Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Anatomically Incorrect

As an elementary schooler, I loved to draw. Girls. I loved to draw girls. My magic markers and I had a pretty rigid "no boys allowed" policy. There were several reasons for this:
  1. Boys. Grody. (Okay, okay, so hating boys was just a front. Really I loooooooved the boys, but sometimes a girl has to save face in front of her USA co-Crushers.)
  2. Because I was so accustomed to drawing girls, on the rare occasion that I did try to conjure the male form, dude usually ended up looking like a lady.
  3. Even when I managed to sketch a passably boyish boy, he'd end up looking like this:
Bo-bo?! On top of drawing them, it seems I had a problem naming boys too.

Bo-bo here—I don't even want to hazard a guess as to how that's short for Timothy, lest my gray matter implode—may be wearing super-cool sneaks and a mildly obscene sweater (don't try to tell me that dog isn't exposing itself to me!), but you guys? Where is his crotch? WHERE IS BO-BO'S CROTCH? Wherever it is, I hope his forehead is there too. If there's an opposite of the Tyra Banks fivehead, then our pal Bo-bo has it:

One-and-a-half-head?

And on top of that (literally), I gave him a Three Stooges haircut. I was not doing Bo-bo any favors.

But this was not an isolated incident. Take a look at some more boy wreckage:

No, that's not a fat suit.
Yes, I know it looks like one.

Jimmy Ray is all, "Bo-bo? I see your vacant stare and hillbilly moniker, and I MOTHERFUCKING RAISE YOU." Also, I submit that the only way Jimmy Ray could be more froglike is if he changed his name to friggin' Kermit—and come to think of it, that might be an improvement.

"But," you say, "maybe we should take the boy out of the sweatpants [ew!] and find out what a cool guy would look like." Well, you asked for it.

The face of cool. No, that's not lipstick.
Shut up! He's just a pretty boy.

I mean, the only thing that could make him cooler is a half-shirt.

Brief aside: My sister & I used to coerce our mother into making us paper dolls drawn to our precise specifications, and one of them was a "hot boy" named Chris (because Chris was my go-to cool boy name circa 1988) who's wearing a motherloving half shirt. Think I'm joking?

Dude. I don't joke about half-shirts. Well, not this time, anyway.

But back to A. Tanner. Once again we have a boy with lifeless Orphan Annie eyes. Once again he has a bizarrely shortened midsection that makes me question his ability to digest food sans medical intervention. And once again his name is printed with an enormous lack of subtlety across his clothing (though I think that's justified in Jimmy Ray's case—he looks like the type who'd forget his own name). So just what makes A. Tanner one-and-a-half-head and shoulders above the rest? Two things (and no, his stylish baby blue smock isn't one of them):
  1. The hair. Behold the magnificently spiky hair!
  2. The earring, a sparkling beacon of awesome in a sea of otherwise humdrum earlobes.
Yes, men with solo earrings were so widespread in 1986 that I felt comfortable co-opting this look for a third grader. But! There were very strict guidelines for male ear piercing in the '80s. The golden rule was this: If the earring was in the left ear, the guy was straight; if it was in the right ear, he was gay, gay, a thousand times gay! Because in the '80s sexual preference had to do with which earlobe a dude punctured, not which gender he wanted to put his penis in. And God for-freaking-bid someone might think you wanted to make out with another dude.

So, because Aaron Tanner was the cutest, most heterosexualest boy in town he had his earring in the... oh, FUDGE.


The right—and simultaneously, wrong—earlobe.

But hey, this wasn't exactly a science. Right, George Michael?

Earring in the left ear = STRAIGHT?!
[Image found here.]

I rest my case. Anyone care to Google Chad Allen's earlobes?

NEXT TIME: If pencils could talk... apparently they'd be quite cynical.

21 comments:

Alison said...

Why do I get the feeling that these boys want to drag me down to hell and eat my soul?

So many creepy pupil-less eyes!!!!

miss jille said...

This made me seriously laugh out loud and wish I still had all my drawing notebooks from elementary school

Lauralee said...

I did not find them creepy. Had some skillz if you ask me.

andrea jean said...

Oh my gosh, these are awesome! I, too, had a no-boys drawing policy. If I broke that policy, they all got the same hairstyle: "spiked," i.e. a bunch of straight lines above the head.

Sadako said...

Awesome pictures. I suck at drawing crotches, too...like either they're too deep or not they're enough, or something!

nikki said...

Oh man, this was a good post. Such creepy eyes your boys had.

Our rhyme for the whole earring thing? "Left is right and right is wrong." How very homophobic of us.

Wellz said...

I used to be allergic to drawing boys too, but I kept at it and now I'm allergic to drawing girls? What happened?

kat said...

that drawing of bo-bo could literally not be funnier of you tried.
i'm guessing his crotch is off having a tea party with his palms

Stephanie said...

I love how they all have their names on their shirts! Can't get them confused with each other! :P

Amiee said...

To me, Chris also seems to have a baby type face stuck on a boys body? I laughed so hard at them all, I could also not draw boys. Nor did I really want to.

Single for Good said...

Love that you named the boy Bo-bo...sounds more like a pet monkey's name. Enjoyed the post and the drawings.

Rin: Recursion said...

Bo-bo is quite clearly an appropriate nickname for Timothy.

...but I only say this because my boyfriend of 3.5 years tells me that Romanians do this all the time. Give people nicknames not even a little corresponding to their real names.

Friend named George? We call him Popo.

Friend named Anita? Mimi, of course.

Thus, Bobo fits right in. Maybe he's secretly Romanian?

Unknown said...

Where I grew up, it was the opposite - earring in the left ear meant gay and earring in the right ear meant straight. (This seems in keeping with the ages-old tradition of "anything on the left is evil and inappropriate.") It's interesting that apparently there were regional differences with the whole male-earring issue.

It never would have occurred to me to draw a BOY.

carissajaded said...

hahahah Sada I freaking love your drawings. I swear, creepy? maybe a tad bit.. but 293198247918734 times better than I could ever draw!

SherilinR said...

i don't know you, but damn those pics were hilarious! i have a whole hard cover book of crap i drew around the same age & my boys always seemed to have a prissy air about them too. and i just wanted to add that jr appears to be wearing some sort of a onesie. or a buttery unitard for his portly frame! and his booties rock!

zanne said...

Those pictures are hilarious.

I remember we had the same rhyme for earrings that Nikki mentioned: "Left is right and right is wrong."

TILTE said...

i don't see anything wrong with these drawings. the all look like studs to me.

Michelle said...

Those are hysterical :D And yet much better than anything I could have drawn at that age. Bobo is the best thing EVER.

Sadako said...

Sada, will you update soon? Hope so!

Barbara said...

This is hysterical. No wonder people don't go over to any of my blogs there's an awesome blog here that sends you into a serious giggling fit.

That could be something else coming out of the dog too. Maybe he has an extra leg. Or it could be a pervy dog too.

I suck at drawing. I'd draw stick figures. Of course I'd go with the very classy triangle shape that was supposed to be a dress. Also I'd forget about the neck and forget about the legs. The feet would always stick at sideways. It was just sad.

I never did understand the earring thing but I do remember that earring somehow were supposed to tell you who was gay and who wasn't. And here was I thinking it had to do with guys that liked guys and girls that liked girls. Even Dylan had the earring in the left ear on 90210.

Pass4Sure said...
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