Review: Nightlife

Artist(s): Bastian Jonsson, Dale Lazarov.

The Master of Silent Porn is back with Nightlife1, a new collection of three tales, this time in collaboration with Bastian Jonsson, a Swedish artist. A year after Manly, Dale Lazarov writes three more stories where two men meet, have sex, and ride together into the sunset. It might sound repetitive, but it definitely isn’t.

From Hard Cases

The book opens with Hard Cases, a story set at an open mike night in a bar. Two guys meet there, one playing the guitar on stage, the other organising the event, though he also knows how to handle the instrument. And they go on to spend the night together, playing with each other’s bodies and with good-sized dildoes.
I thought it was rather interesting to have a wordless story take place in an environment full of music and songs. That did put the pressure on the artist, who has to work even more on the body language of the characters. Bastian Jonsson passes with flying colors. The interaction between the characters is perfectly clear, and it must be said that the color art by Yann Duminil adds a lot of warmth to the pages.

From Layover

The second story is Layover, where cancelled flights and the resulting long wait in an airport has one happy consequence…won’t you guess? A great fuck in an hotel room between a blond, Viking guy and another, dark-haired hunky guy. There are lots of really neat little things troughout this story, like the way the morning after discomfort is portrayed in a couple of panels, or the proof that a breaking condom during sex can be used in a sensual way, under the right circumstances (you’ll have to see it to believe me, I’m sure).

From Closing Time

The third and last story is Closing Time, which brings together two rather different men, an older, white-haired bouncer at an underground club filling a disused church, and the other a young man with a red mohawk and a punkish look, who even has to show his ID to prove he’s old enough. The young man first meets another young guy, but right outside the club, the two are attacked by three thugs. The second young guy flees, but fortunately, a white(-haired) knight comes to the rescue of the punk guy, and sex ensues, undoubtedly adrenalin-fueled.

As can be seen in the three illustrations on this page, Bastian Jonsson’s style is nicely realistic without being photo-realistic, and while all his men are far better looking than average–but then, this is an erotic comic–,they don’t look like inflated porn dolls. The body language of his characters is never melodramatic, but seems slightly enhanced, which works very well for a silent comic. Oh, and the sex scenes are damn sensual, explicit and full of joy.

Apart from the erotic scenes, the three stories have another important common point: the romance aspect. The sex shown is always both hot and tender, and they all end with the two men in a relationship, which is suggested in various ways, sometimes with one single panel, sometimes with a longer sequence. With these epilogues, Dale Lazarov finds intelligent uses for comics’s strengths, the capacity to pack much meaning in one panel or to show the passage of time in an economic, effective way. And as he’s already proved with both Steve MacIsaac and Amy Colburn, he’s good at choosing the artists to work with, Bastian Jonsson being no exception.

Nightlife is another strong entry in the wordless erotic comics corpus Lazarov and his artists are building brick by brick. His two creators are working on other projects, and you can visit them at their web pages (here and here) to follow their work.


Notes:
  1. An 80-page graphic novel published by Bruno Gmünder, available at Amazon.

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