(It’s Jett Vector! Jett appears courtesy of J. Bone and his blog, http://bonesmen.blogspot.com/.)

(Oh, The Family Guy. Appears courtesy of Fox, sadly, but I will give a tip of my cap to my friend Aman Cahudhary for bringing it to my attention at his blog, http://aman-about-town.blogspot.com/. )

- Christopher

(How To Be A Fabulous Fag Hag, by Ellen Forney. From PRISM COMICS: YOUR GUIDE TO LGBT COMICS 2007, and I LOVE LED ZEPPLIN, published by Prism Comics and Fantagraphics Books respectively. Both are quite worth your time and money. Click on the image to see the full strip!)

Edit: It looks like Ellen Forney has a lovely full-colour version of this strip up at her site, http://ellenforney.com/jpegs/faghag.jpg.

- Chris (A little late today)

(Cartoon by Maurice Vellekoop, from the book Vellevision, published by Drawn & Quarterly.)

- Chris

(Cartoon by Tom Bouden, excerpted from Stripped: The Illustrated Male, published by Bruno Gmünder.)

I almost typed “Happy Pride Week!” up top there, but I figured that too many people would confuse it for the nearly-naked-dudes-wrasslin’ league. Actually, your average Pride fight looks and sounds an awful lot like Mr. Bouden’s comic strip up there, doesn’t it? But I digress. Hopefully wherever you are you’re feeling proud and safe and happy this week, and every day of the year. Comic strips continue all week.

- Chris

Earlier this year, I edited my second comic book (and third project) ever: Comics Festival! 2007. Fulfilling the dual duties of promoting the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and exposing the world to a wealth of talented Canadian Cartoonists, it featured over 20 comics strips from across the country and was quite well-received by all who managed to find a copy at a comic shop on free comic book day. But when the submissions started coming in earlier this year, I got cold feet on one of them, fearing the sort of insane and unreasonable reprisal that follows any comic store retailer being upset about things, let alone things that they are paying to give away for free. What was I so afraid of? Cock, or rather the reaction to cock. The cock of…

It’s J. Bone’s Jett Vector, a sexy intergalactic policeman in a leather pouch and spacefaring go-go boots. Now, this was before the Citizen Steele cocktastrophe, let alone slutty statues and tentacle porn, and hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but here’s the story of my own personal fear of cock.

J. Bone is an amazingly talented gay comics artist who’s worked on series including Jingle Belle, DC The New Frontier, and The Spirit. He contributed an awesome one page strip to our first Comics Festival in 2005 (and if you click here you can read it!), and so when 2007 rolled around, I knew I wanted him in the book and he was invited (albeit through his buddy and co-artist on The Spirit Darwyn Cooke) to participate. He turned around a two-page strip in no-time flat, and it was… is… great. You can actually check it out at J.’s blog, Bonesmen. He submitted it to me with a bit of a caveat; having shown the strip to his friends they wondered if it was maybe a little racy for an all-ages book, and what did I think? So I looked at it, and liked it, and then sat and thought about it. Which was a mistake.

Some background: Free Comic Book Day? WROUGHT WITH CONTROVERSY. I’ve no idea why the act of giving comic books away for free has caused so much fucking turmoil, but it totally has, and as the editor of a book being distributed on FCBD, I was very much aware of that…

2004: A child is distributed a mature-readers comic at a Georgia comic book store. It features non-sexual nudity (an excerpt from the recently-released “The Salon” by Nick Bertozzi) and the child’s parent, who apparently has a history of this sort of behaviour, freaks out and calls the cops/the D.A./anyone who’ll listen. This is now known as “The Gordon Lee Case” and the CBLDF is fighting it in court right now. You can help out at http://cbldf.org.

2005: We release our first Comics Festival, and two weeks later get an angry phone call charging me, Peter, the store, and TCAF with being Anti-Semites. Seriously. The reasoning is that we printed Leslie Stein’s comic strip in Comics Festival, wherin the author (Jewish) discusses her physical appearance (see strip here). We thought we’d get flak for Darwyn Cooke having Superman knock-off a local television personality in that issue, not for an autobio comic. Nevertheless, we hold our ground defending Lauren’s right to comment on her apperance and heritage, and nothing major comes of it, but being shouted at and called an anti-semite on the phone? Stays with you.

2005: In a book marked all-ages, a charming “Paul” short story by Michel Rabagliati features a young boy’s first encounter with a naked-lady calendar in a restroom. He is depicted peeing and being embarrassed by the calendar. You really don’t see anything, but retailers screamed bloody murder at the ‘all ages’ tag on something that wasn’t all-ages in… well, Georgia I guess.

2006: There was some cocktastrophe last year too, I can’t remember what it was. I know that the “all-ages” book BLUFF featured an advertisement with bare-breasts in it (that made retailers v. unhappy)… But yeah. Sorry. Anyway.

So, going into publishing the book for 2007? I was a little cockshy about the strip. We’d solicited the book as 13+, made the contents as widely-known as possible, and generally tried to be honest about everything. But I honestly wasn’t sure if the strip skirted into mature-readers territory by virtue of the costume and context of the story… or not. So, and I’m not proud of this, I asked J. if he wanted to cover-up Jett a little more. Maybe a pair of bicycle shorts, or a less-prominent bulge? “If not, I understand, and we’ll run the strip as is and hope for the best,” said I. But I did ask him to change his work. J. said that he’d rather not run the strip if it meant altering it, and I started to feel shittier and shittier about the whole thing… until the book’s designer Chip Zdarsky had a brilliant idea.

“Let Diamond handle it.”

2007 is the first year that Diamond made participating Free Comic Book Day publishers submit their books, in PDF form, ahead of time. I’m honestly not sure why… they don’t seem to have done much with them. But Chip had a good idea. Submit the strip, and if Diamond didn’t say anything about it being ‘inappopriate’ in an ‘all ages’ book (really “Teen” but…) then we’re good to go! J. thought this was a good idea too, and I felt much better knowing that I wasn’t forced to censor or silence a gay creator out of fear of overreaction from the fan and retail community. Did I mention all of this made me sick to my stomach? It did. Anyway. We submitted the book. Heard nothing back. Sent it to press. Diamond got copies. Retailers got copies. No one said anything… until!

CONTROVERSY OVER PHALLUSES AND VAGINAS IN FREE COMIC BOOK DAY BOOKS!

Luckily though, it wasn’t our book. :)

Apparently, Image Comics’ Wolfman by Robert Kirkman featured a back-up story with another Kirkman character named “Brit” and the end of the story features a panel with a bunch of dildoes in it. And then? If you flip the back cover of the book upside-down, and squint, and think dirty thoughts, a picture of a vagina might appear. Seriously. This happened and it sent people into a rage. It was fucking stupid, but then so is the idea that seeing an illustration of a flacid penis might seriously damage a little boy forever, and that one’s in court. So yeah, there was tons and tons of controversy this year… Rich Johnston covered a bunch of it in his Lying in the Gutters column, go check it out.

But not our book. I mean, sure, Diamond sent out a warning to retailers that stated that Comics Festival! 2007 (among 20 other titles or so) had material some retailers might not want to distribute to kids, but they didn’t say why. Then, when Kevin Melrose at Blog @ Newsarama linked to the Jett Vector story at J. Bone’s blog, the first comment on the piece was from a “Christian Illustrator” who described the two page story as being inspired by “gay porn”. But he’s a prick, so who cares?

In the end, we had one of the highest-selling “Silver” level free comic book day books, made tens of thousands of comic fans new and old happy, and everything went off without a hitch. It’s now just-about a month after the event, and no one said shit, apparently too distracted by the cocks, tits, and tentacles present elsewhere on the internet. Which means that my own fear of cock was ultimately unfounded.

If you go check the original “Afraid of Cock” post, you can see Darwyn Cooke in the comments section giving me shit about railing on Don MacPherson when I had come very close to censoring an artist for similar reasons. Why was I giving Don shit? Well, mostly for the yaoi comment actually, and for not knowing what an erect penis in spandex looks like… but I digress. I was giving all the “men” who were “creeped out” by the original image shit because I’d been there, if to a lesser degree. I had 20 other artists in Comics Festival, 1000 retailers who ordered the book, and 25,000 fans who might take objection, and under that pressure I strove for a compromise rather than standing 100% behind an artist who I had personally invited to participate. Put simply: I totally fucked up, and looking back, I see that. All I can say is I’m a convert… for cock. If people are gonna see it even when it isn’t there, then by fuck, lets put it out there in future.

I’ve already apologised to J. in private and we’re cool, more or less, but I did want to take the opportunity here to apologise again to J. for not standing up for a strip I enjoyed, by a fabulously talented artist. If anything, I’ve posted this here not only to air out the skeletons in my own closet, but also to try and draw some attention to J.’s work, to Jett Vector in particular, and maybe let prospective publishers know that there really isn’t anything wrong with this material. It’s sexy, yeah, but it ain’t slutty (see: Marvel Comics, DC Comics). It can be tough dealing with a property that skirts the line, particularly the scary male sexuality line, but it can be done and I’d hope that anyone reading there would trust J. Bone to be the guy to know the difference. I didn’t at first, but believe me, I’ve seen the light. Hopefully some smart editor out there will too, and we’ll all get more Jett Vector in future.
- Christopher

…as expressed by J. Bone, at his blog Bone’s Men.

Congratulations to Canadian Steve MacIsaac and his comic Shirtlifter, they managed to snag a Xeric Grant! Steve is, I believe, unofficially debuting the second issue at TCAF this summer, and I rather liked the first issue. You can check out my review of the first issue here. To find out more about Canada’s Steve MacIsaac (and read a bunch of his comics for free), check out his website at http://www.stevemacisaac.com/.

The rest of the Xeric Nominees for this year have been covered quite nicely by Heidi MacDonald at The Publishers Weekly Blog. Congrats to all of them too, but someone’s gotta give props to the Queer Canadian artists. :)

- Christopher

So I really just posted the Scott McCloud notice because I thought having a 2-screen tall Scott McCloud on the site for a few days would be cool. Really gives you a sense of how iconic the whole thing is, doesn’t it? Anyhow, I figure I’ve got some time before bed tonight so why not do a little linkblogging?

ITEM: My friends at UDON have been pretty busy lately, with everything except new Street Fighter II comic books (by the way, the Image to the right is by Long Vo of Udon, and features two fairly recognizable characters duking it out for Wizard magazine, copyright their respective whatsits).

Now, you may be asking yourself “Why is it that there aren’t any new Street Fighter Comics on the stands?” (Actually, chances are you probably weren’t, as I don’t think my readership crosses over with Udon’s so much, but indulge me for a second). Well, it was announced a week-or-two back that Udon has been tapped to do all of the art for the new 20th Anniversary edition of the Street Fighter II video game. Basically, they’re taking the fan-favourite (and best, honestly) version of SF2, called Super Street Fighter II Turbo and creating a “remix” called “HD Remaster“.

What’s different exactly? Well for starters, it’s going to be downloadable onto your X-Box 360 (only, at this point), and today’s home consoles make the arcade machines of our youth all look like PONG, they’re so much more advanced. The big difference is the level of detail in the art. Whereas the Street Fighter characters of our youth were a hundred pixels high or so, these new ones will be massive, and be better-able to capture expressions, details, every little fold of cloth… well, see for yourself:

So, it’s essentially going to be like the current Udon Comics series, but playable. The primary art and style is actually by Alvin Lee of Udon, who, according to his Facebook profile is hard at work on the series, alongside the rest of the Udon team. It’s pretty rare that a licensor of Japanese material is then asked to go and work on the property for the owners, particularly in Japan. I get the sense that licensed books are sort of “Free Money” and it’s really not best to think about them too hard (which would explain some of the many, many atrocious licensed books). But yeah, doing an adaptation so good that it ends up being the basis for an anniversary edition worldwide? AND it’s a video game license that’s up there with Mario, Pac-Man, and Sonic? Kudos, gents. (Screenshot from Gamekult.com, Click for larger.)

ITEM: ZOMBIES! In honour of The Walking Dead Volume 6 finally shambling it’s way on to store shelves this week (yeah, no kidding there aren’t any fast zombies in TWD), may I present to you two chances for you to take on your own metaphor for consumerism/racism/society as a whole? These flash-based zombie killin’ games will get you all pumped up until you die, and realise that when the Zombiepocalypse comes, it’s gonna be about our brains, one way or another…

1. BOXHEAD: ROOMS and MORE ROOMS: Okay, so you’re in a room, and you have to defeat neverending legions of the undead using a myriad of weapons. You only last until you run out of ammo. The End. Despite this, it’s incredibly addictive and mildly depressing. Did I mention that Satan is in the game too? Lots of Satans? Yeah. There’s also the BOXHEAD: HALOWEEN SPECIAL, in which you as lone-gun-toting-hero must lead groups of ‘civilians’ to safety. But we all know that in the world of the undead, there’s no such thing as safety. http://www.kongregate.com/games/SeanCooper/boxhead-more-rooms
2. THE LAST STAND: Okay, so you’re behind a barrier, and you need to defeat neverending legions of the undead using a myriad of weapons. Sound familiar? Actually, it’s fairly different from BOXHEAD (more detailed/realistic for one), with a focus on dividing up your daylight hours between searching for survivors, weaponry, and rebuilding the only thing between you and the teeming legions of zombie hordes. Lots of fun zombie-movie in-jokes amongst the wide array of shambling (and occasionally running) corpses that you must destroy. I really like the hunting rifle, myself. http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/the-last-stand/

ITEM: Somehow I missed this, but a week ago it looks like GayGamer.net, a homocentric (heh) video game news/commentary site started up their own comics division. Cleverly entitled http://gaygamer.net/comics/, it’s going to cover the queer goings-on in the comics world. Somehow it missed my Cockphobia post. Perhaps it was beneath their notice. At any rate, posting at the blog has been a little spotty since it launched, but they just added a new blogger and it’s always good to have more queer-positive content out there.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

- Christopher

Not me, of course, but take a trip around the internet lately and you’ll find that the poor, put-upon fanboy is being subjected to higher-than-normal ammounts of cock by the unfeeling bastards in charge of the comics industry. How’s that for the antithesis of the typical complaints about homosexuality and even male sexuality in comics?

It all started with Don MacPherson, talking about the images below:

“One has to give DC Comics credit, though, for sexualizing characters of both genders in its newest solicitations. Just check out the Alex Ross-painted cover image for Justice Society of America #7, slated for release in July. It depicts the newest member of the title team, Citizen Steel, a young man carrying on his family’s heroic tradition after he was altered by liquid metal excreted by a Nazi super-villain.

“That strange steel elixir has transformed him into an invulnerable super-hero, a man of steel. And if one looks closely, it’s not just his fists and flesh that are hard as a rock. Perhaps his red, white and blue costume has led him to believe he’s a postal carrier, because he’s looking down at a package… one he seems more than ready to deliver.

“Groovy… it’s a special delivery… for the ladies. Or perhaps this is DC’s subtle attempt to test of the waters in the yaoi fanbase.”
- Don Macpherson

Oh Don, you’re right, because whyever would a dude wanna look at another dude’s package? I mean, that’s solely the domain of ladies and yaoi fans, who are also mostly ladies.

So what starts off as a pretty ignorant comment in a well-meaning article by Don about the sexification of Catwoman et al. snowballs into Brian Cronin making a jack-ass of himself over at the CBR blogs. Take it away, Brian:

“So, just when I was about to expand DC Comic cover snark this month to include a discussion of two horrible horrible horrible horrible statues that DC solicited this week, Don MacPherson had to alert me to a piece he wrote on those two statues at his neat site… Don also made a catch that, admittedly, I do not think I would have noticed, regarding the JSA cover solicited for July…

“Notice anything creepily unusual? Look closer (as Don so ably does for us).

“How freaking creepy is THAT? My pal Jake said to me, “I think there are two equally creepy options - 1. Ross intentionally, on his own accord, drew a big bulge in the guy’s pants or 2. The model Ross had for Citizen Steel had a big bulge, and Ross decided to paint it in.”

“Pretty darn creepy.”
- Brian Cronin

Where do I start with that? First and foremost, there’s a reason that “Comics Should Be Good” isn’t linked from my site, and the above is a good indicator of why. Second, that’s what “Queer Fear” is, in case you were wondering. Brian and his ‘buddy’ Jake are ‘creeped out’ by a bulge in another guy’s pants (artistic or otherwise). The idea that an artist chose to give a character an impressively-rendered package is actually frightening to these fellas, and the idea that his model might’ve had a good-sized package in real life? And Alex Ross decided NOT to neuter him for some insane reason? Equally as creepy.

The best, best part, is the comments section at Cronin’s post. Wherin a bunch of fanboys come to Brian Cronin’s defense over finding cock terrifying. My favourite bit is where “Jake” says:

“What weirded me out about it wasn’t that a bulge existed, but what must have been Ross’s thought process. It was his clear devotion to accurately reproducing what an erect penis would look like in a superhero costume. Either he planned on giving Citizen Steel a boner, or whoever his model that he painted from had one, and he made damn sure he captured a good likeness.”

Jake, buddy, on behalf of all of us who have made hobby out of studying the bulges in guys’ pants, let me state—for the record—that that is not what a good-sized cock looks like when it is erect, in form-fitting material. It isn’t even an artistic approximation therof. That’s just a good-sized soft cock looks like. I’m… I’m very sorry that you can’t tell the difference between the two. I’m afraid I’m going to have to recommend some remedial work for you in this subject. I recommend starting with the underwear section of InternationalMale.com for an hour a day until you can tell the difference.

While Brian Cronin appears to have decided his post doesn’t need defending (I’d submit that it’s, instead, indefensible) Don Macpherson is not one to take criticism lightly, and his defence of his original column continues in the comments section at Comics Should Be Good, and even spills over into the comments section at the Newsarama Blog. In response to a critic, Don offers up “You make it sound as though Ross has no choice but to include a bulge just because there’s one apparent on the model.” Did I mention that said critic is irate homosexual Dorian Wright from PomoBarney? No? It is:

“So, Don, is it the very idea of a bulge that you’re objecting to, then? Because, yes, if Ross is accurately attempting to portray the model, and say what you will about his art, he does appear to be meticulous in attempting to make it as realistic as possible, than he probably should show a bit of package if the model is. But most importantly, SO WHAT? It’s not as if Ross has lovingly detailed the outline of the shaft through the clothing. All he’s done is paint the shadows and highlights in such a way as to suggest that his model wasn’t a Ken doll. Honestly, from some of these reactions, you’d think comic fans were uncomfortable with the suggestion that men have genitals.”
- Dorian Wright

It’s always fun to see Dorian be bitchy, and here he’s fully justified. He’s playing politic here too, and not just out and out claiming that lots and lots of comics fans are entirely uncomfortable with the suggestion that men have genitals. They are. To be fair, it’s not just comics fans, lots of dudes are completely and utterly uncomfortable with their sexuality, but Comic Fans are pretty special in that regard, and comics characters have long been so artisticly dickless as to be concave where their genitals should be it’s not surprising that they’re a little on edge. As a commenter at Newsarama points out, the artistic focus of the piece is clearly the face and chest of the character, not the cock, but certain posters just seem mesmerised by Citizen Steele’s package (that’s his real name, by the way). Why is that, do we think? I’m sure the folks who have a problem with it—the commenters that find it ‘creepy’ or scary—would argue that you simply can’t avoid looking at it, it’s so prominent! I’d like to offer another theory.

Go check out this out. It’s a report on a study about “eyetracking” or seeing how people interact with the internet. It uses a set of goggles to measure where the eye is fixating on a page, and then turns that into visual data. It ranges from bright red, where the eye lingers for a longer period of time, to blue, where the eye barely scans. But yeah, let’s skip to the relevant part. Here’s me quoting a big chunk from the site.

–>Quoted from http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070312ruel/

When photos do contain people related to the task at hand, or the content users are exploring, they do get fixations. However, gender makes a distinct difference on what parts of the photo are stared at the longest. Take a look at the hotspot below.

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

This image of George Brett was part of a larger page with his biographical information. All users tested looked the image, but there was a distinct difference in focus between men and women.

Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.

<--End Quote. (Bolded emphasis above is mine)

It’s not Alex Ross’ fault, gentlemen. You just can’t help staring at the cock. Even when you’re afraid of it.

- Christopher
Note: I’m sorry that this had to be my first post of substance in days.
Edited to add: Pictures of dudes with big packages, for ‘comparisson’.

Since my last “Catching Up” post went over so very, very well, I figured it was time for another. Here’s what the last 4 days of Google Reader have turned up:

- Hollywood.com has David Duchovney confirming a new X-Files movie is in the works. According to Duchovney, “This week, they’re starting some kind of road towards doing it (the film). Gillian and I both want to be in it now. We’re happy to do it.” How about that eh? Time heals all wounds, as does a pretty thoroughly unspectacular post-X-Files career… On a related note, my employer has a ton of original X-Files art for sale by X-Files comics adaptation artist Sean Scoffield. There’s also art from the Queer as Folk TV Show, the movie eXistenZ, and the recent Underworld mini-series from Marvel Comics. Just Saying.

- Video Game website “Gameasutra” has an article up on being out and LGBT in the video gaming industry. The answers are very, very similar to what I hear from gays in the comics industry, so in lieu of any such articles on comics, I figured it was worth pointing out to the industry-watchers who watch this blog. Here’s a good quote from the opening:

Jeb Havens, probably one of the most visible and vocal LGBT developers, says, “It’s not like there’s only a handful” of gay people making games, “but there’s no presence or community. There’s no ‘gay’ face to it.”

I’d love to write a similar article about LGBT creators and industry folk in comics, particularly within the larger realm of blogging, but with no time to spare it’s not gonna happen. C’est la vie, but go read this one: it’s really well done. Thanks to GayGamer.net for the link.

- The best part about my job is selling good comics to people. There’s a special kind of magic to selling someone the first volume of The Invisibles, or giving them Scott Pilgrim for the first time. It honestly makes all of the other stuff, like selling Civil War, totally worthwhile. I was reminded of this by Matt Forsythe back in the comments to my Taiyo Matsumoto post, as it looks like just went out and dropped a bunch of coin on Matsumoto books. Nice! This is why I was so pleased to see this nostaligic remembrance of comics retail from Richard Bruton at the blog Fictions, about his time at Nostalgia & Comics in Birmingham:

“The rarest of prizes though, the really fun one was when a customer would come in and tell you that they’d read everything they wanted and could you suggest anything to read. That always made for a fun 10 minutes or so of chat and selling.

“I always sold the books to people with the promise that if they didn’t like them all they had to do was bring it back in and we’d refund the money, no questions asked. To me it seemed the only fair thing to do. After all, this wonderful customer is putting down good money for a book just because I’m telling them it’s wonderful. I’ve spent a little time asking all the pertinent questions to gauge exactly what sort of thing they’re after, but I could always misjudge their comic character and sell them something they hate.

“I’m very proud of the fact that in all my years of doing this, not a single copy has ever been returned. Not one.” - Richard Bruton, Fictions Blog

I don’t have that kind of track record, sadly, but I occasionally let what I think people should be reading get in the way of what they might enjoy reading. I’m doing my best :) Tip of the hat to the Forbidden Planet Blog for the link.

I think that’s all for now. The contest details for the Garage Band contest are finished. They’re awesome. Posted later today.

- Christopher