Review: The Book of Boy Trouble

Would you be interested in a collection of gay-themed zines by a variety of talented cartoonists?
Because that’s essentially what The Book of Boy Trouble is. Editors Robert Kirby and David Kelly took parts of the first four issues of their Boy Trouble zine (the fifth, already in book form, is still available from Kelly) and added lots of new stories (including 24 pages in color) to make a 130-page book just published by Green Candy Press (also available from Amazon).

As I’ve already written in my review of those first four issues, the stories essentially concentrate on teenagers or guys in their twenties, and range from real-life issues to cute meditations on love and attraction. There’s the occasional flight of fancy, as with the very funny Andy Hartzell story of a guy tricking with a pint-sized angel, and some stories are decidedly less light, like Jaime Cortez’s musings on power dynamics while watching an older white guy with a younger Latino in a gay bar.
Among the all-new stories are the Justin Hall’s travel story, as he recalls meeting a young Indian man while crossing the Peruvian Amazon. Hall is his usual intelligent self, managing to transform what could have been a simple sexual encounter into a reflexion on personal gay expression in non-Western settings. And he draws really attractive but realistic guys.
Not surprisingly, David Kelly tells the cutest stories in the book, with his pared-down style and the sunny smiles of his characters. There’s also a feel-good story by Brett Hopkins, drawn in the most realistic style in the book (most other artists tend toward a more cartoony style), which looks like the beginning of a longer story.
I was about to say I’d like to see more of Hopkins’s work, but then, I’d like to see more work by all those artists. Let’s hope Kirby and Kelly will someday give us a sixth issue of Boy Trouble. In the meantime, why won’t you get yourself a copy of this collection?

Panels by Kirby	A Russ Turk page	Michael Fahy likes hairy butts
	Panel by Kelly