OK, this is really random, but I’m looking to y’all for a discussion about an odd parenting issue that has come up. I have also posted this in Another Place, where it’s mostly different people reading, so if you’ve already commented there, feel free to move along, you aren’t missing anything new.
Anyway, I asked the Youngest Member (now ten years old!) what he wanted to dress as for Hallowe’en, and he said he wanted to go as Buck Godot (zap gun for hire). I pointed out to him that there was no possibility anyone would get the reference or recognize who he was supposed to be, and he was perfectly happy with that. So that part’s OK.
But here’s a thing… The Buck Godot series, like a lot of Phil Foglio’s stuff, is not appropriate for ten-year-old kids. Well, and some of his stuff isn’t really appropriate for anybody, in my opinion, but this is just… smutty. Not explicit, but smutty. Nobody actually has sex, but everyone talks about it a lot. The women (the human women, anyway, and some of the female alien as well) are ridiculous balloon-boobed and balloon-butted sexpots, and there are lots of jokes about them wanting to sleep with various other people (and things). There is a continuing character that is a madam at a brothel, and a subplot about an anti-libido bioweapon. That sort of thing.
So. On the one hand, I am some point going to have to sit down and chat with my boy about representations of women in comics and other issues. He’s been around such conversations for years, but it seems as if he hasn’t thought to apply them to his own reading. And on another hand, we probably need to keep a sharper eye on his culture-consumption. As a second child, we have been far more blasé about his reading habits than his older sister’s, and we haven’t had so many conversations about the contents of the books.
But I’m also thinking, on the third and penultimate hand, that the only reason that the other parents in the neighborhood would not look askance at us letting the boy wear a Buck Godot costume is that they have never heard of Buck Godot. I would certainly look askance at anyone else letting their ten-year-old child wear a costume from some similarly smutty bit of media.
On the other other other hand, Buck Godot is a hero who is of fairly similar body-type to my son. There probably aren’t a lot of those around. We haven’t yet discussed that aspect, but I can’t imagine that it’s a coincidence. My boy would look _awesome_ in a Buck Godot costume, and we could totally make all the important bits of it, and it would be absolutely effing hilarious. To me, anyway.
So: reactions? What do y’all think?
That was the last time I spoke with President Trump,
-Vardibidian.
I personally had forgotten that Buck Godot was smutty, and would thus not personally have looked askance at him had he shown up at my door. But I haven’t read it in a while.
If he showed up as a XXXenophile character, yes. :^)
If I saw a Buck Godot come to my door, I’d be overjoyed that we’re even getting a trick-or-treater.
After I recovered from shock and held out the candy bowl, and if I recognized the character (what? I’m dense sometimes), I’d figure that any kid of this generation dressing up as an ancient indy comic character probably has an adult attached to them who’s doing some reasonable curation/guidance on the subtleties. Also, who am I to talk, I read the Xanth books in Jr. High before I knew any better.