Pretty Boys Are Fools For Ignoring Him

Some time ago, my good friend Bernard Joubert (comics journalist, translator and France's top specialist of censorship in comics) told me he was only interested in autobiographical comics if he knew the person doing them. When he did, reading autobiographical material would be like getting a letter from that person telling about the latest news and events in his/her life. On the other hand, if the author was a complete stranger, there wasn't that connection of knowing who the real person doing those comics was and for Bernard that made it yet another one of those comics where boring everyday people tell you about their boring everyday lives.

I must say that I'm quite different from Bernard in that I love any sort of autobiographical material, be they comics, diaries, videos, photographs. But as it happens, I know Sina Sparrow personally (and no, his real name isn't "sparrow"), creator of the zines Art Fag (two issues), Pretty Boys Ignore Me (two issues) and The Mysterious Element of Beauty.

Art Fag is a collection of autobiographical one-page strips in black and white (some can be seen in colour on Sina's website).

Pretty Boys Ignore Me and The Mysterious Element of Beauty are collections of drawings, usually made at clubs or on public transport, each with a very short text, usually one sentence. Sina seems to try and imagine some of the back story in those strangers' lives and it has a kind of poetic quality.

The thing is, I've known Sina for years, but I feel anybody who's been reading his comics would also know something of his life that would make him more than a stranger. Sina has been involved in making zines for quite a while (one, Boy Crazy Boy, gave its name to his website and imprint), and his comics have always been either fantasy-based (with a lot of superheroes) or slice-of-life. But one also gets the feeling that the fantasies express preoccupations of everyday life while a recurring theme in the slice-of-life comics and images is the mixture of fascination and fear that happen when real beauty clashes with the fantasy beauty the artist yearns for. 

What unites all those pictures and comics is the thick line, which is used both for drawing and writing, and often for colouring when he uses crayons, and which is like a handwriting. In fact it is a handwriting used indifferently for words and pictures.

I haven't mentioned the queer element in theses zines, but really, it's just because it's everywhere, so much a part of Sina's life that it's not really appropriate to call it an "element". "The Mysterious Element of Queerness"? Like "The Mysterious Element of Beauty" it is both strikingly evident and difficult to pinpoint.

You can buy those zines ("Approved by the Comics Cock", it says on the covers) from Sina's big cartel online store which also carries postcards, tee-shirts and other silly and not-so-silly things. And you can see the images he makes on his website.

Going around in Circles

Not all American comics are superhero comics. This simple statement seems hard to believe in 2015 when we are flooded with blockbuster movie adaptations of Marvel and DC superheroes. What probably seems even harder to believe, is that the most successful characters in American comic books have not been superheroes but animals. Funny animals, to be precise. You know - Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny and the like. In the early 1950s, the best-selling comic book, with monthly sales of over 3 million copies, was Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. When their popularity dropped in the United States in the 1960s, the Disney funny animals (especially Donald Duck) kept on being immensely popular in Europe and remain so to this day. While not native to comic books, the funny animal genre having originated in animated cartoons, funny animals adapted very well to the media. And just as comic books grew more adult, so did the genre. Starting in the 1980s, funny animal comics with adult themes - "furries" - started being published on a regular basis in the US and some long-running titles are still published to this day. One of the "adult" themes was gay relationships (and/or gay sex), which leads us to this installment's subject, a little gem called Circles, which ran from 2000 to Summer 2008, with one collection, It Feels Like I've Been Here Before published in July 2005 collecting issues 0 through 4. The story was left unfinished until creators Andrew French (writer), Scott Fabianek and Steve Domanski (artists) finished it in the form of a prose novel that tells the story that would have been issues 9 to 13, The Years Keep Rolling By.

Circles is basically a soap opera chronicling the life of the all-gay occupants of a house in Boston owned by Scottish expat Paulie Mayhew (a dog), who lives with his lover, banker Douglas (an otter). The story begins with the arrival of a new tenant, student Marty (Martin) Miller (a skunk) who gets introduced to the other occupants of the house - artist Arthur Korsky (a bear), wannabe actor Taye (a kangaroo) and gym-bunny Ken (a leopard). The circles of the title are the circle of friends made up of the house's occupants and the circle of seasons, each episode taking part three months from the preceding one, from Spring 2001 to Spring 2003. A relationship soon develops between Marty and Taye, we learn why Douglas seems to be holding a grudge against Arthur, how Paulie became HIV+, and we see Ken get in an abusive relationship (and out of it with the help of his friends). Characters have to deal with the consequences of choices made - or not made - in their past and with the risks of getting emotionally involved with other people. They are, for better or worse, a family of friends.

Marty and Tay prepare for Christmas in Circles 4

Circles is intensely readable and the characters quickly grow on you (a very favorable review was published on the Gay Comics List). I called it a little gem, but it is also in many ways a diamond in the rough. While the characters are always very alive and expressive, the strip often suffers from the fact that the artists are - to put it kindly - lousy at backgrounds. The comic also suffered from being published over a long period of time. Originally meant to be a quarterly, it pretty soon turned into a once-a-year event, with the final issues (9 through 13) never materializing. It's nevertheless worth checking out if you've never read it before and the whole series is available from publisher Rabbit Valley either as print comics or digital editions (except for the collections).

Paulie tries ot help Ken get out of his abusive relationship in Circles 7