Comics, Art, and General Nonsense

YEEEOWW! comic panel redraw hiii also practicing expressions hiii

real.

Godzilla in Shinjuku

@akirakan

Evil Dead II (1987)

do you care him

Was brewing up a joke about Midwestern lesbians going one of two ways (Chappell Roan or Dean Winchester) and then I realised this was but the Platonic cave-shadow of Dolly Parton and Bruce Springsteen, and then I got caught up in Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, and Joan Crawford in the black cowboy shirt in Johnny Guitar, and now I'm suspicious that what I have would be less a joke and more a genuine nugget of queer theory if it didn't, y'know. Still have Dean Winchester in there.

#i mean legitimate question #why does having dean winchester in there invalidate it #because obv he is not a real person making a conscious decision on how to interact with his gender #because again he is not real and cannot do this #but the cultural mythos (if you'll forgive me for making it sound so pretentious) #that's attached to a certain aspect of him #is absolutely in line with the masculinity expressed by bruce springsteen or james dean (via @queenofthequillandink)

Valid question, the answer is 'because that name was in there as a punchline, originally', but I think you may want to go ask @pingnova for recs from JSTOR's archives because it's a question you're far from the first to ask.

Serious answer, also because both James Dean and Bruce Springsteen, if you read anything about them or any interviews, were both very aware that what they were doing was a form of drag.

Continuing on from the serious answer, because I thought about it some more.

Judging from interviews, anecdotes from people who knew them, and their performances, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, and Chappell Roan are/were all very aware that they are/were putting on personas that exaggerated stereotypes of masculinity/femininity. Bruce was deliberately dressing up like his blue-collar father to do the kind of work that his blue-collar father didn't respect as 'real' work. Dolly embraced her drag queen fandom, and Chappell takes style cues back from drag. These people are all self-aware performers doing art with the trappings of gender.

There's a damn good reason that Dean Winchester turned up in my mind as one of two possible directions for playing with stereotypes and trappings of gender for queer women. There's been a lot of ink spilled (most of it not by me, I'll defer to the experts, I'm just here for a good time) over how, when someone tries to build the most manly manly male fictional character, they tend to pile on traits that many real men have but not usually all at once. The sheer unrealistic weight of idealised masculinity makes it feel like a parody, like a put-on. And for an actor or writer to then give the character any sense of groundedness, to make him feel like a person instead of a caricature or a cartoon, the character has to be treated as though, even subconsciously, he's putting at least some of it on.

However. Dean Winchester is a fictional character, and so, is incapable of any real interiority. Given the facts of multiple writers who were apparently sometimes at war with the showrunner and the studio, the 'interiority' that he seems to have also changes by the episode. It's physically impossible for him to be self-aware and deliberately playing with the trappings of the role that he inhabits, because he doesn't exist, and so doesn't have an independent mind to make decisions with. Like any other fictional character, he's less an artist constructing a deliberate persona, and more a ready-made persona for an artist to identify with, play with, use, subvert, step into. (Possess? But that's another thread to pull, for another long-winded, too-serious and yet also too-silly post.)

Anyway. Point is. You have to be a real person with an independent mind to be able to put on a persona that is constructed by a 'real' self underneath. But you definitely don't have to be a real person with an independent mind for your persona to be constructed of an exaggeration of the trappings of masculinity - or femininity - or for that persona to be used, recontextualised, reconfigured, played with in deliberate ways that are compelling to a queer audience. And when I think of fictional women who embody stereotypical femininity to the degree of Dolly or Marilyn, there's really only one. One icon. One big name.

I don't know, in 2025, if there's a big mainstream household-name performer who's doing butch the way Bruce Springsteen and James Dean did butch who could stand as the counterpart for Chappell Roan.

But I do know that a better femme comparison/counterpart for Dean Winchester's butch would be - hear me out - Miss Piggy.

It’s just that I’m used to you, that’s all.

William Powell & Myrna Loy The Thin Man (1934), directed by W.S. Van Dyke

Marcus Halberstam and his rough night.

Concept paintings for the 1966 BATMAN TV show. Watch those hands, Batman from image 4.

‪As a kid, I thought the Joker was genuinely terrifying. It always seemed to me he wasn’t quite “there”. He acted manic and laughed a lot, but there was nothing behind it, it was a laugh without joy—the scariest kind of laugh‬.

f4 first steps- Jetsons style

(pls i tried so hard XDD)

Zatanna: Bring Down The House #4 by Mariko Tamaki and Javier Rodríguez

cat (& bat)

Power Girl: Uncovered #1 (2024)

Finally have all 4 life stages let's gooo

PACIFIC RIM (2013) dir. guillermo del toro