Review: Stanley and the mask of mystery

Coincidences are fun: I just reviewed the Stripped anthology, and it includes a strip by David Shenton, whose work was unknown to me until a few weeks ago.

Stanley and the mask of mystery is Shenton’s first graphic novel, published in 1983 by the now-defunct British Gay Men’s Press. As you can imagine, it has been out-of-print for a long time, which is a real shame¹. Stanley is a gay man who lives in the UK and who can definitely be called a clone: he’s got the muscles, the mustache, and the checkered shirt that goes with it. One day, waking up, he finds a leather mask and boots in his bed… and has no idea how they arrived there. What follows is an unpredictable romp through Stanley’s days, as the author puts everything but the kitchen sink in the 56 large-sized pages of this book: we’ve got games, puzzles, aerobic lessons, personal ads from a gay magazine, excerpt from a children’s book (ok, not the usual kind…) and lots of other wild ideas presented with a packed storytelling which creates an extremely dense reading experience (think 80′s Howard Chaykin, if that means anything to you).
David Shenton’s art style is as whimsical as his ideas. It seems he can draw everything, and enjoys doing so. The humor is gentle but politically relevant: a page showing public lavatories filled with guys wearing false noses and mustaches has two bobbies spying each other in the stalls as they’re trying to play spot-the-queers, for example. The main character’s search for the origin of the mask will lead him to an unexpected place, and reminds me of the first strip in the Howard Cruse’s Wendel strips, another funny coincidence.

The author has done three other graphic novels, two of which are collection of strips, with the third being a complete adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé, a 1986 full-color effort published by Quartet Books, which is worth searching for, since it’s visually brilliant–and it includes an openly gay subplot implicit in Wilde’s writing.
Lastly, David Shenton is currently writing and drawing a very funny and weird online gay-themed strip, Get Her!, which he intends to collect in print when it’s finished.
All of these works, which are only a small part of Shenton’s production over the years (as can be seen on his website), show a sensibility which seems to me to be far from the current main gay representations, and is all the more precious for it.