Blaugust 20: Ode to a fella

I finished drawing that John Redcorn and Dale yaoi frotting pic I said I'd draw. So I finished one (1) thing on my to-do list. Hooray! I'm number 5 in the AO3 tag. Who will be number 6?! wink wank.

While watching some clips of King of The Hill, we noticed some similarities between some of my favorite characters in various cartoons. Let's go through them.

I have depicted in the above drawing: John Redcorn from King of the Hill, Nathan Explosion from Metalocalypse, Brock Samson from Venture Bros, and Wolverine from X-Men. Wolverine just came to me as I was finishing the colors on the drawing, but he fits very well in this archetype.

They're gruff, stoic, emotionally constipated, full of man pain, and seemingly cool but sorta losers too. You can see a little bit of anti-hero, a bit of lone wolf, a little bit of cool old guy, and a little bit of papa wolf.

The traits I have listed are:

• Long hair
• Strong nose
• Big boobs
• Baby Daddy
• Boomer Rock Music
• Native American descent
• Sensitive Prostate
• Trucker jacket and cowboy boots

Let's dig into it.

Girls AND guys like dudes with long hair. It's just cool! Though current society says that dudes need short hair to be manly, you don't care what other people think and define your own masculinity! Plus girls like guys who look a little bit (or a lot) like pretty girls.

Long hair calls back to years long past, when Spartan warriors had long beautiful flowing hair to caress and sniff while holding each other in the brotherly bond of battle. It also just calls back to the 1960's and 1970's when long hair for men had its place in culture.

John Redcorn's long black hair is part of his character design, as the seemingly sagely Native American stereotype. The other part of his character design is that he's just some middle-aged dude who doesn't know what he's doing with his life - he just likes rock music (long hair required!) and banging babes (long hair required!), but he doesn't have a stable home. There's a dual meaning in wearing his hair as befits the personality he wants to sell (new age healer catering to gaijin), as well as the personality he actually is (mediocre sad dad rocker). This is beautiful to me.

Nathan Explosion's long black hair is part of his job. He's the singer of a metal band, and there's nothing more metal than a curtain of dark hair windmilling in the night. Well maybe leather gay biker fetish gear is more metal? Cuz Rob Halford was bald and pretty metal. But still! The hair is also just a direct reference to Corpsegrinder, who is also a chubby Floridian. And it's a fun way to show that he's more of the stoic silent type, with half of his face hidden by his stringy hair.

Brock Sampson's long hair is a curly mullet! It'd be at the length of John or Nathan if it was straightened out, but we love a lambswool king. It seems he's a natural blonde, as he also had a straightened mullet when he was a younger football lad. Maybe he embraces his natural texture now. There was a point in the 80's where dickheads like Nikki Sixx said that curly hair was NOT metal, but actually curly hair is the most metal of all hair because it requires such manly committed maintenance to keep in top condition. Plus most 70's rock dudes had curly and wavy hair. And that's what Brock is. A 70's rock dude who loves Led Zeppelin. Some people call him hockey hair, so he's aware that his -do is not very common in current year.

And Wolverine. Oh, Wolverine. His hair's gone through many lengths and unruliness levels, and it's definitely longer than the average dude's hair-do. Wolverine's hair is simply an expression of his wildman personality. He just sorta wanders around and punches people for a living, he doesn't have time to shave or cut his hair especially when he's actually feral and just running in the woods naked! And he doesn't want to have short hair! Wolves have wild manes. Only tamed poodle dogs get haircuts.

For the most part, all these dudes are supposed to be macho men. And many artists have decided that strong noses with a high bridge or a craggy shape feel masculine to them. The nose goes along with their chad jawline, and square chin. It's the kinda strong bones that tells the ladies, “I'm here, I'm queer, and I'm prime breeding material. Don't you want a strong impregnable man who can carry your children through labor and survive to raise your babies too?”. It's the masculine equivalent of “birthing hips” on ladies. You heard it here folks, noses are where dudes give birth.

Wolverine gets depicted in all sorts of ways, as a comic book character with 1000 different adaptations. But I think most artists know to depict his nose with some sort of bridge, rather than an baby button Axl Rose ski-slope.

This is NOT at all to say that baby button noses aren't manly. Look at Itagaki's characters in Baki! They ALL have a little button nose! The nose bridge is just one of many visual shorthands the artists used while designing these characters to quickly get across their estrus levels.

I do enjoy drawing noses that stand out far from the face. Don't get that rhinoplasty, queen, keep that nose big and proud!

All the dudes I am ode-ing to have some level of thickness beyond their surrounding cast. Most of them are rather tall and wide, like John, Nathan, and Brock, because height is often associated with maturity and masculinity. Wolverine is short and wide AND middle-aged, and we thank god and satan for this short king representation. You can be shortstacked AND milfy too! And I think MILF-itude is what I'm personally enjoying from the Big Boobs trait.

John Redcorn is the most “average” of the cast I'm examining today. KOTH has a very unassuming art style, so it still sticks out that John Redcorn has rockin' abs compared to everyone else's dad bods in the show. And he stands much taller than the average middle-class white neighbors he has. He's like the Fabio of the cast… and I fear that the women of Arlen objectify him as such too. He's more than his huge honkers! He's got a sensitive soul too! And he wants so a bad to be a good dad to Joseph… which makes him sad single mom coded in my book. MILF. It's also quite fun that he gets fat in Season 14, his vest doesn't close all the way anymore! Maybe he's enjoying a more retired life, not having to be the town gigolo anymore?

Nathan is quite tall, around 6'6“ if you believe the concept art. He has more of a belly compared to the muscular chads in this article. He occasionally is muscular - such as when he's a younger football player, or when he works out obsessively in the submarine cuz he has nothing else to do. All that comes together because fat can become muscle when worked on, and muscle easily melts into fat when you're just hanging around eating chips and takin' it easy. Nathan is also one of the “moms” of the band, as Ofdenson assigns Nathan and Pickles as the caretakers. And, well, mommy needs to feed her children with huge milkers…

Brock Samson is another big boy - as Colonel Hunter Gathers exclaims, “good god they're makin' em big nowadays!” He's easily the width of THREE or FOUR Hunter Gathers (let alone the width of five Rusty Ventures!), and he's gotta be big for his job as a bodyguard to catch bullets with his incredible girth! His actual job is a spy, and it's interesting that they made him such a meaty man when the usual character design association with a spy is a more slim-muscular James Bond type, or a sexy thin seducer, because you can usually hide better when you're not 7 feet tall and 300 pounds. So that's a fun little subversion there! Brock is also a mommy figure in his show, as the one caring parent that the Venture twins have. Aren't we lucky that Brock has two mammaries, one for Hank and one for Dean? He's the mom who STEPPED UP. And I don't mean mom just cuz I have a MILF fetish, I mean that they make him do the matronly duties like check them hair for lice and comb their hair and do CPR. Another fun subversion in the hyper-masculine design! As I said, girls like guys who are like if a girl and a guy had a baby ;)

And last but not least, Wolverine. As a superhero, he has to be swole. He's usually very short in the comics and cartoons, which I absolutely love. I do remember when Hugh Jackman was casted, a lot of nerds were complaining that he was 12 inches way too tall at his height of 6'1”! I think Hugh does a great job as Wolverine in personality though, so I ain't complaining about him being a live action representation. Maybe 1% of Wolverines in the universes got shin extension surgery. Wolverine's yet ANOTHER amab man (assigned MILF at birth). He often has to serve as the mentor figure to the younger lads and ladies of the X-Men. Whether it's being Rogue or Kitty Pryde's adopted mom (and dealing with those girls's oedipus sized crushes…), being X-23's genetic mommy, or being bisexual biracial Daken's literal daddy. My man has his hands full. And his hands aren't even that big! In any case, it's good to see a macho mommy man who is short in stature but high in testosterone. We gotta break the stereotype of the 7ft chad somehow. That 7ft chad in Wolverine's universe is Sabertooth, and well, you don't want him anywhere near your kids.

I am babbling too much again. I'll finish off my unhinged ranting about Boomer Rock Music, Native American Descent, and Sensitive Prostate later. Tomorrow maybe. Hey, maybe I can write more blog posts and actually do them on time if I don't make them all 50k words long!

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