Review: Roy & Al

Artist(s): Ralf König.

After the Bull’s Balls graphic novel, König gets a new English edition from his German publisher with Roy & Al1, one of his funniest books and the first one to focus on pets.
Al is a high-bred little white dog who longs for the days when he lived with his mistress, before she died and her faggot son got to take care of the dog. Roy is a large mongrel with a calm disposition who doesn’t mind that his master is into anal sex and fist-fucking, as long as he gets fed and walked daily. Both meet when their masters do, and the straight dogs have to learn to live together, which isn’t easy for Al, who’s as snobbish as he’s homophobic.

Roy, Al, and their masters.

Creating a homophobic dog forced to live with a gay guy is already quite a funny idea. But König manages to sustain the level of laughs throughout the book, partly by turning his story into a repetition comedy (Al sees his master having sex, throws a tantrum, gets reprimanded…) with lots of twists, and partly by developping the relationships between his human characters on one hand (Al and Roy’s masters become lovers and have even more sex) and the dogs on the other.

König’s art is priceless, with a keen eye for facial expressions, especially for his dogs, and his timing is perfect – he also draws some very hot scenes. This is comedy at its best, and combined with the very good printing on this book (nothing to do with the printing of Bull’s Balls), you get one of the most recommended of the lighter König’s books.


Notes:
  1. This 62-page large-sized graphic novel is translated and published by MännerschwarmSkript Verlag. Available from this German online gay bookshop.
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    Update 09/2006: A new edition has been published by Arsenal Pulp Press, and is available at Amazon.

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