Stepping in Man Cave Guano

Bro Culture pow-wow with Scott Adams enhancing my man cave experience

Let’s keep up with Colbert, as he expounds on the dinged male egos of American men today.

Thirty-five years ago, discussion of the “masculine identity crisis” for the “post-sensitive male” resided within the NPR/New Yorker set, as popularized by Robert Bly’s Iron John. I read the book and thought it was interesting, but not particularly compelling. By that point in my life, I considered myself relatively immune to such influences, after all of the “personal searching” I’d done during my college years. Which is the proper time for such musings, after all. Speaking of the various schools of thought I exposed myself to while a student, I highly recommend the HBO Max documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.

The buzz around Iron John inspired me to start working on this cartoon, with the intention of submitting it to The Comics Buyer’s Guide. I abandoned it after losing the inspiration due to interruptions for business travel.

From a Cuppala Days Ago

Following my recent Monkees-related posts there was Sunday’s Jumble That Scrambled Word Game. My offspring solved the obvious answer to the cartoon before I saw the paper. In the school tradition of “be sure to show your work,” I filled in the blanks to confirm his solution.


The Comics Curmudgeon weblog, that I believe predates this one, carries on. Unlike this safe online haven, the site is monetized, so you will see ads.

https://joshreads.com/

Gently nudging the strange internal illogics of comic strips is something I usually leave to the Curmudgeon. The Family Circus is an easy target, with Sunday’s installment being as unsettling as it is reassuring, in a way that’s unique to the feature.

Click the pic to see the complete strip on Comics Kingdom… which also has ads

“Here I am, Billy! Come to the light, Billy!” In Curmudgeon fashion I will point out if that isn’t Bill’s knee, his death dream was apparently a wet one.

An Old New Yorker

Yeah, I know CBS Sunday Morning “is intended for mature audiences,” as in “old.” Consider me targeted. Yesterday, they featured a New Yorker cartoonist from the publication’s first twenty years, Barbara Shermund.

Here are Shermund’s first and her final cartoon (that I could find), appearing in The New Yorker.

Barbara Shermund, 10-16-1926

Barbara Shermund, 9-16-1944

Trumped Art

Sometimes the distinction seems blurred between the two PBS series, American Masters and American Experience. It has come to light that the recent Masters installment about Art Spiegelman was censored to remove a mention of Trump that associated him with fascism.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2025/05/21/pbs-edits-anti-trump-section-out-of-spiegelman-documentary/

Giving in to Trump, especially pre-emptively, is pointless. Doing that will get you nothing. Harvard University is refusing to go along, but it has the financial resources to resist his authoritarian edicts. Everybody else will have to hang on until he’s out of office. Which will be four years from now, if we’re still a democracy by then.

To Hellinger and Back

Following my introduction to comic books with Superman and Batman, Daredevil was my first step into the decidedly different world of the Marvel Comics Group.

Daredevil #19, 1966

The gritty tone of Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+ brought to mind Mark Hellinger, a New York street reporter turned columnist, who became an influential writer and producer of tough guy movies. Right now I’m watching Hellinger’s The Roaring Twenties, a quintessential Warner Brothers picture.

The movie is available here on Tubi.

https://tubitv.com/movies/100019809/the-roaring-twenties