Pathetic Fallacy

The Quest Begins Anew

From 1974 until 1977, when I was between six and nine years old, my dad was the minister at Youngstown, Ohio’s First Christian Church. This was a position which came with some strange perks: the church owned a literal mansion, the Myron Israel Arms home, which they called the “Disciple House,” and my family lived in this building for several months after moving to Youngstown from New York City, while we sought an affordable place of our own. Some of my memories of this time include sleeping on a tiny mattress placed in the center of a cavernous, empty room with marble floors¹; the bathroom that adjoined it had been furnished sometime in the 1920s in elaborate Art Deco tiling and still had a toilet whose tank hung on the wall overhead and flushed with a pull-chain².

The church building and the Disciple House were right next to the Butler Institute of American Art, which I visited often to see the fantastic scale models of masted ships, some tossed in realistic resin waves³. It was also surrounded by the Youngstown State University campus, whose Modernist library I wandered through freely; there was no security in those days, and I explored anywhere that wasn’t locked. As I recall the library had a floating staircase and that seemed like something straight out of The Jetsons.

One day when I was gadding feral⁴ about the campus, I discovered under a bush a discarded YSU yearbook, the 1972 Neon. The book was in tatters, and many of its pages had been cut to ribbons (presumably to remove personally-relevant photos), but what remained was intact, and so I flipped through it; to my kid mind, whatever this book was, it looked like it was probably full of adult stuff, and that made it enticing. There was a color section of grainy art photos of students staring into sunsets, or their post-degree futures, or whatever. There were stiff group photos of the Math Club and the Libertarian Society (which had four members).

But then, without warning, near the end of the book there was a many-paged comics section—but not a ha-ha funny comics section. It was a weird fantasy story drawn in the style of Frank Frazetta, featuring a bare-chested barbarian who walked through blasted landscapes strewn with corpses, and who confronted an antagonistic wizard. Interspersed between fantasy panels there were brief vignettes, drawn in a much more cartoonish style that recalled Vaughn Bodē⁵; these featured (mildly) satirical scenes student life on the YSU campus.

At the end of the story, the wizard opens a dimensional tear and spirits the barbarian away into the present-day university, where the barbarian, not understanding what happened, or why he is surrounded by disaffected hippies, smites everyone dead with his sword. In a final two-page spread he stands alone amidst yet another field of carnage as the entire scene dissolves into the John Tenniel illustration of the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

Of course, being six or seven, I had no context for any of this. My child-mind saw only death and destruction involving the campus I was currently inhabiting. Looking about, I saw the students wandering to class, long-haired and bell-bottomed, apparently un-smitten by barbarians. I was shaken to my core. What even was this? Why would someone draw this? I was nearly as upset as I was after sneaking a peek at an issue of National Lampoon and reading a photo comic that featured a mother shooting her kids in the head.⁶

So of course, I did the reasonable thing: I took the yearbook home with me and hid it in my bedroom where my parents couldn’t find.

At first I would regularly steal furtive glances at my contraband for the illicit thrill of its wrongness. But over time, I looked at it less and less, and eventually the yearbook was lost—a casualty, I suspect, of one of the many flooded basements my family suffered after moving to a ranch home with terrible drainage. By that time, I was no longer discomfited by the comic, understanding it to be a pastiche of sword and sorcery tropes; but I did wonder about how it came to be, and who the weirdo responsible was.

Okay, so to cut to the chase that I’m sure you’ve anticipated by now, a few years back I recalled this bit of childhood trauma and I searched online to see if any record of it existed. At the time, I didn’t even remember the title of the yearbook or its specific year, but after a bit of digging I found an online repository of digitized YSU stuff, and lo and behold, after scanning through several PDFs, there was the Barbarian of my youth. And after I re-read the story (and found it neither as frightening nor as confusing as I remembered, I checked the yearbook credits to see if I could find the cartoonist and there he was: Val Mayerik.

If that didn’t make you gasp, you probably weren’t reading comic books in the 1970s, so I will explain: Mayerik was a comics artist who initially made his name in fantasy titles, working alongside and sometimes with P. Craig Russell and Barry Windsor-Smith; eventually he transitioned to illustration, particularly work for TSR games and Magic: The Gathering. But it was in 1973 that he achieved his place in comics history by being the original artist to draw Steve Gerber’s creation Howard the Duck, in Fear 19. The YSU book I had discovered dated only one year before.

Howard's first appearance — Howard the Duck’s first appearance, drawn by Val Mayerik, Marvel Comics’ *Fear* 19 (December, 1973)

If it isn’t obvious by now, I’m someone who holds onto childhood obsessions, particularly when they’re only half-remembered. Time and again I have attempted to track down a movie, book, or comic that thrilled, horrified, or confused my young mind. These fragments of mental effluvium had their origins in a pre-Internet world, making them difficult and sometimes impossible to recover. Most of the time, when I’m successful in identifying and re-acquiring the artifacts of my memory, they turn out not to live up to expectations. But every once in a while, I am genuinely delighted by the outcome of my search—and the discovery of a young Mayerik’s contribution to my mind’s warping is one of these times.

Or, you know, linoleum? I was a kid, in my mind it was marble. ↩︎
The building was sold to YSU in 1983 to be used for alumni relations and its stately halls were divided into fluorescently lit cubicles. ↩︎
In 2005 the Butler Institute purchased the Disciples’ church building and it is now home to folk art and Americana collections. ↩︎
As all proud Gen-X kids did. ↩︎
This is me editorializing after the fact. No way was I a cool enough kindergartener to know who Vaughn Bodē was. ↩︎
I don’t know what issue this was and I don’t want you to tell me. ↩︎

Less Fun than a Barrel of Crackers

Header image: S.O. Grimes general store, Westminster, Md., c. 1900. Image via Library of Congress.

Another day, another shot fired in the culture wars: this time, the internet is losing its collective mind over the new logo for Cracker Barrel. If you are unaware of the controversy, congratulations—you might consider skipping reading the rest of this essay to remain in blissful ignorance.

To summarize: Cracker Barrel, that paragon of blandly inoffensive roadside dining, has decided that its long-standing theming to evoke early 20th century general stores might be limiting its appeal to Gen Z, and so has embarked on a brand makeover that downplays the hokey country charm. Part of this rebrand is a simplified logo that ditches an illustration depicting a gentleman in overalls perched on a wicker seat ladder back chair and leaning against the titular barrel. (This man, “Uncle Herschel,” was a real person.)

Cracker Barrel logos, left: 1977, right: 2025.

To say that the change has not been taken well by the chain-restaurant-going public would be an understatement. Some of those seeing red also see a political conspiracy—from “influencers” who say that the logo is stripping culture and heritage away from rural white Americans, to Fox News hosts claiming that corporate moves such as this logo change are why President Trump needs to send troops to Chicago. Underlying these criticisms is the assumption that the rebrand is part of an insidious “woke” movement perpetrated by American businesses.

The truth is, no corporation wants to touch anything political with a twelve-foot pole, especially these days. Look at what happened to the department store Target, which caught flack from the right for daring to stock pride merchandise, only to get hit even harder from the left for caving to anti-DEI pressure. Walmart and Amazon have also been subject to boycotting headaches over DEI policies and allegations of abetting the Trump administration. No, politics have nothing to do with the decision to change the Cracker Barrel logo—although it remains to be seen if political outrage from consumers can be sustained.¹

The rebrand reminds me of a similar kerfuffle last year involving the British confection Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Americans may be confused that such a product exists in the first place; but they would be even more baffled by the logo for the sugar refinery Abram Lyle & Sons, which consists of bees swarming about the corpse of a lion. The company’s motto, “Out of the strong came forth sweetness” points to the source of this imagery, the biblical tale of Samson’s riddle². All of which is to say that this is the most badass logo ever, as well as being an amazingly long-lived one—it dates to 1883. In 2024, Lyle & Sons decided that this work of art was too morbid, and replaced it with a more anodyne illustration of a syrupy lion. This change was also greeted with political accusations.

But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded character and context in an effort to streamline their identity. I have written previously about the often misguided penchant art directors have towards simplifying their brands. I suspect that the lion’s share (ha) of this tendency is simply following trends, and the current fashion in corporate design is simple, flat typography and short (often single-word) brand names. To the extent that someone actually gave this a thought, the rationale is to remove any attributes that might complicate a consumer’s attitude towards the brand. It also reflects the desire of new executives to mark their territory by peeing on it—see HBO’s constant rebranding, or Elon Musk destroying the only part of Twitter that had any value, its name recognition.

If you want to be charitable, and I try to be when I can, the move towards brand simplification also reflects a longstanding adage in design—be it visual art, design, writing, or engineering: “less is more.” This saying, often misattributed to Mies van der Rohe, emphasizes clarity and utility. The goal is to focus on what is essential. Practitioners of this belief make outsized claims about the effects of this approach. In his seminal work Understanding Comics (1993), cartoonist Scott McCloud claims that idiographic drawings amplify meaning. He also claims that in simplified, “cartoony” design, viewers can insert themselves into the depiction³. I love McCloud to pieces but this all seems a bit farfetched to me.

Scott McCloud claims that simplification leads to self-identification. *Understanding Comics*, 1993.

There’s a lot to be said for purposeful simplicity. Growing up in the 70s and 80s I was surrounded by, and loved, logos by Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, and Paul Rand, all of whom were known for absolutely iconic, geometric, minimalist designs. But these artists, working before digital tools, had to visualize their designs as tight, abstract forms. They did not select something they liked from the font menu, slap it on a generic color shape, shut down Adobe Illustrator and call it a day. Even at their simplest, the great Modernist graphic designers had a sense of context and of play. They weren’t afraid of their work conveying an attitude.

And it’s attitude that’s missing from the Cracker Barrel rebrand. The original logo wasn’t great, in much the same way that the actual restaurants aren’t great. But it did have a point of view, and that’s what the new design is lacking. As a rule of thumb, good design is supposed to not draw more attention than the message it conveys. But when design fades away into no design, the message also disappears. When you look at the new Cracker Barrel logo, ask yourself: would you even know what good or service it represents if you didn’t already know the brand name? Here, look at what happens when you replace the words:

Is it a clothing line? Is it a cake mix?

It also remains to see if Cracker Barrel is going to remain committed to this rebrand, given the fact that their stock is being absolutely destroyed. ↩︎
If you’re not familiar with the Book of Judges: Samson, on the way to visit his future bride Timnah, is set upon by a lion. The hero kills the beast with his bare hands. Sometime later he returned to the scene of the attack and found that a colony of bees had made a hive in the lion’s body. Samson eats some of the honey. Returning to marry Timnah, he tells the bridal party (made up of Philistines, who are his sworn enemies) that they must answer a riddle or forfeit their clothes: “Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.” Ultimately this story does not end well for Samson, Timnah, or the Philistines. ↩︎
Amusingly, in his essay “Modern Cartoonist,” comics artist Dan Clowes takes exception to McCloud’s theory: “Comics tend to lean toward the iconic (‘The Adventures of a featureless blob'”‘) because it encourages reader identification. Let’s get away from this arena of vagueness (a cheap gimmick designed to flatter the shallow reader)” Eightball 18, 1997. ↩︎

The Early Writings of John McCoy (2nd edition)

A Facsimile Edition; with commentary by the author

I published the first edition of this commentary in 1997, having just learned how to code HTML from a disreputable Usenet post. The website that this work first appeared on, ungh.com, has long ago evaporated with the rest of the Web 1.0.

Recently, however, I recalled the essay in a dream¹, and fortunately I was able to find a .doc copy languishing in the recesses of a forgotten directory on a floppy disk that had fallen behind a shelf in my basement².

It’s been nearly 20 years and the wisdom of old age³ compels me to revisit and enlarge this seminal work. So I present here the second edition, with newly scanned facsimiles, enlarged commentary, and new annotation.

A note on the text:

Fortunately for scholars, the original MSS for the works discussed here arrive to us in almost pristine condition, thanks to their having been cached in the remarkable School Days edition #566, produced in 1966 by the WinCraft corporation of Winona, Minnesota⁴. In addition to my earliest writings, this folio contains many other historical items, including report cards, numerous second and third place ribbons, and a certificate awarded for “knowing and making the letters correctly in the daily use of legible manuscript handwriting.”

Perhaps the most important artifact of the twentieth century.

I Sit in It

Written in Mrs. Kubasko’s p.m. kindergarten class, Harding Elementary School, 1974.

I Sit on It, #2 pencil on ruled Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″

Text:

~~Jo Johl~~ John.
IS I Sit in it
Meet me
See Mat on it

Notes:

From 1974 until 1977 I attended Harding Elementary School in Youngstown, Ohio. Although today it seems strange to me that there should have been a public school named after the second-most hated President of the United States⁵, at the time I was just happy to be sharing my blocks with Nora, the little red-haired girl who was my first real crush. We would almost exclusively use these blocks to design elaborate traps, which is an interest that I now recognize as one of the stranger symptoms of autism⁶.

I Sit in It is the earliest extant MS in my handwriting, and it demonstrates many of the themes that would mark my later work. Written in first person, the story is plotless, simple, and relies upon suggestion for its effects. The most obvious questions for the reader are: “What is ‘it’? Why does the narrator sit ‘in’ it, while Mat is ‘on’ it? Where are we to meet?” Although these questions are ultimately unanswerable, they are essential to the story’s meaning. By the promise of rational answers and the lack thereof, the reader is led, koan-like, to a new level of understanding. It is only when the familiar categories of “in” and “on” are deconstructed that enlightenment begins.

The true subject of I Sit in It, then, is the mutability of identity. Note the strikethroughs at the top of the page: Jo becomes Johl becomes John. And then, a final period after John announces the completion of the metamorphosis. But should we assume that this teleology is valid? It seems unlikely.

The Missing Bird

Written in Mrs. Wren’s first grade class, Harding Elementary School, 1975.

The Missing Bird (recto), Crayon on Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″

The Missing Bird (verso), Crayon on Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″

Text:

THE “MISSING
BIRD” BY John McCoy
Once there was a bird.
He had a mother. She said, “Hop,
and fly.” He hoped, and fell.
His mother cood not find him,
and askek mrs. owl. “Look behind th⁷
tree.” she said. and there he was!

Notes:

Mrs. Mathilda Wren, my first grade teacher, claimed to have served in the armed forces during wartime⁸. She also had a pair of decorative plastic mushrooms on her desk which she claimed were poisonous. The poison was so strong, she said, that a child need only touch the fungi to die a painful death. Today I believe her intentions were to keep her students’ hands off of her belongings, but the result was a horrified classroom of six-year-olds. Why would anyone keep something so dangerous on their desk? we wondered. What if we brushed against the mushrooms by accident in the midst of show and tell? Eventually, the brighter students in the class realized that the mushrooms posed no real danger, and they terrorized the rest of us by threatening to force us to touch the forbidden objects.

Some of the anxiety of this situation is no doubt reflected in The Missing Bird, a story which at first appears to be straightforward, but which reveals a sinister underbelly upon closer examination. Although baby animals are often separated from their mothers in children’s literature (see P. D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother? [1960] or Eric Hill’s Where’s Spot? [1980]), it is not so typical for the mother herself to be the author of the separation.

The reader must decide for themself whether the mother truly believes that her child can fly or if she is malicious in her instructions. The central tragedy of the fledgeling bounding forth only to plummet, Icarus-like, is vivid no matter what the mother’s motivation. The chance misspelling of “hoped” instead of “hopped” is felicitous: just as the bird, we too hope for the best as we venture into the world, only to be brought low by gravity.

Owls are traditionally figures of wisdom, but the sensitive reader will question the narrative value of the tacked-on character of Mrs. Owl. Why can’t the mother see for herself where her child is? She knows he must have fallen near the tree. Perhaps the mother isn’t really looking.

The Restaurant

Written in 1976 or 1977, location unknown.

The Restaurant (recto), #2 pencil on white Kraft paper, 8″ x 10.5″

The Restaurant (verso), #2 pencil on white Kraft paper, 8″ x 10.5″

Text:

There was a restaurant where a man
who sold pencils would stop every
day to eat breakfast. And all the
morning he would shout out loud to
him self as if he wanted everyone
to hear. There was also a threesome
that had a favorate table to eat
at. To day, however, as they where sitting
down, they noticed a lady 6′ tall,
long-black haired, coming in. They
shuffled around nevously, collecting
cups, plates, and silver ware, and sat down
making it appear as if they just had
breakfast. Then, the lady sat down
drank half a cup of coffee, and
then began talking to herself.
Not outloud, like the pencil-
man, but in a soft murmur.
The threesome left by the
backdoor. And even after the
tabe was wiped & cleaned, the
lady still looked on, still
clutching the half-emty
cup. The pencil-man glanced over,
saw the lady, and ran out the
door. The lady soon left.

The next day, the threesome had
just finished breakfast when the lady
came in. They left. The lady spotted
the pencil-man talkig outloud and
went to the chair next to him. “It’s
to cold outside! The birds are
freezing, dam⁹ it!” said the pencil-
man. “I know nobody wants to, but
somebody’s got to feed the birds!”
“May I have some tea, herald?” asked the
lady. The man grabbed the teapot,
poured the lady some. “I ain’t nobody
named herald,” the man said.

The next day the man & woman
came together. The threesome left
for good. The man & woman began
to talk together. They left and moved
into an apartment together wher
all the do is tall softly to one another.
And the restourant will never be the same.

Notes:

No writings save for notebook pages of cursive handwriting practice remain from Mrs. Vernarsky’s second grade class, which is a shame, because that means I won’t be able to point out that Mrs. Vernarsky had an enormous beehive hairdo (except in this sentence). When I try to remember what I wrote in her class, all I can remember is being caught drawing “Big Daddy Roth”-type hot rods, the kinds with monsters and big chrome exhaust pipes¹⁰.

Even if there is no surviving literary record of my second grade year, its importance to my personal development should not be underestimated. It was in the second grade that I was found to be nearsighted, and the resultant eyewear immured me from my playmates. Oh, they still traded their Now ‘n’ Laters with me, still dropped their Scooby-Doo valentines in my box, but dodgeball was forever changed.

It’s informative to look at a report card from this time. While I always got good marks for “Health Habits” I was slipping in “Rules and Regulations,” “Respects Rights,” and the notorious metric of “Plays Well With Others.” This, then, was the beginning of of my Bad Boy phase:

Small wonder, then, that alienation should be the major theme of The Restaurant. None of its characters are able to communicate with one another, preferring instead to shout or murmur nonsensically—or, in the case of “the Threesome,” to abstain from discourse entirely. Although I cannot recall my initial conception of The Restaurant, its obvious models are Sartre and Beckett, perhaps by way of a particularly bleak skit on Zoom.

For example, the ostensible protagonist, “the Pencil-Man,” craves attention from an indifferent world, but is paralyzed by his own incompetence. “Feed the pigeons,” he admonishes, but why doesn’t he just feed them himself? Surely there is complementary bread at the restaurant. At least the Pencil-Man is given a possible motivation by the narrator: he wants somebody, anyone to hear. When “the Lady” makes her appearance, she is described objectively, blankly, as though she were a suspect in a police line-up: “6′ tall, long-black hair.” But what is her crime? Merely her attempt to connect with another human. “Herald,” she calls the man, and in the misspelling we may see the Pencil-Man as John the Baptist, another abrasive hairy man who shouted a lot. The Pencil-Man, however, is unwilling to take the role of martyr; he instead offers tea, as though a participant in a Zen Buddhist chadō ceremony. Thus we see the contrast between Western and Eastern paths to transcendence.

Although they strike up a relationship, romance does not seem to be a remedy for the alienated Pencil-Man and Lady. Theirs is a sexless relationship, in which all they do is talk softly to one another. This would seem to indicate communication, but it is a communication devoid of either action or context. How will they survive? Who will sell the pencils?

Perhaps the most enigmatically fascinating characters of all are “the Threesome.” In contrast to the narrator’s clinical portrayal of the Lady, the Threesome are given no description, not even to differentiate them from one another. Are they men or women? Are they lovers? Why are they so threatened by the arrival of the Lady? Possibly they represent dissolution of identity, the generic, interchangeable personality of Late Stage Capitalism. If so, their aversion to the Lady makes grim sense. The Threesome attempt to absorb the Pencil-Man into their hive mind, only to have the Lady encourage his eccentricity. Theirs is the true tragedy of the story, as they are unable to even enjoy their breakfast, preferring the imitation of eating to true nourishment.

And the pigeons? What of them?

Not really, but it sounds poetic. ↩︎
This is a bald-faced lie. Why would I even write such a thing? ↩︎
Not a lie per se, but stretching things. ↩︎
Still in operation as of 2025, although these days as a purveyor of sports memorabilia. ↩︎
As of 2021, Harding is only the third most hated. ↩︎
This correlation is posited in some versions of the self-administered “Aspie Quiz,” see https://rdos.net/aspeval/#925 ↩︎
Unclear whether the “e” was omitted intentionally or if it was drawn on the table alongside the MS. ↩︎
Vietnam? Korea? WWII seems unlikely. Most likely of all was she was fucking with us dumb kids. ↩︎
Such fire! ↩︎
This was when CARToons Magazine was at the height of its popularity and there always seemed to be an issue being passed around by the boys in class. Looking back, I am confused by my interest here because I have always been indifferent to cars. But I do like “Big Daddy” Roth. ↩︎