The Last Straight Kids on Earth

42 days after a zombie  AND giant monster apocalypse destroys his town and probably the world, teenage video-game addict Jack (Nick Wolfhard, left) seems to be coping well.

The monsters and zombies can be easily outrun, there is plenty of food and other supplies to scavenge, and he has his technogeek bud Quint (Garland Whit) for company.  There's only one thing missing:

The Girl.

That's right, only 1 1/2 minutes into The Last Kids on Earth (2019), and Jack is summoning The Girl as the meaning of life, the key to his dreaming, the only thing missing in the apocalypse.

Sigh.  Why is it always the Eternal Feminine?

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but after watching Twelve Forever and reading Welcome to Wanderland, a series dedicated to finding The Girl seems old fashioned and even offensive. 

The tv series is based on a series of children's books by Max Brallier, who although cute, doesn't appear to have any sexual or gender diversity in his works.

He does admit that "there are gay kids out there" in response to a homophobic comment on his twitter page.  Just none among The Last Kids on Earth.

To be fair, only Jack expresses heterosexual interest.  The other characters could be gay, just closeted.

The Girl is June (Montse Hernandez), all-around athlete, top student, editor of the school newspaper, practically perfect in every way, whom Joe was crushing on before the world ended.  In the first episode, Joe and Quint discover that she has survived the apocalypse by hiding in the school.

What a coincidence?

They also hook up with the school bully Dirk (Charles Demers).  The four "last kids on Earth" (and a friendly cat-monster named Rover) move into a decked-out treehouse with a zombie-proof moat and get down to the business of survival.

According to Netflix, this is a tv series, but there is only one "episode," 67 minutes long, online.  IMDB lists six episodes, perhaps covering the five books in the series, where the kids learn more about their situation, and eventually have to fight to save the world.  There is some stunt casting, including Bruce Campbell from The Evil Dead series and Mark Hamill.

And maybe they'll find someone gay along the way.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the Blacksmiths with Brawny Arms

One of the poems parodied on Rocky and Bullwinkle was "The Village Smithy," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840):

Under a spreading chestnut-tree the village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.

Actually, it was parodied everywhere, in cartoons and comedy sketches throughout my childhood.   It must have been a recitation assignment for generations of squirming schoolkids, and a hated memory for comedy writers of the 1960s.

If you read the entire poem, you find that the smithy has a wife and kids, but I only ever heard the part about how the village children come around every day to gawk at his muscles.

I could relate.


Although the poem doesn't really have a plot -- the blacksmith flexes his muscles, children gawk, he goes to church -- it was spun into movies in 1897, 1908, 1913, 1922, and 1936.

In the days before factories, the blacksmith had the job of forging tools and other instruments from iron. There were several blacksmith gods, including Vulcan in Graeco-Roman mythology and Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalevala.

Unfortunately, they rarely worked shirtless -- too many sparks.

But early cinematographer Eadweard Muybridge filmed two naked blacksmiths for his study of Animal Locomotion.

There are still blacksmiths today.  They even have World Championships.  40 blacksmiths from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Britain competed in the 2014 Horseshoeing Contest in Eureka, Nevada.  Trey Green of Lakeside, California was the winner.

Looks like they still have "large and sinewy hands."

See also: James Whitcomb Riley: Even a Dull, Depressing Poet Can Be Gay

Frank Frazetta: The "Good" Muscle Artist

During the 1970s, any comic book about Tarzan, Conan, or any other barbarian hero was likely to show him heavily-muscled, half naked, holding a sword aloft, with a naked woman clinging to his legs. There weren't any gay magazines yet, at least none available for kids in small Midwestern towns, so they became gay teen pornography -- it was easy to ignore the naked woman.

We didn't know who drew the covers, so we just called him the "Good" Muscle Artist.

Turns out that he was a Brooklyn-born bodybuilder tunred cartoonist named Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), who began drawing comics in 1944, at the age 16.  At first he specialized in "funny animal" and semi-naked lady titles, but in 1954 he went to work for Al Capp on the venerable L'il Abner.  

By that point, Abner was married to Daisy Mae, with a son and mostly domestic adventures, but still, they gave Frazetta experience in drawing heavily-muscled men and semi-naked women.  By the 1960s, his covers were re-invigorating the sword and sorcery genre, with Robert E. Howard's Conan and Kull and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and John Carter of Mars as musclemen.  Here's a Conan cover with a gorilla instead of a naked lady at his feet.

Although heterosexual fans believed that he was drawing for them, envisioning their dream worlds of having powerful muscles and naked ladies lying at their feet, he was an "equal opportunity ogler," adept at showing the erotic power of everyone and everything.

I've heard that he was bisexual in real life, and that he was homophobic.  Maybe he was both.

During his long partnership with Ralph Bakshi, Frazetta worked on several animated features, as well as album covers and posters for a dozen movies.

Late in life he opened a Frazetta museum in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, to showcase his fine art.

Most devoted to muscular barbarian heroes.

See also: Jim Steranko: Escape Artist Turned Comic Book Illustrator; and Boris Vallejo

The Comic Book Jungle

When I was a kid, in the 1960s, I didn't care much for DC and Marvel comics. Whenever I picked up an issue, it turned out to be the middle of a story that would go on for months, with installments in three or four different titles.

Gold Key Comics were a godsend, with stories that concluded in one issue. They offered Disney's Donald Duck traveling to Tibet or the Amazon, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig as Indiana Jones-style adventure archaeologists, and even more jungle beefcake than DC and Marvel.  (I also liked Harveys and Archies, but not Charlton).

1. Tarzan.  This was the Edgar Rice Burroughs version, articulate, wealthy, and retired from vine-swinging on a jungle plantation – and, when the television series began in 1966, illustrated by pin-up quality pictures of Ron Ely. Jane was usually absent; instead, Tarzan spends most of his time bonding with various noble Africans and extremely chummy white explorers. The testosterone-laced atmosphere is embued with a surprising degree of tenderness: In “Message in the Snows,” Tarzan and two explorers named George and Alec are captured by giant Autralopitheci. George is wounded. Cradling him lovingly in his arms, Alec cries “Oh, please don’t die! Not now – not yet!”

2. The back-of-the-comic, The Jungle Twins, which spun off into its own title in 1972, introduced the identical cousins, both with amazing physiques and a dislike for clothing. On an extended visit with Uncle Tarzan, they adopt a golden lion and use it to rescue a girl from a savage human sacrifice. She asks suggestively“How can I ever thank you?,” but they skip the kiss. “Don’t thank us! Thank. . .the golden lion.”

3. Korak, Son of Tarzan: not the Boy of the MGM movies, a curly-haired muscleman in leopard-skin Speedos.  He is not interested in girls, though he has a heterosexist back story, and spends a lot of time orchestrating heterosexual romances for others. For instance, in “Valley of the Monsters,” he saves an attractive young urban African named Muhammed Isolo (“graduate of Oxford University”) and helps him “go native,” strip to a loincloth and marry a native girl.

4. His back-of-the-comic feature, Brothers of the Spear, also spun off into its own title in 1972. They are the white Dan-El and the black Natonga, co-rulers of the lost kingdom of Aba-Zulu. They happen to have wives, but their administrative duties and marriages never take front-stage to the joy of stripping down to a loincloth and spending some quality time in the bush. 

5. Turok Son of Stone had the most interesting premise of the lot: two Stone Age Indians, the young Turok and the middle-aged Andar, are trapped in a lost world full of dinosaurs and savages. Both have magnificent physiques, of course, and they spend their stories trying to get home and rescuing each other from monsters, with no girl in sight..

Hours of beefcake and bonding for 12 cents apiece-- well in the early 1970s, 20 cents, then 30, 40, and 50 in quick succession, until the company finally folded in 1982.