the Butt Trust

The Butt Trust names a category associated with disposable comic figures: characters who exist as pawns in isolated episodes, with no carry-over of identity or understanding from one appearance to the next. The expression becomes personal when the narrator asks whether he belongs to it, but the answer leaves the category’s boundaries uncertain.

Comic Origins

The narrator connects the phrase to Don Martin’s cartoons and the recurring figure Fonebone. Martin never used the same character twice; each was an innocent pawn with no continuity from one episode to another. A Fonebone is described as a placeholder, a disposable clone or stooge, and then as “A member of the Butt Trust.” The phrase therefore gathers up the sense of being interchangeable and subject to a comic fate without control or understanding.

A Question of Belonging

Kimmery may have sensed in the narrator a dread of a page about to turn and reveal a ludicrous doom in the final panel. That image links his unease to the Fonebone pattern: an individual treated as a temporary figure in a story whose ending is already waiting. The connection is suggestive rather than a stated definition of the Butt Trust.

Later, the narrator asks, “Was I in the Butt Trust?” The reply—“I don’t know if I’d put you exactly in the Butt Trust category”—does not confirm or deny his membership. Instead, the phrase moves from a description of disposable cartoon characters to an uncertain measure of the narrator’s own place in the pattern.