Fucking Day: The Lover Boy Books (Patreon)

Today we're talking about the Lover Boy books, a series of — oh no, it looks like this says "a series of 'humorous' 'cartoons' about horny men from the 1960s?"

Shit. There must be some kind of mistake. I do '90s TV shows about car Draculas and forgotten Star Wars spinoffs, not midcentury sex drawing mistakes.

Fuck. I'm not ready. This is the first two-page spread of The Bedside Lover Boy and the premise is that this man desperately wants to inseminate his neighbor's adult (?) daughter, followed up by a reference to a book that was already 30 years old when this was published. Who is this for? Housewives who hate their terrible husbands? Horny married men seeking reassurance that their constant, overriding desire for strange is fine and normal? Guys trying to hypnotize women into sex with the subtle, subconscious power of wearing spirals all over their torso?

I'm worried that even in the '60s, this was one of those books you bought for someone as a joke. That unlucky recipient would never read it — would in fact curse your name for it — and it would then pass from thrift store to thrift store before finally being digitized and ending up on my laptop screen. Why do we preserve these relics? Are some things not better consigned to the dustbin of history? Where do shaven bigfeet go to try out for the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1960s?

Oh. Hershey, Pennsylvania, of course. Lover Boy's wife is utterly delighted by the appearance of this enormous beast. And why not? She knows that should he persist in his quest for next-door hole, "Mr. Carpathian" will pop his head off with his freakishly-large hands and feast on the warm goo within.

Despair not, Lover Boy. You may have been cockblocked by some kind of Central European forest ogre, but it's the early 1960s, and you know what that means: it's still socially acceptable to ask your wife to pick up some porno from the store for you.

I mean, she'll bitch about it, but what's she going to do, not buy you a copy of Gambo!? Back then, that was grounds for sending your wife to an Asylum for Frigid, Hateful Nags. And before you judge, remember that the married man of the 1960s had nothing to look forward to but decades of steady employment and the company of a servile, financially dependent bangmaid. Pornography was one of his only reprieves from this unrelenting hell. The other?

Drinking! You know, alcohol. The thing that makes you come home in the middle of the night screaming into your dark, empty house, clutching at a stuffed lion in a bowtie. There is no response, they know better by now. Don't bother going upstairs, Lover Boy. Tear that carnival prize open and thrust your limp whiskey dick into its soft, understanding, newspaper-filled insides. Fail to achieve climax and fly into a fury. This would never happen to Mr. Carpathian. Piss in whatever's handy and pass out.

Nobody has to know about this. You can rationally explain to your children that daddy made a little mistake. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes! You know, like accidentally getting your girlfriend pregnant at 17 and ruining your life because she won't "take care of it" even though you offered to pay. Well, you can take care of it now, can't you?

Shit, that got dark. And I'm not really being fair — mainly, this book is just incomprehensible. When it isn't repeating the same two jokes about getting drunk and consuming pornography to make it through another day, it gets terribly confused.

What is the gag here? I think it's that the husband is really giving himself a gift by getting his wife a series of sixties-slutty outfits, but why does he look so nonplussed? Why does she look so pleased? This is a perfectly serviceable 1960s joke about how husbands are selfish and fuckhungry and they botched it in a way that last year's AI pun robots could only dream of. I've seen enough. Let's move on to Office Lover Boy.

Is it too late to cancel the article and make it about a Canadian anti-meth puppet PSA instead?

Jesus fucking Christ. I think the artist was going for the smutty smirk of an elevator pervert here, but they way overshot. This is the face of a man who knows where each of these women live, the locations of their spare keys, and the precise measurements of each of their toes. This is a serial killer the police will call "The Toe Fairy," who will taunt investigators with letters proclaiming that they are privy to a great Becoming.

These women do not realize how much danger they are in. We can do nothing for them. We have to move on.

This is far less menacing. Cute, even! See, you hire women whose feet you want to chew on, then fire them when they give you a black eye for trying to lick their toes.

But women aren't just useful for their foot meat! They can also be wielded as tools, as one would a sensual hammer or screwdriver with tits. That smile on the salesman's face there is a little much, but at least it's not the elevator one again. It would be crazy if they printed that picture twice with no modification, as if to really hit home how proud they were of capturing man's limitless capacity for monstrous evil in only a few pen strokes.

Oops! I'm scared now, everyone. I've been scared. In fact, I don't see how this could get any more haunting. Unless they put in a picture of the Toe Fairy sawing the feet off his most recent victim with the caption "Businessmen know when to foot the bill and when to foot foot mm mm tasty foot," I think we've maxed out on alarming imagery.

How naïve I was a moment ago. I braced myself for the presence of terror but not the terror of absence. At some point between dumpster and PDF scan, this page of Office Lover Boy has been obliterated, leaving only memories behind. It's as if a nuclear blast went off in this book, casting shadows of what once was on the empty page. "Worthington Krisko" is an anagram for "it nothing, sorrow, kk."

Fuck! This one is even more upsetting, supposing as it does that the third stage of the secretarial relationship is o̸̧̲͈̲͕̩̰̍b̸̡̨̩̺̬̺̣̪̖͍̂ͅļ̴̺͓̹̞͓̳̣̖̔̈́̃̋͌ǐ̶̠̯̟͙́̐̽v̸̩͓̝̯̟̞̥̐̾̂̏̐͋̉́̆͜͠i̶̖̞̝͈̘̻̬͙͚̘̩͎͋̈́ǫ̵̰̻̼̭̖̭̭̰͕͇̼̿͑̔̒͌͛͗̀͠͝͠n̴̹̘̞̱̝̲̣̦̂͛͝.̴̛̝͇͎̝͔̪̙̠̬̒̄. I'm starting to wonder whether maybe this wasn't part of the book in the first place. I mean, we're dealing with the kind of lunatic who printed an image of a knowing, malevolent grin twice. It doesn't seem too far a leap from Grinch sex cannibal to conceptual commentary on the hollowness of corporate life.

See here, how the artist reduces the attractive female employee to her lower half? By rendering the woman as nothing but an ass and vagina on legs, they expose the grotesque logical endpoint of female objectification. The woman literally becomes a "skirt."

This spread, relating the results of a company day out, is no less haunting yet not as immediately legible. Now it simply appears that there is an epidemic of torso annihilation at work. Incidentally, the Torso Annihilator is also what they call my liver punch.

MORE PENCILS. GET MORE PENCILS, Lover Boy intones to his gaggle of confederates. What a terrible indictment of man's single-mindedness. That said, this one makes more sense if you realize it's set in a world where ass jiggle physics have been cranked up by God like in a game of Dead or Alive, so that even the relatively sedate act of sharpening a pencil sets them cheeks a-wobbling. Did you catch that "sharpening pencils" might also be a double-entendre for stiffening penises? That's the kind of wit we've come to expect from— actually, who did create this book? Who is responsible for all of this, for the pencils, the face?

Wait. No, that's… that can't be right. This was the work of the Berenstains? As in, those Berenstains?

Yes, before they were known for anthropomorphic bears and then an extremely Reddit conspiracy theory, Stan and Jan made a living cranking out Phil Hirsch-level cartoon books. They went from office harassment bits to kids' stories about responsibility and telling the truth when they had children of their own, but the keen observer can perceive echoes of their earlier efforts in their latter-day output.

Still, I'll take a smutty Papa Bear and a terrified-into-shock Brother Bear over the Toe Fairy any day. And hey, would the people who brought so much joy into the hearts of children around the world include that terrible expression of predatory scorn a third time in their funny book of workplace sex crimes? Indeed, would it be the last image in that text, presented one final time without context or caption, even at the protest of their publisher? Would they urge us to gaze into the visage of hatred, to know its terrible reality, in the very same year that they published the first Berenstain Bears book?

Yes, they absolutely would.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, whose complete Berenstain collection is arranged chronologically, with a velvet rope separating the Toe Fairy from The Big Honey Hunt.

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