Entries for February 2007:
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I don't know what's happening, but there's a real dearth of gay-themed comics right now. Or maybe I'm missing something.
The good thing about that is that it has made me have a look at Yaoi Press, a publisher of non-Japanese yaoi I'd neglected the last months, who'd published a title I'd mostly enjoyed, Pinned!. A recent interview with publisher (and writer of Pinned!) Yamila Abraham states that, contrary to their other titles, Pinned! was designed to appeal to gay men as well as straight women (who are their target audience). But it seems that Pinned! sold poorly, the masculine appearance of the characters putting off the female audience. So, I guess that straight women and gay men really don't have the same tastes.
Stallion certainly doesn't make the same "mistake". Written and drawn by the Spanish two-women Studio Kôsen, this Western tale of love and vengeance features young or slightly androgynous guys, and there's nary a body hair in sight.
Josey is a young man chasing Bill Tempest, a man who'd left him for dead on a previous encounter. Stallion is a young Indian who's also suffered abuse at the hands of Tempest, and wants to kill him. The two cross paths, and their life will never be the same. Okay, the story is kind of predictable, but it's well-paced, the characters are engaging, and after all, it's a romance comic, so melodrama is in order.
For me, the selling point is the art, which is beautiful. Very detailed, obviously researched, it also gives the characters a strong sensuality, and not only in the sex scenes (which are hot, but not explicit).
That story only fills the first half of the 192-page volume. Apart from a short making-of for Stallion, we find a short story by the same team, drawn in an earlier style, closer to what I've seen in Japanese yaoi. It shows a young man chasing a vampire who's killed his dad, forcing him to take a hard decision. Not bad at all.
The last story in this volume is Cancellation of Darkness, written by Laila Reimoz and drawn by Amelia Woo.  A cursed college boy around whom friendly people get easily hurt finds an unexpected ally in the person of a young faculty member, and tells him about his weird, childhood Teddy Bear who wants him all for itself. Demon and human will fight for the love (and the body!) of the young guy, with devastating results. Entertaining, but not light.
The rest of the book is taken with ads for other Yaoi Press books and a preview of one of them. You can find this book at the Yaoi Press online or at Amazon.

Published in English by Class Comics right after Porky #1, The Pornomicon is the second comic by Logan to be translated from the original French.
This one-shot is a weird and compelling story blending Lovecraftian mythos with gay sex. You know, tentacled porn and all that. But in 24 pages, Logan actually manages to write a few characters with a personality and, surprise, large cocks. Extremely large cocks.
In the age of the Crusades, a knight comes back from Jerusalem to visit a monk friend of his. He's brought back a strange book that's given him unholy nightmares, and he wants the monk to decipher it. Apparently, in Logan's version of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu likes men. A lot.
And this is only the beginning of the story, which then crosses a few centuries to land in the XXth century, with an artist whose sculptures ressemble Yog-Sothoth and all his little friends. Although they're not little. At all.
I like Logan's art in this comic even more than in Porky. He wears his influences on his sleeves (one of the pages has backgrounds "after Mike Mignola"), and his design sense is on full display. Apart from being a very good, disturbing erotic comic, it's also a good comic, period.
You can find that comic at the Class Comics site, and more about Logan at his own site.

When, a couple of years ago, I wrote a review of various gay-themed French comics, I didn't write anything about the erotic ones. I'd meant to do it since then, so I'm very glad that Class Comics, Patrick Fillion's operation run by him and his partner, has begun translating some of France's gay erotic comics.
Logan is an artist whose work I really enjoy: he tends to draw big, burly and often hairy guys far from the canons of the eternal, artificially-smooth, drug-enhanced gay men often found in mainstream gay porn. His series Porky, the first issue of which was published in English last April by Class Comics (there's a second one in French), is a fun romp mixing more-or-less realistic sex (with the exception of rather big dicks) and sci-fi elements which build up little by little. The title character is an 18-year old guy, named Benjamin but nicknamed Porky (he's not especially slim) by his classmates, who rises up to the insult by showing how cock-hungry he is. A bum dressed as Santa Claus will enable him to fulfill one his fantasies...
Add to that a mysterious, eyes-glowing-red stranger (with an enormous cock, of course) who appears out of thin air after a big explosion, Porky's father who's about to get out of jail (and pays with his ass for it), and you get an entertaining comic where men are men, all the while fucking each other.
Logan draws all this in a scratchy, solid style which is heavily influenced by comics from all over the world (making him a very modern artist), his storytelling is clear and dense, and his cocks thick enough to have a swing over them. Did I mention I find his cocks a bit too big? Ah well, that's a matter of taste, after all.
Porky walks a thin line (only thing that's thin here, if you'll pardon the pun) between reality and fantasy, both in the men drawn, who have a lot of physicality (and I don't mean that because they're all stocky), and the setting and tone of the story. And you'll see, the second issue is even better.
You can find that comic at the Class Comics site, and more about Logan at his own site.