One more thing I didn’t know, and am very happy to have learned. From The Valve.
As anyone who teaches funny books or films knows, the task of convincing students that the scene before them is anything other than incidental would try Job’s patience. You show them a panel from the surprisingly awful Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator like, say, this
and ask them to talk about the image as a crafted artifact and they will sit there, stone-silent, for fifty minutes while you prattle on about how (1) the writer wanted Batman represented by a powerful gloved hand and (2) the original alien was a giant penis preying on (a) the crew of the Nostromoand (b) our inborn fear of alien interspecies rape. You show them the H.R. Giger painting that inspired Ridley Scott
and tell them that there’s phallic imagery, phallic imagery, and then there’s the work of H.R. Giger—and still they sit there staring at your Freudian hammer in a World of Nails. You inform them that the lips of the alien were constructed from six stretched and shredded condoms smeared with KY jelly while they quietly compose comments for Rate My Professor about how everything in your course is about sex.
“Not everything,” you insist. “But I mean, come on now, clearly this alien is. It is a giant penis, and within it is another penis, a penis within a penis, and in this panel Batman is firmly gripping that inner penis—”
And you stop because no matter what you say, professors who open semesters with images of Batman giving an alien a hand job get comments on Rate My Professor about how everything in their course is about sex.
