Steele, Crazy After All These Years

What's shakin', poindexters? Lancelot Steele again, with more excerpts from my stupendous new how-to book, "Be Steele, My Heart." That's the one where I transform you, the lowly nerd, into an irresistable love beast. All you have to do is follow my easy-to-understand rules! Here's a web-only exclusive rule: stop wasting your time reading comic book blogs! ...Hey, come back here! Hey! Where are you-- goddammit!!! I didn't mean right now! No, don't cry. Don't -- what? No, I'm not mad at you. I'm not! Jesus Christ, you are a freaking mess. Thank God I'm here to help, huh? Shh. Shhhh. It'll be okay. Daddy loves you.

We alright? Great. Now, on to rules that actually appear in my book. Like the ones illustrated by the above panel...

Rule #54: Be muscular, somehow. I don't care how you achieve this. Illegal steroids, expensive and dangerous plastic surgery, or even that tired old workhorse, exercise. Just be muscular. And once you do that...

Rule #55: Make sure other people know about it! Tell everyone you know. And when you've done that, tell complete strangers! If they try to change the subject, subtly steer the conversation back around to your body. Also, remove all draperies and Venetian blinds from your home and office and keep the lights on at all times. Teach yourself to sleep standing up, facing the largest window on the front of your house. Start a chain letter where people have to mail a photo of you to ten of their friends or else their pet will die. If your local homeowners' association will allow it, paint a realistic mural of yourself (naked if possible) on your roof, so your beautiful muscular form is visible to airplanes and med-evac helicopters and hang-gliders and people with jetpacks. Have sexy, nearly-nude photos of yourself printed on all of your checks. Or if you prefer to bank online, find a way to send your creditors a video file of yourself dancing around topless and/or bottomless to some hot, sensual song. I recommend "Crocodile Rock."



Read Cassandra's dialogue again. Did you all catch that? I wasn't even flirting with that four-eyed popsicle stick but she automatically visualized herself doing a lap dance for me! As if I'd even let her! Which brings me to...

Rule #62: Everyone will want to sleep with you. Don't let them. Now, I know this sounds like crazy talk, but bear with me. Here's the deal. Aside from all the time management issues full-time lovemaking would cause, you have to maintain some standards. Hmm. How can I explain this to somebody who has never had sex before? Huh. Okay, it's like this: let's say you live in a mansion. A tall, broad-shouldered mansion with huge "guns" and washboard abs. Sure, you could let a Puerto Rican come inside -- but if a neighbor saw, it would devalue your property. Oh, I'm sorry. That's a terrible analogy, and offensive to boot. Because the phrase "come inside" makes me sound gay! Again, my apologies. But you get the idea.



Rule #77: Always be lifting something. And make sure it's heavy! So-called "experts" will say that you shouldn't work every single muscle group every day, and that "rest periods" are necessary to avoid stress and strain. This is 100% pure b.s. promulgated by some whacked-out women's libber chick who wants to keep all us men down. She's the same person who secretly instigated such feminizing man-fads as beard dyes, eyebrow shaping, and bathing. Personally, I do none of those things. But I digress. The above panels show the devastating results from when I took a day off from exercising. Look at it! Blech! Disgusting! I'm practically a skeleton. I could barely hold that plant! And Cassandra had to help me up the ladder. We were just like Jimmy Stewart and Barbara Bel Geddes in "Vertigo!" ("I look up, I look down. I look up, I look down...")



Rule #80: Technology is for turkeys! If you're reading this on a computer screen then I've just proved my point. So get in touch with your caveman side! The foxes may say they want a sensitive, hairless nuturer with the heart of a poet, but way deep down inside their woman-parts they crave a horny neanderthal. With a paycheck. So never pass up an opportunity to demonstrate any skill that would serve you well in the wild. Like yelling! See that panel up there? Here's what really went down: I have powerful lungs to go along with my powerful everything else, so I pretended I couldn't work the phones. For added sexuality I loosened my tie and touseled my perfect coif (just a tad). Also, between panels I ate that entire pencil! Sideways! Made the Dazzler wetter than the flume ride at Six Flags. Not that I slept with her, mind you. (See Rule #62.)

For the rest of my rules, you'll have to buy my book! That's "Be Steele, My Heart" by me, Lancelot Steele, available in all fine coffee shops, stripper clubs, church lobbies, and Amazon.com, just as soon as I figure out how to work the "collate" function on the copy machine.