Review: Khaos Komix Vol. 1

Khaos Komix is a charming webcomic whose main characters are queer teenagers covering the whole LGBT spectrum, each chapter telling the story of one character as he or she relates as friend or lover to the other characters. In this first collection, the focus is on Mark and Steve, who begin as childhood friends and evolve into something else by the time they enter they mid-teenage years.

Writer and artist Tab Kimpton is young, British, and from what he says in the About page at the back of the book, he’s been working on this comic for a long time, since what you can read on his site and in this book is the third and definitive version of his stories. I haven’t read the previous versions, but this one is an engaging view of what it can mean to be young and not straight in our modern society.

Steve realizes Mark is gay

Mark notices Steve's roving eye

Steve and Mark’s stories develop over the course of several years, but the meat of the tales is how each of the boys understand that the other one is attracted to his friend and what happens after that (it’s no easy road). In telling those stories, Tab Kimpton manages to find a balance between realism and romance, in the situations he describes (one guy tries to get the other to kiss him during a drunken evening with no parents at home, for example) and in the temperament of his characters (who tend to blush at the sweetest time). In fact, most of the plot of the stories is character-driven, each boy taking control of his life little by little, navigating the deep waters of friendship, attraction and love while negotiating the twin obstacles of parental watchfulness and (mostly) well-meaning friends’ meddlesomeness.

Tab Kimpton’s art is as charming as his characters: open and expressive faces, varied body language, and a propensity for drawing cute but everyday-looking characters. He also uses some codes from manga (well, I assume they’re from manga, I might be wrong), such as a more stylised version of characters to denote strong emotions. His storytelling is always clear and strong, which is not something I can say of every manga-influenced webcomic. Or maybe I’m just showing my age by writing that.

In any case, this first volume of Khaos Komix¹ is the kind of book I would have liked to read when I was a teen myself. It’s full of warmth and optimism, without being saccharine. I hope Tab Kimpton will publish the rest of his series in book form, because this webcomic definitely deserves it.