The Gay Men of Roy Crane's Adventure Comics

When I was a kid, a cute teenage boy rode by on his bicycle every morning about 6:00 am and threw a tightly-bound copy of the Rock Island Argus onto our porch.

It had to stay in pristine condition, untouched, until after dinner, when Mom got around to reading it -- and doing the crossword puzzle. Some of my favorite memories involve the family gathered around the tv while Mom called out crossword puzzle clues.

"Star of Casablanca, five letters, begins with an I."

"Vegetable related to the carrot, seven letters.  I have R and P."

"Greek god, nine letters, begins with a H"

Dad got the paper next.  By the time the kids' turns came around, it was nearly bedtime.  I still instinctively associate newspapers and bedtime.

I skipped the news, editorials, and sports (except when there was a picture of a cute athlete) to read "Lifestyle", with movie reviews and tv listings and events going on in town, and the comics page.

The Moline Dispatch, from the town next door, got all of the good comics: Peanuts, BC, The Wizard of Id, Doonesbury.  I didn't realize it at the time, but the Argus got mostly dinosaurs limping through their senescence, with costumes, language, and themes that delighted Grandma forty years ago.

I just thought they were bizarre.

Still, they were sometimes good for beefcake.

Alley Oop, a muscular cave man transported to the modern era through a plot device lost to history.

Prince Valiant, a knight in King Arthur's court transported to pre-Columbian North America.

Out Our Way, a single panel strip reminiscing about the joys of the Great Depression, mostly involving n*de boys.

Or gay subtexts, in two comic sstrips by Roy Crane.

Captain Easy seemed to involve the swashbuckling adventures of a pair of boyfriends, the taciturn, muscular Easy and the cheerful, eyeglassed Wash.

Neither looked twice at a woman.

But when Wash Tubbs first appeared on the comics page in1924, the creation of cartoonist Roy Crane,  he fell in love with every woman in sight: "Gosh! Wotta bon-bon!  Wotta tomato!"

In 1929, he hooked up with Captain Easy, who soon took over the strip and changed the focus from humor to adventure.  Wash tagged along, gazing lustfully at semi-clad ladies as comic relief for 40 years.   I was just reading during a period of quiescence.

More after the break

Sad Sack

When I was a kid, I loved Harvey comics' supernatural titles, Casper, Spooky, and Hot Stuff having science-fiction and espionage adventures in the Enchanted Forest.  In a pinch, I didn't mind the kids-with-crazy-obsession titles, Little Dot, Little Lotta, and Richie Rich.  But I never even picked up Sad Sack.  

Military humor -- gross!  It was the middle of the Vietnam War.  Our fathers and older brothers were dying in Vietnam, or burning their draft cards and going into exile in Canada.  Who wanted to be reminded of all that?

But recently I came across an old book, The Sad Sack.  Apparently the character existed before Harvey Comics, in a pantomime strip published by Sergeant George Baker in the military magazine Yank during World War II.  The Sad Sack (short for "Sad Sack of Sh*) was a classic schmiel, beset-upon by bad luck, but tough, masculine, and sexually active (although here he's paying a woman to iron his pants).




Two hardcover compilations of Sad Sack strips appeared in 1944 and 1946.  There was a radio series (1946) starring Herb Vigran and a movie adaption (1957) starring Jerry Lewis.

Harvey took over the franchise in 1949, giving Sad Sack a voice, a nebbish personality, and surprisingly, a lot of shirtless and semi-nude shots (although he didn't have much of a physique).

 He was now a permanent private at Camp Calamity, so he would never go to war (like Beetle Bailey and Gomer Pyle), and he had a coterie of friends and superior officers, notably Sarge.

Sad Sack and Sarge have a "antagonistic best friend" relationship similar to that of Beetle Bailey and Sgt. Snorkel, with the same homoerotic subtext.

There were many spin-off titles, including Sad Sack's Funny Friends, Sad Sack's Gobs n Gals, Sad Sack and the Sarge, and Sad Sack Laugh Special.  Sounds like Archie spin-offs like Pals n Gals, and Laugh.

I never knew whether Sadie Sack was Sad in drag or just his girlfriend, but she turns out to be his female identical-twin cousin.  Rather a gender bender.

The Sad Sack title continued to be published for over thirty years, ending only when Harvey Comics folded in 1982.   so somebody was interested in Sad's chubby physique and buddy-bonding with the Sarge.

Just not me.

Better Nate Than Ever: Gay Kids, Wacky Aunts, and Beefcake

Big Nate is a comic strip character who first appeared in 1990.  Since then, there have been many collections, a series of chapter books  with pun titles, some activity books, a musical, and an animated tv series (with Nate voiced by Ben Giroux).  A live action movie, Better Nate Than Ever, js set to appear in April 2022.  Creator Lincoln Peirce writes that in the original chapter book (2013), he included a subplot about a boy coming out, which caused homophobic schools to cancel his speaking engagements and libraries to ban all of his books.  But he also got "a lot of support" and won a Lambda Literary Award.  

I didn't want to wait for the movie, so I bought the book.  

Nate, age 13, lives with his working-class parents and older brother Anthony in a suburb of Pittsburg.  He loves musicals, and acts out various scenes with his friend Libby, who has a crush on him.  However, when she moves in for a kiss, he backs away.  He states that his sexual identity is unknown: "I'm 13.  Macaroni and cheese is my favorite dish.  How do I know who I want to hook up with?"

You generally know who you're attracted to at a very young age, even if you're not thinking in sexual terms yet.   But let's go with it.

The other chapter books and the tv series portray Nate as aspiring artist and chess player, never mention a musical, and give him friends named Francis and Teddy but not Libby.  He concocts wild plans to meet girls,  has had three girlfriends,  and dissolves into a slurry of hormones when he sees Jenny, the Girl of His Dreams.  

In the comic strip, we see the same characters and hetero-horny hijinks.  Nate is currently accusing his buddy Francis of being a jinx who caused their favorite sports team to lose.  

What's going on?   

Better Nate Than Ever is not included in the list of Big Nate novels, nor are its sequels, Five Six Seven Nate (2014) and Nate Expectations (2018), "wonderful evocations of what it's like to be a theater kid."

Turns out that this is a new evocation of the character, written by Tim Federle (with Lincoln Peirce's permission, one assumes).

Nate's interest in musicals, and singing and dancing in general, gets him a lot of homophobic harassment.  His older brother calls him a "homo" and asks if he's practicing Gays and Dolls.  His father disapproves of his goal of becoming an actor and "hanging out with a bunch of queers."  Even his mother complains that the neighbors can see him prancing around in the back yard "like a fairy." 

He and Libby see a call for open auditions for the role of Elliott in E.T.: The Musical, to be held in New York City.  The day his parents happen to be going out of town.  They come up with a plan: Nate will "borrow" his mother's ATM card, take the bus five hours into New York, audition, then get back on the bus and home before Mom and Dad notice.  

The book details Nate's very funny adventures on the bus and at the audition, with some subplot involving his freespirited Aunt Heidi.  Nate tries to get a guy to ask her out, but he states that he "only dates men."  Nate is shocked for a moment, but then says "Hey, that's great!"   No subplots about boys coming out.  Could I have gotten the wrong book?

The 2022 live action movie will star Rueby Wood as Nate,  Lisa Kudrow as his wacky Aunt Heidi, and Joshua Bassett as older brother Anthony.

Joshua Bassett came out as gay while starring in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (actually he said that he identifies as LGBTQ+, but there are many letters in the alphabet, and it's ok to still be figuring out which applies to you).  His Anthony  plays a bigger role than in the novel, as an ally rather than an antagonist (and he gets a shirtless shot in the trailer).  

Joshua promises that there will be "gay kids" in the movie, but I don't see any likely prospects on the IMDB cast list.  Unless it's Nate himself.   

See also: The Better Nate Than Ever Series

Buster Brown Comics: 1940s Beefcake at the Shoe Store

The first generation of Baby Boomers watched some crazy kids' shows on their brand-new black and white tvs, like Andy's Gang, aka Smilin' Ed's Gang (1951-1960), with the screechy-voiced hosts Andy Devine or Smilin' Ed McConnll, the demonic hell-beast Froggy the Gremlin, and the live action adventures of a very Nordic "Indian boy" named Gunga (1955-60).

It was sponsored by Buster Brown Shoes, an attempt to get kids interested in the most boring item of clothing imaginable:  an elderly Little Person in an Edwardian sailor suit would say -- very slowly:

"I'm Buster Brown....I live in a sho....He's my dog Tige....He lives in there too.

The crazy advertising mascot derives from Buster Brown, an early 20th century comic strip (1902-1921) about a mischievous boy who has adventures and then writes a "resolution" to behave more appropriately in the future.

Like many tv series of the 1950s, it had a predecessor on radio, Smilin' Ed's Buster Brown Show (1944-1953), with Smilin' Ed McConnell hawking the shoes and reading the adventure stories.

With a tie-in comic book, Buster Brown Comics.  45 issues were published between 1945 to 1946.  You could get them for free at local shoe stores and department stores, which conveniently printed their addresses on the front cover -- presumably while picking up your comic, you (or Mom) would do some shopping.

Each issue featured a humorous story starring Smilin' Ed and the Gang, plus an adventure story starring a muscular teenage boy: "Leathern Cord of Magic," "Dude Ranch Desperado," "Leopard Men," "Desert Raiders," "Ghanga the Elephant Boy."

Most were scripted by Hobart Donovan, the head writer of Smilin' Ed's gang, and the husband of voice actress June Foray (best known for Rocky and Bullwinkle).  A number of artists drew the stories, including Ruben Moreira, Ray Willner, and future fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta.

Remember, this was an era where movies never showed shirtless men except an occasional Tarzan or Bomba the Jungle Boy, and tv was a small black-and-white box with ghostly, hard-to-see images.  Comic books were your only source of beefcake images.

And you could get free beefcake comics every other month just by dropping in to a shoe store.

Sounds bizarre, but sign me up!

See also: Andy's Gang