Review: Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast: A Second Bowl of Serial

A long time after the first book gathering the first hundred strips of Greg Fox’s online series Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast, here comes the second collection, with the puny title of A Second Bowl of Serial¹.

As the title suggests, the strip, published online bi-weekly, features a bed & breakfast house in New England, run by a gay guy and mostly populated by gay guys. There’s a half-dozen regular characters, and far more occasional ones. Considering it’s been years since I last wrote about the strip, I’ll begin by introducing the main characters again: Kyle is the owner of the B&B, a solid, reliable man who’s into healthy, veggie food, much to the dismay of some of his guests; Richard is a rather flamboyant guy, unlucky in love, the closest thing the strip has to a clichéd gay man; Brad is a football player, with a superhero physique and a slowly developping self-esteem as a gay man; Lance is a kind of cold-hearted bastard more interesting in his high-paying career than in a relationship; Eduardo is the youngest of the lot, still sorting out his life after having been thrown out by his family for being gay. Three more characters are really important in this collection, two of which are new: Nick, one of the few characters who’s not classically handsome (I’d say he’s classically manly, but that’s another question), is a mechanic and a loudmouth (though none of the characters are exactly shrinking violets) who appeared in the first collection; Breyer is a Canadian, large-sized guy who quickly plays an important part in Kyle’s life; finally, there’s Dave, who struggles with feelings of worthlessness because of his being wheelchair-bound.

Eduardo, Brad, Kyle, Lance and Richard

Greg Fox weaves a story with a lot of strands, most regarding love and friendship. Two new couples emerge in this collection, with the reactions of the other characters as a chorus, sometimes supportive, sometimes less so. In fact, another driving force of the strip is the antagonism between some of the characters, who often reach an makeshift truce, though rarely a frank appreciation of each other. For a strip which mostly does without big, dramatic events, there is in fact a lot of drama, and also a lot of very funny one-liners. Fox’s characters tend to be people with a personality as strong as their sense of humor, which makes for entertaining reading. They clash and uneasily make up just like members of biological families–the creation of a chosen family is in fact an explicit point in the strip, a theme that will surely resonates with a lot of readers. Kyle plays the stabilizing role, as he gets along with everybody, and the other characters all add something to the mix, sometimes in an unexpected fashion, as they go from foils to allies and back again.

Nick and Dave bond over computers

Kyle and Breyer's first date doesn't go well

Fox’s art has gone from interesting to solid, over the course of the strip. His realistic style delineates each muscle, each body hair in an obviously loving way. Which makes it all the more jarring (at least for me) when characters sometimes seem to be drawn slightly off-model when not in the foreground–but other readers might not notice that, or find it endearing. What I really like in Fox’s style is the variation he manages to bring to body types which are, for the most part, of the muscled, built variety. I also appreciate the care he gives to the detailed setting of his stories, while avoiding to create cluttered, unreadable pages. That seems easy, but judging from what some mainstream artists do, it isn’t.

Something else I really like in these strips: they take some time to read. Between the detailed art and the loquacious but not verbose dialogs, you can spend a good time immersed in Kyle and his friends’ lives. From what Fox says at the back of the book, it also seems we won’t have to wait as long for the third collection, which will begin the color run of the strips. So, head to New England and find your way to the bed & breakfast where a jock walks around in his undies and men spend as much time in (almost) friendly bickering as in heart-to-heart discussions of their love life’s ups-and-down. You won’t regret the trip.