hirschfeld, who invented Tootsie Rolls in 1896, named them after his daughter Clara, nicknamed Tootsie.

The creators weren't required to name their superhero after a girl.  Lots of product mascots have a different name from their products.

 "I'll toot for Tootsie" sounds decidedly feminine.

And doesn't the secret hand-signal look rather dainty?

When you add his oral fetish....