The Blowfish Blog

[Caught in the Net] Slashers

Slash! You know what I’m talking about — fan fiction or fan art creating non-canonical, often homosexual, pairings of characters, usually (but not always) fictional. Like Kirk/Spock from Star Trek, or Batman/The Joker like I linked to in last week’s column. I was inspired to do a piece on slash by a hilarious ballad from the brilliant James MacDonald, posted at weblog Making Light: “The Ball of Kirriemuir“. It opens:

Tuvok the Vulcan he was there
Standin’ at the bar,
Sayin’ “This isn’t logical
An’ I’m not in pon farr”

An’ it’s who’ll slash ye this time
Who’ll slash ye noo?
The lass who slashed ye last, lad,
She no will slash ye noo.

And it continues in that vein, with appearances by agents from the X-Files and folks from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. The comment thread is full of people adding their own verses. Very funny stuff. (It’s a parody of the real, and incredibly bawdy, song of the same title from the late 1800s.)

There is, of course, such a thing as Real People Slash, involving real individuals in fictional scenarios. (Hell, my friend Nick Mamatas wrote a great story called “Real People Slash”.) One such example of RPS appeared just in time for last week’s Democratic National Convention, in the form of a Tijuana Bible about the forbidden love between George W. Bush and John McCain, titled “The Adventures of Fuller Bush Man and John McCain in ‘Obliging Lady.’” It does, in fact, involve hardcore cartoon sex between George W. and a strangely busty McCain, and it’s a spot-on parody of the old Tijuana Bibles. Whatever your politics, you gotta admire the craftsmanship.

Speaking of Tijuana Bibles, if you aren’t familiar with them, the Wikipedia entry is a decent introduction. They were hand-drawn pornographic comics, often featuring strangely horny and uninhibited versions of popular cartoon characters like Popeye and the Katzenjammer Kids and Nancy and Sluggo and so on, as well as real celebrities. They were, in fact, proto-slash, imagining all sorts of unlikely pairings of fictional characters.

Randy Milholland’s webcomic Something Positive has a Depression-era spin-off called Something Positive 1938, and a large part of the plot concerns the main character’s job drawing Tijuana Bibles — that’s the place I first heard about the strange little booklets, in fact, which just goes to show I don’t spend enough time rifling through cardboard boxes in the seedier corners of flea markets . . .

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 3 September 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.