"The Nut and the Tire Nuts"

“Straight Jacket,” Blast #1, Feb. 1971, p. 11. Blast was a short-lived (2 issues) humor magazine. Jan Brunvand discusses this joke/puzzle/legend, which he calls “The Nut and the Tire Nuts,” in The Mexican Pet, 63-4; Too Good To Be True, rev. ed., 115-17; and Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, vol. 2, 460-1. His earliest written source is from 1978.

Giant Mosquitoes in Tall-Tale Postcards

Many tall-tale postcards, which flourished in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, used manipulated photos to portray the rich bounty of various locales (often in the Midwest): giant animals, fish, fruits, vegetables, eggs, etc., all products of a supposedly super-fertile environment.

Notably, some postcards deviated from this boastful promotion of local wildlife and crops by depicting the farmers’ nemesis, the ravenous grasshopper, in giant form. Perhaps on some level it was beneficial for its victims to imagine themselves successfully battling a single huge grasshopper rather than the innumerable real-sized ones that regularly ravaged their crops.

Whereas postcards of giant grasshoppers were plentiful, apparently there were none of giant mosquitoes. I failed to find a single instance in Roger Welsch, Tall-Tale Postcards: A Pictorial History (1976) and Cynthia Elyce Rubin and Morgan Williams, Larger Than Life: The American Tall-Tale Postcard, 1905-1915 (1990). It may be that at the time it was too difficult or even impossible to photograph these tiny insects, but there were also no postcards I am aware of with drawings of them. I suspect that if more makers of exaggerated postcards had been based in wetter regions of the U.S., monstrous mosquitoes would been given their due. There certainly are very many entries under X1286.1. Lie; the large mosquito, in Ernest Baughman, Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America (1996); so the folklore existed, but the postcard makers chose not to exploit it.

A couple of early drawings of giant mosquitoes:

Life, August 20, 1891. In Conrad Groth, ed., A Cockeyed Menagerie: The Drawing of T.S. Sullivant (Fantagraphics, 2021), 15. 

Library of Congress. Cartoon of giant mosquito stinging a man sleeping (between ca. 1900 ca. 1930).

 

 

Seduction of the Innocent & Eye of the Beholder

Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954), 185. “Some of the ordinary comic books have illustrations revealing crude sexual details if you look at them in a certain way. The shoulder of a man with a red scarf around his neck shows a girl’s nude body.” 

 

The book’s section of b&w illustrations (between pp. 212-3) shows the comic book panel referred to, also helpfully cropping and magnifying it for the obtuse reader.

It originally appeared in Jungle Comics #98, Feb. 1948.