The Gay Geek (June 12, 2008)

We now bring you some regularly scheduled beefcake:
I really enjoy the work of gay artist Jason Bone, there’s something about his style that I’ve loved ever since I saw a Doom Patrol sketch he did back in his amateur press days. His beefcake sketchblog, Man’s Adventure, is one of my favorite feeds on my newsreader. He doesn’t update very often but whenever he does it’s a bit of a treat.

Hopefully I can scratch that part about not updating very often. Bone is now promising to attempt more frequent updates, promising (on average) a guy a day. He’s already added a new trio of images, including this one of two studs playing strip poker.

There’s something about Bone’s line work that makes for some really sexy guys, even if his "type" is different from mine.

Toykopop Burst:
Plenty of rumors were flying about influential comic publisher Tokyopop after the Book Expo America a couple weekends ago. The publisher’s troubles became official in the days following as staff layoffs and a split into two companies was announced – one company will handle publishing while another company, Tokyopop Media will handle film production.

While I’ll be interested in seeing what Tokyopop Media will focus on, I'm most interested in seeing how the publishing company will fare. Tokyopop has long been an important publisher for gay comic readers. Early in this decade, they revolutionalized the comics market by pushing manga in bookstores (taking them out of comic shops, where female-friendly and gay-appealing genres like shoujo struggled to find their audience). Not long after finding success in bookstores, Tokyopop brought the first boy-meets-boy romances to US bookstores with Fake and Gravitation.

Tokyopop later got into creating original graphic novels, which included lesbian and gay inclusive titles. That included Steady Beat, a rather ABC Afterschool Special-ish story about a young woman realizing that her sister is gay just as she starts to fall for the new boy at school, who is being raised by a gay couples. Off*Beat told a rather quirky romance between two reclusive high school guys as 12 Days took June Kim's amazingly moody art with a story of a lesbian dealing with her ex-girlfriend’s death.

Around the same time, Tokyopop quietly started the BLU imprint, which focused on YAOI. The imprint was always fairly slow-moving, especially in comparison to the rest of Toykopop’s output, but they did put out the excellent Shout Out Loud (one of the few titles I’ve seen mix romance with coming out issues) as well as Gerard and Jaques, a title long on my ‘to read’ list as it comes from the amazing Fumi Yoshinaga. Tokypop has given gay comic fans plenty to enjoy over the years, often times being the one to break down barriers.

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Unfortunately, that’s not all Tokyopop has done in that time. Heidi McDonald makes a comment I’ve been thinking when she notes that Tokyopop is very similar to another major publisher to see a high profile collapse – CrossGen, who kept introducing new products without much follow-through. Tokyopop rolled out a promotional “magazine”, turned their original titles into audio drama podcasts, revamped its website into a social networking site and recently launched a webcomics initiative.

Will the company manage to recover, find its way and continue adding to the gay inclusiveness in comics? I’m sure other publishers will take over any YAOI gap left if BLU were lost, but the only other original graphic novel publisher with a similar amount of gay inclusiveness I can think of is Oni Press (who’ve given us the likes of Scott Pilgrim, Maria’s Wedding and Hopeless Savages).