Griffy grapples with Muffler Man on the masculinity mat

Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion: (#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity (#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy) In all of this, the actual cartoonist, Bill Griffith, is mocking common attitudes towards masculinity and its manifestations in relationships between men, especially in the pop-cultural wolf-pack fantasy of a dominant alpha male (who gets to do the breeding with the females) and a…