Hey there, readership! Two quick things.

I am still in New York, and the nice folks at NPR’s The Bryant Park Project morning show have asked me on to their show to talk about the con, my experiences, and etc. I’ll be on sometime around 8am tomorrow morning, and I’m looking forward to it. If you can’t make it up that early in the evening, it looks like the show is archived on their website.

Meanwhile! I contributed a little sidebar piece to New York gay mag Next Magazine’s most-recent issue about comics, just in time for the convention. I found a copy while I was here and they blew it up onto a full page with art and everything, which is fab. It’s a quick-and-dirty little piece called 6 Essential Gay Graphic Novels.

So it’s been a pretty good weekend :)

- Chris

Being a gay dude who is at least nominally interested in the bears (not the sports team) I’m pretty-much spoiled for choice when it comes to eye-candy in the comic book store: chubby, hairy, muscley guys are the majority demographic. Granted: I am married now and so I don’t have those thoughts anymore. But what about the poor, single, (ostensibly straight) nerds at the comic shop, where are they supposed to find love? Why, at Comic Book Singles Night!

This past Friday, February 8th, Brave New World Comics in Newhall, California held their first ever Singles Night, encouraging ladies and gents to head to the shop and maybe meet the nerd of their dreams. As you might expect, just dumping a bunch of folks that would describe themselves as ’socially awkward’ into a room is not, necessarily, the best idea for a good time. It’s to the credit of Brave New World owners Atom! and Portlyn Freeman that things went so smoothly, as they shored up the event with live bands, food, and booze. To be honest, I think the idea of getting a bunch of nerds drunk is kind of amazing, but probably for different reasons than the organizers intended… still, by all accounts the evening was a huge success.

I got a chance to talk to Atom! Freeman (his real name) about the event.

“My goal with most in-store events is to break-even, get an opportunity to say the store’s name in public and see new faces,” said Atom! “[For Comic Book Singles Night] we doubled our break-even number … our event got mentioned by 5 local radio stations including an interview on a highly rated morning program and we got a half-page write-up on the front page of the local newspaper!

“Business-wise it exceeded all of my expectations.”

And how about romantically? Anyone hook up at the event? “I hope so,” said Atom! “Because the point of this was to find our friends someone they could enjoy being with. Turns out, more then just our friends responded. I know a lot of numbers were exchanged.”

According to Atom! more than 100 singles showed up to the event, with a 60/40 gender split weighed towards the guys… a hell of a lot better than I, for one, was expecting. Personally I’d worry about setting up too many of my existing customers with each other… what if they decided that they only needed one copy of a given comic that they could share? I know it’s blasphemy, but apparently when two comics nerds get married they actually start mixing their respective comics collections! Heresy! Apparently the key to events like this is involving the larger community and bringing new faces into the comic book store to pair off with your shoppers. Of course, I think the fact that Atom! referred to his customers as his friends says a lot about the very genuine community-driven motivation behind the event, but he also figured out the key to getting a whole bunch of potential customers to see all that Brave New World had to offer: Local Bands.

“[My biggest surprise was] what a draw local live bands are,” said Atom! “At one point in the evening, just looking over the crowd I guesstimated that it was 50% fans of the band who just came for the music. While we didn’t do huge sales numbers that night, the weekend was huge because for the next couple days, people came back to buy things they had seen that night.

“I’m now looking into what it will take to have a live music night every 6 weeks.”

What struck me most about this event, and what made me want to write about Comic Book Singles Night in the first place, is that the language used to describe the event in the press was very open-ended regarding gender and sexuality. Brave New World made it pretty clear that whether you were a guy or a girl looking for a guy or a girl, you’d be welcome to come and try your luck at the comic book store.

“This was one of the first factors that we felt needed resolution before we went ahead with the event,” said Atom! “Our intention was never to exclude anybody. The only way that we even made it gender specific was the raffle and even that was “put your ticket in this box if you want to be paired with a boy, in this box if you want to be paired with a girl.”

“I see a major part of my job as a retailer is creating a community. To create a place where people with similar interests can gather and interact. I don’t see gender or orientation as major components in that job. Our store is located in a Victorian-styled strip mall with a bridal shop, hair salon, yoga studio, and antiques boutique. If we wanted to focus on the single white straight male comics fan, we could be much more profitable in the industrial center with a roll-up door that only went up 4 times a week. Our goal is to reach as many people as possible and expose them to art, culture, and entertainment that they wouldn’t normally run across.”

In the past I know that Eisner Award-winning comic shop Zeus Comics in Dallas, Texas has done social ‘mixers’ for their clientele, including a specifically queer-themed mixer in late 2005. My experience with the comics industry is that it’s no more or less homophobic than the general public (and those that disagree should hang out on X-Box Live some time to see what fandom-oriented homophobes really sound like…), but that doesn’t change the fact that the comic store is generally a very heteronormative environment. Superhero comics in particular (the bread and butter of most comics shops) are notorious for this. Check out my Afraid Of Cock post for more. Many queer customers still don’t feel safe being ‘out’, so any actions that are taken to really include and engage gay comics fans I feel are worth noting. Would BNW ever sponsor a Gay Singles Night? “I would need more convincing that there would be a need for a more queer specific event,” says Atom! “But, a lot of our single queer customers and friends were here and some met each other for the first time, so who knows?”

That leads into the most pressing question of all, will there be more Singles Nights for the friends of Brave New World? “Without question… We’ll probably try it again in 6 months to see if it still draws and then quarterly and so on. [It was] easily one of the best events we’ve ever had.”

- Christopher Butcher
Images stolen from: http://www.keef.net/, http://www.comics.org/, http://thatsmyskull.blogspot.com/, and http://www.scottsaavedra.com.

If you head over to Xtra.ca, the website of Canada’s twice-monthly free gay newspaper, you can see my second article for the paper, a primer on Yaoi manga from a gay perspective. It’s actually based on a blog post I made here from 2 and a half years ago, which in and of itself was adapted from an article I wrote for a U.S. based gay newspaper, but which never appeared in print because they had weird rights issues. Anyway.

What struck me when rewriting it (and I think it only shares maybe 1 or 2 paragraphs with the original) was how much the yaoi segment of the manga market has changed in just a few years. Where once upon a time there was only Be Beautiful, DMP, and those guys that did Skyscrapers of Oz, there are now so many different publishers and imprints and sub-imprints producing more than 20 volumes a month! What was once an emerging category is now full-blown, and it was a real treat writing an introduction to the genre/phenomena for a gay male audience.

Even better? The story ended up as the cover-feature of the print version of the magazine! My name, finally in lights. My friend Eric Kim, illustrator of Love as a Foreign Language for Oni Press (amongst other comics work) was comissioned to do the cover illustration, and you can see it up on the right there. He did a great job (thanks Eric!) and the paper really pops in the newspaper boxes. You can click on the image to see a larger version.
So, yeah. I’m a paid journalist now, which means I’m Completely Entitled! I get _paid_ for these opinions of mine, which makes me fabulous and insufferable! Bwahahaha!

Love,

- Christopher

+ Let’s see what joys the internet can provide for us today, shall we?

“Fan Fiction is an Internet site where fans can speculate, converse and write on books, movies, shows, etc.
“One branch of the site is dedicated to Harry Potter, and explicit scenes with Dumbledore already appear there.”
- Christian Broadcasting Network News

Thanks to Mike for the link, we find that J.K. Rowling outted Dumbledore in a reading last week and that this move will likely have Christians more upset. As usual, they’ve made sure to get their facts straight before rushing to the internet. Oh, Christians, you’re the worst part about Christianity.

+ Meanwhile, the comics journalism debate was ended this week way before I threw Beaudelaire at it, by Tom Spurgeon. A rumour reverberated throughout the industry about long-running indy comics show APE, The Alternative Press Expo, moving from it’s “first show of the year” placement to pretty-close to the last show of the year in November. What would this mean? Why would they do this? Why didn’t anyone pick up the phone and actually just call and find out what was going on? Congrats to Tom Spurgeon who actually put the effort in to find out the how and why instead of just the ‘what’, in this interview with David Glanzer from Comic Con International (the folks behind APE as well as well as the big show in San Diego). If the blogosphere had put as much effort into actually doing comics journalism in the past few weeks as they’ve put into talking about why no one does comics journalism, the question itself would cease to be.

+ At MisterKitty.org, Dave uncovered a ‘plot’ by Archie to try and whitewash the actual creators out of their creative history. Archie comics re-uses stories from throughout their publishing history all the time, making small updates to the art or dialogue to try and make them more contemporary for today’s youth (although how they get away with those fashions is beyond me… I guess with the electro revival a few years back all their 80s reprints would’ve been cutting edge for a little while there).

Anyhow, one of the more recent reprints does a lot more than alter a pop-culture reference like ”Burt Bobain” to “Bernard Bay” to make it relevant, it changes a breaking-the-fourth-wall moment with Betty acknowledging top-notch artist Dan DeCarlo as the creator of the story she’s in, to a general “The Archie Comics Staff”. I think that I can take it for granted that you, my audience, find this as gross as I do, but let’s talk about the reason why. Dan DeCarlo created the characters/properties of Sabrina, The Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats, and aside from not acknowledging DeCarlo with any finanicial consideration considering the other-media successes of both properties, Archie Comics has steadfastly maintained that DeCarlo was just the artist, and that an employee of the company (and not a freelancer) really came up with the ideas when all evidence points at that as being a load of bull.

Poor guy got fucked over by a major corporation even WITHOUT signing a contract that effectively says “I didn’t create this thing I’m creating, AOL/Time-Warner did, or possibly Stu Levy.” Wait until they erase this generation’s names off of their own work in ten or fifteen years…

Anyway, if there’s a bright-side to all of this, it’s that when they re-lettered Betty’s word balloon they did it in what looks to be a computer-generated ‘lettering’ font without changing any of the other lovely hand-lettering, so the whole thing has the air of a creepy, computerized “Mis-terrr Ann-derrr-son…” voiceover. Maybe today’s young Betty & Veronica readers will see through Archie Comics’ attempts at erasing the human hands that built their empire? One can hope, until then, we can all linkblog the hell out of it.

- Christopher

Shannon Gerard at TCAF 2007. Picture by Blake Bell.

Visitors to the 2007 Toronto Comic Arts Festival may be familiar with the works of cartoonists Shannon Gerard and Stef Lenk. In addition to both cartoonists (multi-disciplinary artists, actually) launching brand new comics as part of the lead-up to the festival, they also had one of the most interesting displays at the event. Comprised of a life-sized sculpture implying the classic board-game OPERATION and knitted and crocheted pairs of boobs and a penis’ & testicles (alongside promotional images shown here), these pieces (and the brand new books that accompanied them) sat amongst all of their other comics work, and the cartoonists themselves were set-up across from Top Shelf and at an all-ages event with nary a peep of trouble. I did a double-take myself when I saw the handsomely-produced member hanging on the wall at the show, but then I’ve already dealt with my own fear of cock… I thought it was a great display.

Apparently at York University in the North of Toronto? That cock-stuff don’t fly.

According to BlogTO.com, after a complaint by an anonymous YorkU professor a window display featuring the work of Gerard and Lenk was removed from the York University Bookstore. The display was promoting both the works themselves and a gallery display of art from both Lenk’s and Gerard’s projects, and while the work is certainly provocative, I don’t think anyone expected this reaction.

Although it’s not mentioned at BlogTO, Shannon Gerard is actually a YorkU alum and may even have taught there, I know that she sat on the TCAF 2005 Comics Academia panel alongside folks like Bart Beaty and Phoebe Gloeckner. I think it’s important that this material not be characterized as the work of a University student still ‘finding’ themselves, particularly because Gerard’s work is quite accomplished and even popular here in town. Also interesting? A version of the display featuring all of the same components hung in the window of bookstore Pages, right downtown on Toronto’s busiest street (and at one of our busiest intersections) for weeks without any notable incident.

I don’t mean to keep stealing all of the good bits from the BlogTO article, but let’s tie the whole thesis together, shall we:

“Although no one knows if it was the nudity or the crocheted Boobs and Dinks, Chhangur suspects, “it was the piercing on the crocheted penis on the cut out male figure and the open discussion about testicular cancer. Breast cancer seems socially accepted as is the depiction, (real or crocheted) of breasts but not penis’ or testicular cancer. Most of the complaints came from grown, white, heterosexual, men.”"
- BlogTo.com

Huh, how about that? Where have I heard about ostensibly straight white dudes having a problem with artistic depictions of male genitalia before?

Where… where could that be?

Anyway, let’s keep it positive. Why don’t you go and check out Shannon Gerard’s site at http://www.shannongerard.org/, and Stef Lenk’s site at http://steflenk.com/. Both are solid artists with excellent comics projects, and it’s nice to have an excuse…despite the unfortunate nature of said excuse…to link them.

- Chris

Though the official release date isn’t until today, The Best American Comics 2007 can already be found on store shelves everywhere, be they ‘comic’, ‘book’, or virtual. In fact, even before this Chris Ware guest-edited volume was available, the vast majority of the works in this volume could be found on the bookshelves of any artcomix fan who was paying attention from August 2005 through August 2006. Even though the raison d’etre of the Best American series of anthologies is to scour the totality of printed material for good works, the 2007 Comics edition is particularly notable for drawing the majority of its material from the output of publisher Fantagraphics books, and in particular their anthology Mome makes a very strong showing. In fact, upon receiving the book a few days back one of my more outspoken retail compatriots remarked (with a good measure of actual anger) that there was nothing for him in this book, since he’d already bought all of the Mome volumes, Kramer’s Ergot, and Charles Burns’ Black Hole. It’s actually that anger, which I’ve heard from more than a few people now, that made me want to review this volume and Mr. Ware’s examples of the best of comics in 2006.

Ware’s introduction to the book is interesting, as he writes about visual literacy and invention in the context of his own work and in the work of the artists he has assembled here. Of course (and in typical self-depreciating fashion) he throws the idea that this is the ‘best’ work in comics right out the window in the first paragraph: No matter how much you criticize Chris Ware, you can be sure that he has already beaten you to the punch in doing so. Instead he talks about the work in terms of “telling the truth,” which he states to be the primary attribute in comics stories that he personally enjoys. This shouldn’t be mistaken for an elevation of non-fiction over fiction or any other such fallacy, but instead Ware seems to best respond to works that seek to understand, explain, and celebrate the human condition, and that’s evident in the book. More than half of the books’ stories are outright biography or autobiography; the only real concession to the fantastic seems to be in Ware’s appreciation of C.F.’s Blond Atchen And The Bumble Boys and Paper Rad’s Kramer’s Ergot; the hypercolour cute-brut works descended from the Fort Thunder collective and, in Ware’s estimation, the work Gary Panter (Panter also included here via an excerpt from his Jimbo In Purgatory). If “Fiction,”as Mr. Ware has posited elsewhere, “allows details and doubts about actual events to be bypassed and the remembered essence of a person to suddenly ‘come alive’ again,” then it seems very much like that fiction oughtta stay as close to plausible as possible, if the choices here are anything to go by.

The collection isn’t a bad one, and seeing as it is produced and marketed for a ‘general public’ graphic novel reader it’s a lot harder to fault it for being picked from a fairly small (though very deep pool). I’d have a hard time arguing against any of the included works as being undeserving of the “Best Comics” tag, and I probably wouldn’t bother either because that kind of behaviour is kinda dickish. But even the briefest page-through of the book will show that while it is a coherent and considered opinion on comics, it also isn’t representative of the North American comics publishing industry as a whole. Luckily Ware has already forestalled such criticism (told ya!) but it’s still a little aggrivating that, for example, anything with a whif of genre about it is seemingly disqualified, despite its ability to get to get at “truth” in it’s own way. Further absent are any comics that don’t mark print as their primary medium. I wonder what kind of view of the industry this presents to the ‘general public’?

Next year (and for the foreseeable future) the Best American Comics collections will feature new, permanent Editors in the tag-team power couple of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. I feel fairly confident in saying that their vision of the Best Comics will look substantially different from Ware’s, just as my own ideas about the best comics released this year do. Will that make for a better, more coherent or thorough anthology though? Will those opinions be any more or less correct? I quite honestly have no idea, but there’s a much better chance I won’t own previously released versions of 80% of what’s in the book, and that’s pretty exciting to me at least!

So my recommendation? Check out the table of contents for this one over at The Publisher’s Website and see how many of the works–or creators–are new to you. If you haven’t purchased much of this work already I’d strongly recommend you do so through this volume… but maybe keep the other eye open and on the rest of the graphic novel rack too.

Meanwhile, Chris, What Did You Think Were The Best Graphic Novels of 2006?

Well I’m glad you asked. Now that literally every award for graphic novels published in 2006 has been given out, AND they made a book out of it, here’s what I thought were the best comics in 2006. I’m not limiting myself to works by North American creators as Mr. Ware is, but I am requiring English-language publication in 2006. I’ve included my (whopping) 28 choices behind the cut below. Let me know what you think: Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Precocious Curmudgeon, David Welsh reminds me that I’d been meaning to post a little something about Perry Moore’s new superhero-populated Young Adult novel Hero, released by Hyperion Books this fall. Hero is about a young man named Thom Creed who, nearing the end of his high-school career must deal with coming out as both a gay teenager and as a superhero.

The thing that strikes me most strongly about the work is the tone. Hero is… dark. Really dark. As a character, Thom doesn’t have a friend in the world–no refuge from a strongly (and often violently) homophobic society and family. I think all gay teenagers can feel that they’re alone, and that the whole world is against them, but there was definitely a heightened sense of those feelings at work in Hero that matched the heightened senses and abilities of the superheroes that populated the book. The novel felt to me like the notion of The X-Men’s “Protecting a world that hates and fears them!” but to the Nth degree–at least the X-Men are a team, the gay kid here is a hated outcast even among outcasts. I was a gay teenager once upon a time, and as hopeless and shitty as the world can seem at that age (and it can and does), there’s always something or somewhere to turn. Whether it’s that one friend who ‘knows’, or the internet, or hell, ‘Kids Help Phone’ there’s something out there for gay teenagers… and something that Hero’s gay teenager is never afforded. And then aside from having no friends, no family, and nowhere to turn, even Thom’s first sexual experience ends up being profoundly damaging, ending with his being outed and scandalized in the international media. For a novel that wants to put forward a positive message about being a gay kid, it’s deeply sex-negative in punishing the lead character, his father, his friends, and superheroism in general for acting on his gay desires. Like I said… DARK.
On the one hand, I think that makes the tone really successful in a lot of ways: the story is written from the perspective of a kid in distress and the novel is genuinely menacing throughout. I can’t tell you the dread I felt at Thom coming home to his father’s house a couple of times towards the end of the book. On the other hand, even though the kid completes the hero’s journey in the end and the novel aims to be a positive statement about coming of age as a homosexual in American society, I’d kind of be afraid to give this to an at-risk gay teenager because it’s so incredibly bleak, right through the ending of the book during which the superhero establishment still can’t… or won’t… cut the kid a break specifically because he’s gay. Sure, I’m a fan of happy endings, but I’m also a fan of balance, and I found the tone really unbalanced in an off-putting way.

That realization was a tough one for me, because the book is genuinely well-written otherwise. Author Moore has a fantastic grasp of writing action scenes that are detailed and especially illustrative, a high compliment for a book that owes so much of its soul to comic books (and superhero comics in particular). My memories of the book are entirely visual, scenes and dialogue playing out in a near-comic format and stopping short of word-balloons popping up in my mind’s-eye. There are no confusing or poorly-written passages in the story, all of the author’s intent comes across perfectly clearly. Granted, there are several large plot problems and the afformentioned pervading darkness, but the book moves along so crisply that you probably won’t notice the former until you’ve set it down with a happy sigh. The latter…?

Another strength of the narrative is the characterization, primarily of Thom but also in his relationships with several key characters including a fiery red-headed teammate, a straight-talking old southern woman, and an emotionally distant and troubled father. Read that again and you’ll see how all three of those character types are archetypes that border on cliché, and it’s to Moore’s credit that they avoid that fate. He manages to imbue each character with a good measure of humanity, mostly due to cribbing directly from conversations and relationships in his own life, according to this interview at AfterElton.com. It’s a good example of how to turn personal experience into a narrative with broad appeal. Thom as a character both coming to terms with his homosexuality and his place in the world (a shitty, oppressively dark world…) was easy to relate to as someone who’s done the same; Thom as a character coming to terms with his superpowers was easy to relate to as someone who’s read as many superhero comics as the author obviously has. Superhero fans–gay or straight–will find a lot that is both familiar and enjoyable in this novel.

But as I said, this is all at odds with a general bleakness that makes the book very hard for me to recommend to its target audience. I think I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Moore, being a gay man of a previous generation or two didn’t have a confidant, the internet, or telephone help lines for queer and questioning youth. In that way the author’s experiences directly reflect his character’s and I feel that it’s to the characters’ detriment–as well as that of a teenaged reader. As someone who is a great fan of seemingly timeless gay-themed young adult novels like James Howes’ The Misfits and David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy, I personally prefered the way that the characters could be challenged without a situation being necessarily undertaken alone, and without an air of hopelessness. Even Frodo got to have Sam on the trip up Mount Doom, y’know? But reading the numerous positive reviews around the internet (and helpfully catalogued at the author’s website) it seems that mine and David Welsh’s interpretations are in the minority–that the world really is that dark for queer and questioning youth and that this is the book for them.

Hero is most likely going to be enjoyed by comics fans who enjoy work like Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, comics that draw on the iconic power and history of superheroes to tell smaller, more personal and human stories (with the requisite occasional huge battle). I haven’t read the recent superhero/novel hit Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, but Hero seems, in focusing on a voice not often heard in the straight-white-boys-club of contemporary comics, likely to appeal to the wide swath of readers who enjoyed that tale (it even has a smart, layered, and ballsy female character to get behind as well!). But for readers either in the target audience or a few years outside of it, I’d much rather slap Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy into their hands than Hero.

But then Boy Meets Boy doesn’t feature a bitch’n fight scene between Batman and Wolverine, so it really is a tough call.

- Christopher

This review is based upon an uncorrected advance proof provided by the publisher.

WHOOPS! Got a bit negative for a second there, didn’t I? I forgot my promise not to engage all of this. Sorry about that, didn’t mean to harsh your mellow. Out with the jive, in with the love.

I am in the newspaper. The GAY newspaper. The fine folks at XTRA magazine (publishing in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and even on the internet) comissioned me to write a little overview of what’s hot in gay graphic novels, and I turned it into a sort of fun, on-its-ear SUMMER READING LIST. It saw print on my birthday (yay!), and it went online earlier this week when I wasn’t looking:

Porky #1 & Pornomicon #1 by Logan. Published by Class Comics. 32 pages; $9.95 each.

In the past year Class Comics has begun publishing gay comics from around the world and these two comics from France’s Logan (so hot he only needs one name) are downright dirty, in all the right ways. Featuring worlds seemingly comprised entirely of hot’n'hairy muscle bears with impossible proportions, anyone searching for something a little more hirsute in their smutty summer reading will have it made in the shade. A word of warning: If guys with PIG tattooed on their tummies and sex with the Octopus-faced baddie from Pirates Of The Caribbean (and all that entails) make you squeamish, Logan’s work is definitely not for you.
- Review by Me.

It includes everything on the spectrum from the suggestive to the smutty, and all points in between. It was a lot of fun to write too, and even more interesting? I WAS EDITED! Usually I just rail on and on here at the blog, but I got to work with an editor who actually made the piece stronger and tighter overall! Suck on that, Internet!

For those of you that need a reason to click through the link, here’s what I reviewed: Stripped: The Illustrated Male, Porky #1, The Pornomicon #1, Fun Home SC, Aya HC, All-Star Superman, Casanova: Luxuria, PRISM: Your Guide to LGBT Comics, Shirtlifter #2, and Young Bottoms In Love. There really wasn’t much point in picking stuff just to rag on it, so I’ll spoil the surprise and say that I generally liked all of the books in the review.

They even let me plug The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which was really rather nice of them. I’ve got another article for them almost completed which has a decidedly Eastern bent. I’m sure you can figure it out…

I hope my friend at Fab doesn’t get mad that I wrote an article for Xtra. DRAMA. :D

- Christopher
Image from this year’s PRISM Guide, which you should all go buy to support a worthwhile organisation.

If you go here:

http://comicsnthings.blogspot.com/2007/07/citizen-steel-and-power-girl-cosmetic.html

you’ll see what happened when the afformentioned Citizen Steele image from my much-beloved AFRAID OF COCK post finally hit shelves this past Wednesday. You’ll need Adboe Flash to view it.

What does this mean? DC’s really only interested in shying away from controversy when the mood suits them, I guess. Or, you know, COCK. Apparently the reason given for deflating Power Girl’s boobs (see that same link) was that they needed to fit another character on the cover, not that they were too big in and of themselves… The reason why the cock had to get shrunk down? I’m all in favour of rampant speculation. Go to town, really.

I’m not too broken-up over Citizen Steele’s dehancement, just that the thinking behind it is ripe for disection, and it’s somehow the same thinking that’s behind decisions like this:

On the left there, that’s the solicitation cover for SHOWCASE: BATGIRL, the first of DC’s cheap reprint volumes to feature a female lead character. On the right? That’s the cover it shipped with. Spot the difference.

Do we all know what kind of industry we have now? Are we all aware so I can stop getting death-threats from retards when I dare to suggest a comic book cover is mysogynist? No? I’m just a humourless jerk who hates everything you love? Okay then. Just as long as the dissonance is cognative, I guess that’s alright?

- Christopher

Earlier this spring 801 Media, Inc., sister company to DMP Books (and publisher of lots of yaoi under the JUNE MANGA imprint) began to release their books. Comprised of seemingly more raunchy yaoi action and with a higher price-per-book to make you pay dearly for your filthy, filth porn, I honestly haven’t heard much about the line as a whole. I decided to take matters into my own hands (heh) and so I present to you three short reviews of 801 Media’s first wave of books:

AFFAIR, by Shioku Kano. 200 pages, $15.95, ISBN: 9781934129050
AFFAIR has the dubious honour of provoking the following question from me, 20 pages in: “Is this translation just incredibly bad, or is it nearly-unreadable in the original with excellent translation?” A collection of various yaoi cliches, the dialogue is punctuated with a series of statements that border on non-sequitors through each story. A convoluted mess, saved from the trash by some thoroughly dirty artwork. It can’t be good if I have to force myself to finish the pornography.

BOND(Z), by Toko Kawai. 192 pages, $15.95, ISBN: 9781934129005
The first story in this single-creator anthology, about two straight best friends who end up fucking in a restroom while their girlfriends are back at the table in a restaurant, is both surprisingly hot and really well drawn. BOND(Z) is actually a collection of short stories so it isn’t JUST straight dudes in a washroom (they like to fuck lots of places), but that is the lead (and longest) story, and it’s really, really well put together. The other shorts are surprisingly strong as well, and if you like the yaoi for either the dirty bits or the romance, this one is an essential purchase. Bonus: Surprisingly strong depiction of homosexual desire.

ICHIGENME VOL 1: The First Class Is Civil Law…, by Fumi Yoshinaga. 240 pages, $15.95, ISBN: 9781934129012
I’d really been looking forward to this one, another “dirty” yaoi title from 801 Media but created by ANTIQUE BAKERY’s Fumi Yoshinaga. I really loved Bakery, which isn’t yaoi (or even dirty for that matter), and the idea of Yoshinaga doing something more ‘explicitly’ gay was really appealing. My expectations were surpassed by the deft handling of this ‘coming out’ story, set in a Japanese law school. The art and storytelling remain as strong as ever, though part of the charm of Bakery is the maniacal attention to detail in the depiction of the food, something the author is robbed of doing in this story. But I actually came away feeling like I’d learned something about Japanese law school, showing that Yoshinaga knows just how much information to include to keep the setting feeling real, while not obscuring the characters at all. These reluctant lovers, following their dreams and denying their urges… It’s a great little romance novel. There’s nothing particularly graphic though, at least nothing that you wouldn’t see in much tamer yaoi releases, I can only assume it heats up in later volumes. Fans of Bakery and FAKE will enjoy the will-they, won’t-they relationship. I’m looking forward to volume two.

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Just for fairness’ sake, I’ll try and review some filthy hentai for Simon Jones soon too. Although “Wow, she really fucked her brother good this time around!” is probably going to bring the wrong sort of hits to my site.

- Christopher