Post Funny Panels: Maximum Bogosity

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > Post Funny Panels: Maximum Bogosity

X-O: Apr 28, 2002; Long Live The King!

Calaveron posted:

But we've seen injustice pa and ma Kent, and they don't look like the inappropriately aged parents of an inappropriately aged superman

When the boy you raised turns into a murdering tyrant it ages you a few years.

# ? Dec 11, 2018 15:03

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# ? May 9, 2024 09:19

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

drill press corps posted:

Please do! This is a story I genuinely want to hear.

Skwirl posted:

I don't know much about it, but margarine was cheaper than butter so during the depression the butter lobby got a number of laws passed to make it less appealing. Some states it was illegal to sell margarine with food coloring in it (without dye yo make it yellow it's a clear/whiteish color, like Vaseline). I think in at least one state margarine had to be dyed red, which I kinda want to see on someone's breakfast toast at least once.

I'll try to keep this all in one post, because while it's cool, it's really off-topic.

Vox's food derails: butter orgy comic edition

First a tiny bit of background. Margarine is a butter substitute invented in France in the 1870s. Originally derived primarily from beef tallow, margarine is now mostly made from vegetable oils. It's one of the earliest, biggest victories of food science manufacturing. Incredibly cheap to produce, modern margarine has no negative health effects (so long as it doesn't use trans fats), and has pretty much always been healthier than butter. Margarine can also be kosher (though I don't really know anything about that area- something to do with mixing meat and dairy?).

When margarine came to the states in the 1870s, it was viewed as a huge threat to the dairy industry. Dairy producers were right to be afraid; margarine was available much cheaper than butter, and in a void, likely would have largely cornered the market. The dairy industry took an all-out approach to manipulating public opinion of margarine - and bear in mind that the information ecosystem of the time makes today look positively healthy. State legislatures were bribed to ban margarine. Scientific reports were falsified to show that margarine caused...basically every serious negative health effect. Rumors were spread about the margarine manufacturing process involving dead cats, rubber, and other unsavory
substances. The federal government put massive taxes on margarine. Public figures gave live, barn-burning speeches about the threat of margarine to the American Way of Life. At every level, Americans were targets of a tide of misinformation about what they ate.

Here are some choice quotes from this NatGeo article:

Governor Lucius Hubbard of Minnesota bemoaned the fact that �the ingenuity of depraved human genius has culminated in the production of oleomargarine and its kindred abominations.� Senator Joseph Quarles of Wisconsin (the Dairy State) thundered that butter should come from the dairy, not the slaughterhouse. �I want butter that has the natural aroma of life and health. I decline to accept as a substitute caul fat, matured under the chill of death, blended with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks.�

Another legislative maneuver by Big Butter was coloration. Butter is normally a very pale yellow; it's dyed to look the way it does. Margarine looks even paler, but it's difficult to tell the difference, especially if it's also dyed yellow. Butter manufacturers came up with a great response: get state legislatures to require that it be dyed unappealing colors, like pink (which was used to imply there was blood in it- anti-margarine messaging tried to tie margarine to blood, death and decay). Some 30-odd states required pink margarine, and left the laws on the books when the Supreme Court overturned them in 1898.

Margarine was aggressively depicted as simultaneously, artificial, unnatural, unhealthy, foreign, unamerican, unpatriotic, and (in particular) a cheap product used by the lower classes. Even before the great depression, financial turbulence and class inequality meant butter was effectively a luxury good subject to shortages, and like any luxury good, organized crime became involved in controlling the supply. They would also manufacture fraudulent butter, sometimes by dying margarine (people do genuinely have trouble telling the difference). That's where that comic comes from! People were drowning in these messages, even in comic books.

Fake butter was the source of another big, big change in how food was regulated in the US. See, the dyes used in butter? The fake butter? Yeah, that stuff wasn't exactly harmless. At the time adulterants used to change food color and texture weren't regulated, and companies (and criminals) had a strong incentive to just use whatever made something look good on the shelf. This was an issue in many areas, with butter (and "butter") being a prominent one. A lot of people were getting sick or dying because the "margarine war", alongside other trade conflicts and the endless tide of harmful "patent medicines" and other quack remedies. In response, in 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the FDA! :toot:

The FDA regulated food, drugs, and other product categories. In particular, they set purity requirements for food (there's now an upper limit on how much rat poop can be in your flour) and require that all food ingredients be listed and certified by the government to be "Generally Recognized As Safe" (GRAS). That means no more sawdust in your oatmeal :yum:

. I am, to put it mildly, an FDA fan.

Something to emphasize about all of this is that the harmful, undesirable, unclean nature of the "artificial, chemical" margarine wasn't just something that the average American assumed. Messages about how bad it was were absolutely everywhere, like the air people breathed. People just...bought into it, and it became a part of culture. It may seem ironic now with our purple artificial berry flavor cheese spread, but margarine was an alien, foreign thing that people didn't grok- a weird artificial creation that was surely, surely harmful. You'd read somewhere it was bad, your friends thought it was bad...why doubt it?

This hasn't changed. Right now, trade groups, companies and lobbyists are still putting out wave after wave of bullshit chemophobic beliefs about food. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, who do great work in other areas, are militantly opposed to the existence of food dyes. The FDA is chronically underfunded and its regulatory power has been limited by industrial interests. Rumors and (industry-funded) studies about non-caloric sweeteners and corn syrup and salt abound. There is now a massive marketing drive for "clean", "natural", "honest" food with "fewer, easy-to-read" ingredients (that cost more to produce and decay faster, but can be priced much higher). Green labels and cert marks and health claims are everywhere. "Organic" means everything and nothing.

Industry does this because it works, and it works on us. Pink Himalayan Sea Salt is a thing people actually purchase. Soylent exists. The Food Babe is real, and she has made more money than you ever will. Large numbers of people believe sugar is an addictive toxin, and that carbohydrates are the root of all cancer.

We are not materially smarter than the people of the 1870s. While the media may have changed, the quality of information isn't much better- and there's a hell of a lot more of it. We're still targets, and the tide continues to rise.

A couple sources I used to fortify and color my knowledge for this post:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/margarine-used-to-be-pink-and-more-colorful-tales-from-the-food-dye-industry
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2014/08/13/the-butter-wars-when-margarine-was-pink/
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0807.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1870s-dairy-lobby-turned-margarine-pink-so-people-would-buy-butter-180963328/

PS: I don't know whether or not there was an antisemitic element to the crossover between kosher margarine use and the use of blood imagery in anti-margarine messaging. While I wouldn't put it past the people involved, I don't know that kosher formulations of margarine were in use at the time.

PPS: about 1110 words. Right on target.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Dec 11, 2018

# ? Dec 11, 2018 18:30

Keeshhound: Jan 14, 2010; Mad Duck Swagger

Kosher mostly just requires that food be prepared in a certain way (like Halal), although there are a few additional rules like dairy and meat. The specific passage bars "boiling a kid (goat) in it's mother's milk." The Jewish people being who they are, some sects chose to enforce that prohibition in inventive ways ("We can have beef sausage pizza if we use goat cheese, because it's not the same species of animal!")

Given how many dishes use butter and meat, I can see the appeal, especially for someone not inclined to look for loopholes.

# ? Dec 11, 2018 18:46

Gavok: Oct 10, 2005; Brock! Oh, man, I'm sorry about your...

...tooth?

There's a great moment in that Injustice story where Pa Kent lets it slip that he knows that Bruce is Batman. Not that Clark blabbed it. It's more that Clark is constantly talking up being friends with Batman when you'd think at some point he'd tell his parents that he's friends with billionaire Bruce Wayne.

# ? Dec 11, 2018 22:19

Jonny Nox: Apr 26, 2008

Don't fry with margarine though, smoke point is lower and it makes pancakes taste gross.

# ? Dec 11, 2018 22:54

Wapole Languray: Jul 4, 2012

Margarine can replace butter for eating purposes on like bread, but yeah you cannot swap them out for cooking purposes most of the time.

# ? Dec 11, 2018 23:36

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Jonny Nox posted:

Don't fry with margarine though, smoke point is lower and it makes pancakes taste gross.

Oh yeah to be sure, but again fun times when the "butter" you bought has, like, ground up buttercups in it. Pre-Pure Food and Drug Act America was a strange place.

# ? Dec 11, 2018 23:52

Wheat Loaf: Feb 13, 2012; by FactsAreUseless

Jonny Nox posted:

Don't fry with margarine though, smoke point is lower and it makes pancakes taste gross.

That truck that went on fire in that tunnel (it was either the Channel tunnel or one of those road tunnels that cuts through Alpine mountains - I'm leaning towards the latter) years ago and killed a bunch of people was full of margarine, wasn't it? Very combustible stuff under the right conditions, I believe.

# ? Dec 11, 2018 23:54

Bruceski: Aug 21, 2007; The tools of a hero mean nothing without a solid core.

Wapole Languray posted:

Margarine can replace butter for eating purposes on like bread, but yeah you cannot swap them out for cooking purposes most of the time.

And baking (as a subset of cooking) is right out.

# ? Dec 12, 2018 00:00

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

... and somehow I managed to post my comic strips in the completely wrong thread. Sorry.

Selachian fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Dec 12, 2018

# ? Dec 12, 2018 00:57

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

Selachian posted:

Retail

I have some bad news, Feuti...

# ? Dec 12, 2018 01:16

Red: Apr 15, 2003; Yeah, great at getting us into Wawa.

Thaddius the Large posted:

I really appreciate when a villain is able to recognize �yep, completely overmatched here, I�m through� without a second thought.

# ? Dec 12, 2018 02:31

Push El Burrito: May 9, 2006; Soiled Meat

Red posted:

NEXT: Not Sabretooth!

Is this before or after Wade strands Crossbones in a hot air balloon?

# ? Dec 12, 2018 05:16

Proteus Jones: Feb 28, 2013

Push El Burrito posted:

NEXT: Not Sabretooth!

Is this before or after Wade strands Crossbones in a hot air balloon?

~~After~~ Actually now I'm no longer sure.

# ? Dec 12, 2018 06:33

Samuringa: Mar 27, 2017; Best advice I was ever given?

"Ticker, you'll be a lot happier once you stop caring about the opinions of a culture that is beneath you."

I learned my worth, learned the places and people that matter.

Opened my eyes.

Push El Burrito posted:

NEXT: Not Sabretooth!

Is this before or after Wade strands Crossbones in a hot air balloon?

After. The Arc begins with a bounty being put on Wade's head and a bunch of villains(Including Sabretooth) answering the call but Crossbones is the first one that hits him and gets stranded. That panel is from the last issue of the arc when they meet at a bar after all the poo poo that happened during the other issues, have a chat and duke it out. It is also Sabretooth second appearance in the entire arc.

# ? Dec 12, 2018 07:38

Beachcomber: May 21, 2007; Another day in paradise.; Slippery Tilde

Red posted:

I believe this would be 30% funnier without the thought balloon in the first panel.

# ? Dec 12, 2018 08:02

site: Apr 6, 2007; Trans pride, Worldwide
Bitch

Thaddius the Large posted:

I really appreciate when a villain is able to recognize “yep, completely overmatched here, I’m through” without a second thought.

Probably the only good set of panels in the entirety of secret empire

# ? Dec 12, 2018 08:11

Ghostlight: Sep 25, 2009; maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me

Samuringa posted:

After. The Arc begins with a bounty being put on Wade's head and a bunch of villains(Including Sabretooth) answering the call but Crossbones is the first one that hits him and gets stranded. That panel is from the last issue of the arc when they meet at a bar after all the poo poo that happened during the other issues, have a chat and duke it out. It is also Sabretooth second appearance in the entire arc.

Does it reveal what all the raft stuff in that issue was about?

# ? Dec 12, 2018 08:20

Avulsion: Feb 12, 2006; I never knew what hit me

Ghostlight posted:

Does it reveal what all the raft stuff in that issue was about?

Read Watchmen.

# ? Dec 12, 2018 08:53

Android Blues: Nov 22, 2008

Discendo Vox posted:

I'll try to keep this all in one post, because while it's cool, it's really off-topic.

Vox's food derails: butter orgy comic edition

First a tiny bit of background. Margarine is a butter substitute invented in France in the 1870s. Originally derived primarily from beef tallow, margarine is now mostly made from vegetable oils. It's one of the earliest, biggest victories of food science manufacturing. Incredibly cheap to produce, modern margarine has no negative health effects (so long as it doesn't use trans fats), and has pretty much always been healthier than butter. Margarine can also be kosher (though I don't really know anything about that area- something to do with mixing meat and dairy?).

When margarine came to the states in the 1870s, it was viewed as a huge threat to the dairy industry. Dairy producers were right to be afraid; margarine was available much cheaper than butter, and in a void, likely would have largely cornered the market. The dairy industry took an all-out approach to manipulating public opinion of margarine - and bear in mind that the information ecosystem of the time makes today look positively healthy. State legislatures were bribed to ban margarine. Scientific reports were falsified to show that margarine caused...basically every serious negative health effect. Rumors were spread about the margarine manufacturing process involving dead cats, rubber, and other unsavory
substances. The federal government put massive taxes on margarine. Public figures gave live, barn-burning speeches about the threat of margarine to the American Way of Life. At every level, Americans were targets of a tide of misinformation about what they ate.

Here are some choice quotes from this NatGeo article:

Governor Lucius Hubbard of Minnesota bemoaned the fact that �the ingenuity of depraved human genius has culminated in the production of oleomargarine and its kindred abominations.� Senator Joseph Quarles of Wisconsin (the Dairy State) thundered that butter should come from the dairy, not the slaughterhouse. �I want butter that has the natural aroma of life and health. I decline to accept as a substitute caul fat, matured under the chill of death, blended with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks.�

Another legislative maneuver by Big Butter was coloration. Butter is normally a very pale yellow; it's dyed to look the way it does. Margarine looks even paler, but it's difficult to tell the difference, especially if it's also dyed yellow. Butter manufacturers came up with a great response: get state legislatures to require that it be dyed unappealing colors, like pink (which was used to imply there was blood in it- anti-margarine messaging tried to tie margarine to blood, death and decay). Some 30-odd states required pink margarine, and left the laws on the books when the Supreme Court overturned them in 1898.

Margarine was aggressively depicted as simultaneously, artificial, unnatural, unhealthy, foreign, unamerican, unpatriotic, and (in particular) a cheap product used by the lower classes. Even before the great depression, financial turbulence and class inequality meant butter was effectively a luxury good subject to shortages, and like any luxury good, organized crime became involved in controlling the supply. They would also manufacture fraudulent butter, sometimes by dying margarine (people do genuinely have trouble telling the difference). That's where that comic comes from! People were drowning in these messages, even in comic books.

Fake butter was the source of another big, big change in how food was regulated in the US. See, the dyes used in butter? The fake butter? Yeah, that stuff wasn't exactly harmless. At the time adulterants used to change food color and texture weren't regulated, and companies (and criminals) had a strong incentive to just use whatever made something look good on the shelf. This was an issue in many areas, with butter (and "butter") being a prominent one. A lot of people were getting sick or dying because the "margarine war", alongside other trade conflicts and the endless tide of harmful "patent medicines" and other quack remedies. In response, in 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the FDA! The FDA regulated food, drugs, and other product categories. In particular, they set purity requirements for food (there's now an upper limit on how much rat poop can be in your flour) and require that all food ingredients be listed and certified by the government to be "Generally Recognized As Safe" (GRAS). That means no more sawdust in your oatmeal . I am, to put it mildly, an FDA fan.

Something to emphasize about all of this is that the harmful, undesirable, unclean nature of the "artificial, chemical" margarine wasn't just something that the average American assumed. Messages about how bad it was were absolutely everywhere, like the air people breathed. People just...bought into it, and it became a part of culture. It may seem ironic now with our purple artificial berry flavor cheese spread, but margarine was an alien, foreign thing that people didn't grok- a weird artificial creation that was surely, surely harmful. You'd read somewhere it was bad, your friends thought it was bad...why doubt it?

This hasn't changed. Right now, trade groups, companies and lobbyists are still putting out wave after wave of bullshit chemophobic beliefs about food. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, who do great work in other areas, are militantly opposed to the existence of food dyes. The FDA is chronically underfunded and its regulatory power has been limited by industrial interests. Rumors and (industry-funded) studies about non-caloric sweeteners and corn syrup and salt abound. There is now a massive marketing drive for "clean", "natural", "honest" food with "fewer, easy-to-read" ingredients (that cost more to produce and decay faster, but can be priced much higher). Green labels and cert marks and health claims are everywhere. "Organic" means everything and nothing.

Industry does this because it works, and it works on us. Pink Himalayan Sea Salt is a thing people actually purchase. Soylent exists. The Food Babe is real, and she has made more money than you ever will. Large numbers of people believe sugar is an addictive toxin, and that carbohydrates are the root of all cancer.

We are not materially smarter than the people of the 1870s. While the media may have changed, the quality of information isn't much better- and there's a hell of a lot more of it. We're still targets, and the tide continues to rise.

A couple sources I used to fortify and color my knowledge for this post:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/margarine-used-to-be-pink-and-more-colorful-tales-from-the-food-dye-industry
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2014/08/13/the-butter-wars-when-margarine-was-pink/
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0807.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1870s-dairy-lobby-turned-margarine-pink-so-people-would-buy-butter-180963328/

PS: I don't know whether or not there was an antisemitic element to the crossover between kosher margarine use and the use of blood imagery in anti-margarine messaging. While I wouldn't put it past the people involved, I don't know that kosher formulations of margarine were in use at the time.

PPS: about 1110 words. Right on target.

This is absolutely fascinating, thank you for this post.

# ? Dec 12, 2018 09:15

Infinitum: Jul 30, 2004

Discendo Vox posted:

I'll try to keep this all in one post, because while it's cool, it's really off-topic.

Vox's food derails: butter orgy comic edition

Why do you know so much about butter?

# ? Dec 12, 2018 09:23

Samuringa: Mar 27, 2017; Best advice I was ever given?

"Ticker, you'll be a lot happier once you stop caring about the opinions of a culture that is beneath you."

I learned my worth, learned the places and people that matter.

Opened my eyes.

Infinitum posted:

Why do you know so much about butter?

you would not believe it

# ? Dec 12, 2018 09:35

Infinitum: Jul 30, 2004

Samuringa posted:

you would not believe it

# ? Dec 12, 2018 10:19

Samovar: Jun 4, 2011; I'm 😤 not a 🦸🏻‍♂️hero...🧜🏻

Samuringa posted:

you would not believe it

# ? Dec 12, 2018 11:02

Opopanax: Aug 8, 2007; I HEX YE!!!

site posted:

Probably the only good set of panels in the entirety of secret empire

Wait is O'Grady alive again?

# ? Dec 12, 2018 19:51

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Infinitum posted:

Why do you know so much about butter?

Studying garbage bullshit in FDA-regulated product areas is a passion and, hopefully, a career for me. It's like a secret world of bad science, bad communication and bad policy, much of it also comedy gold.

# ? Dec 12, 2018 21:44

Senior Woodchuck: Aug 29, 2006; When you're lost out there and you're all alone, a light is waiting to carry you home

Retro Futurist posted:

Wait is O'Grady alive again?

No, but the identical robot with his memories who replaced him goes by "Eric" to his friends.

Comics, everybody!

# ? Dec 13, 2018 00:16

Cousin Todd: Jul 3, 2007; Grimey Drawer

Senior Woodchuck posted:

No, but the identical robot with his memories who replaced him goes by "Eric" to his friends.

Comics, everybody!

Yeah. I tried to find out if Tony Stark had a doctorate and instead read that he was adopted in hopes of tricking an alien into thinking the Stark's actual son, the one the alien tinkered with earlier, was still kicking about. It just got stranger from there, and I'm honestly still not sure if Tony is a Dr.

# ? Dec 13, 2018 00:41

Synthbuttrange: May 6, 2007

Ah yes, the Phony Stark gambit.

# ? Dec 13, 2018 01:07

Push El Burrito: May 9, 2006; Soiled Meat

Synthbuttrange posted:

Ah yes, the Phony Stark gambit.

It not Tony. It gambit.

# ? Dec 13, 2018 02:17

Ygolonac

Nov 26, 2007

pre:

*************
CLUTCH  NIXON
*************

The Hero We Need

Invincible Iron Man #3

Later (IIM #5)

I look at those panels of Tony with his arm up, and I can hear it.

"I am Shiba Inu."

# ? Dec 13, 2018 02:22

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Discendo Vox posted:

Studying garbage bullshit in FDA-regulated product areas is a passion and, hopefully, a career for me. It's like a secret world of bad science, bad communication and bad policy, much of it also comedy gold.

Get with Sydney McElroy and start a Sawbones spinoff.

# ? Dec 13, 2018 03:01

CzarChasm: Mar 14, 2009; I don't like it when you're watching me eat.

Who What Now posted:

Get with Sydney McElroy and start a Sawbones spinoff.

That would be awesome. "Food Lies, with Syd and DV".

My favorite is "Margarine is one molecule away from plastic." Ok. Sure. Let's even say that's true and accurate. Did you know that common table salt is a molecular bond away from being two incredibly toxic substances? And you put that on your food without question.

# ? Dec 13, 2018 19:17

Keeshhound: Jan 14, 2010; Mad Duck Swagger

CzarChasm posted:

That would be awesome. "Food Lies, with Syd and DV".

My favorite is "Margarine is one molecule away from plastic." Ok. Sure. Let's even say that's true and accurate. Did you know that common table salt is a molecular bond away from being two incredibly toxic substances? And you put that on your food without question.

I'm more concerned about sodium's reactive properties than I am its toxicity, to be honest.

# ? Dec 13, 2018 19:25