Interview conducted by Will Cooling
DISCLAIMER: STICKY is an adult readers anthology, and the following interview and preview images contain language and imagery intended only for mature audiences
Excerpt from the STICKY press release:
STICKY is a hardcover collection of erotic tales of man-on-man carnality and sweetness written by Dale Lazarov and drawn by Steve MacIsaac. “This is why your mom didn’t want you reading so many comic books,” says Unzipped. “What’s cool about [STICKY’s] man-on-man comic action is that it’s not just hot, it’s also friendly, and, well, versatile.”
TimeOut Chicago says “carnality and sweetness is the exactly the right combination that makes STICKY a real standout in the genre. Readers will find the material is both erotically charged and unabashedly romantic”. STICKY features several erotic comic stories that, while incredibly hot and masculine, show how gay men not only just hook up: they connect. In “Hold On”, a casual street fair hook up between two hot guys turns into an extended challenge to see how far they can go while delaying orgasm. And they go pretty far! “Talk Show Queers” looks into what happens to the gorgeous gay rodeo star after he’s been brutally dumped by a boyfriend who declares himself straight in front of a talk show audience: gets picked up by the hot, burly security guy sitting front row center. Naturally, they get down to some sticky business… In “Treats”, a sexy, butch pirate and a muscle-bound monk meet at a grad school Halloween party. Trick or treat? Both, if it’s good!
STICKY, although intended predominantly for gay males, is also suitable for heterosexual women who make up a large part of the audience for softcore queer television programs like “Queer As Folk”. And women do like it: in “The Bitch List”, Bitch Magazine says “STICKY presents wordless, atmospheric vignettes of man-on-man action that are intimate and human while still indulging timeless tropes like leather daddies, hot cowboys, and improbably explosive money shots.”
STICKY is published by Bruno Gmunder Verlag, a gay art book publisher in Germany with extensive international distribution. STICKY, a hardcover, is priced at $19.95. Readers can order or purchase STICKY in all bookstores, online or offline; already available in Europe, STICKY is released in the US on April 30th, 2006 and distributed by Bookazine.
Artist Steve Macisaac is a Canadian living and working in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in a number of comics anthologies and ‘zines including What’s Wrong (Arsenal Pulp Press), True Porn (dist. Alternative Comics), Boy Trouble, and Holy Titclamps as well as his own self-published comic, Shirtlifter. This is Dale Lazarov‘s first published work as a comics writer, but definitely not the last. Dale lives and works in Chicago.
“Sexy, stylish, minimalist…an intense mixture of erotic realism and the freedom of comics storytelling makes STICKY a pleasure to have in one hand.”
— Clive Barker, author of Hellraiser
Title: STICKY
Authors: Dale Lazarov & Steve MacIsaac
Publisher: Bruno Gmunder Verlag
$19.95
US Distributor: Bookazine
ISBN: 3861879719
Amazon.com purchase link
The Nexus: How would you explain STICKY to someone who has never heard of it?
Steve: A friend of Dale’s once called it “slice of life porn”; I think that’s pretty accurate.
Dale: “Slice of life gay comics porn”, to be more precise. We first described it, on our press release, as “a comic series of erotic tales of man-on-man carnality and sweetness”.
The Nexus: How did STICKY come about?
Steve: About four years ago I approached Dale with the idea of doing some gay erotic short stories. I was living in Japan at the time, and had a vague idea about submitting the completed work to some of the gay magazines there, all of which run comics. Although that idea didn’t pan out, Eros Comics in Seattle picked it up for a three issue run, which Bruno Gmünder then offered to publish as a hardcover.
Dale: Steve didn’t give me a specific brief for the scripts. I just wrote gay erotic comics that I wanted to read — something with a more human, playful, light tone — and I was lucky that he liked what I wrote. By the completion of the second script, I’d already named the series STICKY; I wanted the comics to be memorable (“sticky”), romantic in a masculine, Walt-Whitmanesque sort of way (“adhesive”), and basted in cum.
The Nexus: What strengths and weaknesses does the comic medium bring to pornography/erotica when compared to more traditional/mainstream mediums such as prose and television?
Steve: Prose is great for immersing you into the scene psychologically, while video has motion and visuals, which are sexually arousing for obvious reasons. I think comics combines both strengths – they’re more immersive and participatory than video while still stimulating arousal through visual appeal. Plus you can play with temporality, setting and story complexity more than with video since people can send more time with each panel.
Dale: Steve’s art is very contemplative and my writing is very much oriented towards gestures and details that reveal story, character and theme, so it’s an excellent medium for us as pornographers. We ask people to dwell on both the erotics of the image and on the sensitivity/sensuality/sensibility of the stories. You have to give them meaningful action to dwell on, though, or the art looks like a pin-up or a dead beat panel.
The Nexus: What comic books and comic book creators have inspired/influenced STICKY?
Dale: I am definitely the love child of Alan Moore and Warren Ellis when it comes to my scripting style. But if there’s anything from a comic that influenced STICKY it’s the Tom of Finland illustration of the gentle, confident smile on a biker’s face when he’s taking two policemen’s cocks up his ass.
Steve: In terms of the way I draw, I really try not too look to much at other artists to see how they came up with specific solutions to problems in the sense that I don’t want to be unduly influenced by / become a second-rate version of people I respect and admire. But some creators who have influenced my art and storytelling methods include Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Dave Sim, Chris Ware, Alex Toth, Garry Trudeau, Dylan Horrocks, Dan Clowes, Herge.
The Nexus: Did you gain any inspiration from porn in other mediums?
Steve: More for reference than inspiration. While drawing the book, I watched a few movies here and there, and looked at a variety photos and stills, trying to get a sense of how to accurately depict the various stages of intercourse. My style really tightened up while doing STICKY, mostly because of the necessity of getting things to look right — even if I didn’t always make it, the striving forced me to improve. Although comics in other genres are often best done with a looser, more impressionistic style, I think porn needs to be a bit more straightforwardly representational if its going to function as something that gets you off. So I looked at a fair amount of depictions of people having sex, just to make sure that I had things right.
Dale: Silent gay porn film shorts from the 70s and 80s were a subconscious influence on me when I wrote STICKY. I have been seeking them out more avidly now that I am aware of their influence because it’s interesting to me how that particular sensibility is entirely absent from contemporary gay pornography. There’s a particular Zeus film where two guys working in a carpentry shop have sex during lunch hour. The look of tenderness and desire that they share with each other after they have sex and return to work is exactly the kind of beautiful hotness that I want to see my collaborators draw.
The Nexus: What role do you think the quality of the plots have played in STICKY’s success? Or was it all down to how hot the sex scenes are?
Steve: I think the plots are pretty instrumental to how well the book comes together, simply because they provide a context that reminds us that these are two people having sex, not just generic, interchangeable body parts.
Dale: I’m working on a book with a lesbian cartoonist who draws gay porn. Because she draws really hot skanky tough guys, I decided to write a book that was more rough-trade and kink-oriented than STICKY for her. The funny thing is her interpretation of the scripts totally responded to the tone of the stories so that showed up in her art as well as the hot skankitude. She describes the characters as “adorable” because of how they relate to each other as people. I think you can certainly draw “hot guys having sex” without a plot but “adorable hot guys having sex” depends on a context that’s developed through incident.
The Nexus: How does writing/drawing erotica/porn differ from writing/drawing more mainstream material?
Steve: I’ve done almost nothing that could be considered mainstream comics. My non-erotic work is almost exclusively queer themed, slice of life vignettes. I guess one difference is that the sex in my solo work is much less celebratory, even when oftentimes explicit.
Dale: I would love to write the graphic novel equivalent of a powerful, literate HBO Sunday night series. I certainly would approach such a project with a completely different set of narrative goals but my skills and aptitudes as a writer would remain the same.
The Nexus: Many reviewers/commentators have praised STICKY for being ‘sex positive’. Was it important to you to show a more positive side to sex and gay sex in particular than some of the more violent and aggressive material out there?
Steve: Definitely. Despite my answer above, I mostly consider sexuality to be an incredibly positive force. Early on we made a conscious choice that we were going to try to make STICKY something a little different than you usually find in most porn – comics or not. We wanted to get outside of rigid top/bottom, virile stud/effeminate pussy-boy dynamics. Not that there’s anything wrong with those kinds of tropes; I’ll likely explore some of those ideas in future work. But basically we wanted to go outside false binaries, and to highlight a more playful, human kind of sex, while still maintaining its function as something designed to arouse.
Dale: I like the idea of the erotic reversal, which depends on the characters being both equals as well as versatile and creative lovers even though they might have differences that imply power differentials. I also totally get off on tenderness as well as hard-f*cking between men. Even if the types involved turn me on — like the butches in Gengoroh Tagame — I really can’t get into violent or cruel gay erotica. Any time the sexual partners look angry or scared and in pain — like gay sex is always a kind of rape — I am totally turned off.
Rapey sex isn’t the only thing that turns me off in gay erotic comics; I have a whole litany of complaints about them. They either take themselves so seriously they’re joyless or they’re so precious they’re like a doily under a figurine. When it comes to the illustrative style, I don’t like it when the guys are so stylized they don’t actually resemble something morphologically possible — or desireable. I also get turned off when the guys all look the same except for a change in hair color and a few features and they all wear the same set of expressions. I also dislike it when the characters are dead behind the eyes; they’re not enjoying sex or connecting with their partners. I always get the impression that stiff, withdrawn erotic illustrations say “I am depressed, alienated and going through the motions” and don’t do anything for me no matter if the persons featured are the types I like to look at in porn. The biggest problem in gay erotic comics, though, is that they are not good comics: the panels look like a sequence of pin-ups with no story-telling design sense. There’s no erotic suspense to the stories because they don’t build to a climax (so to speak).
The Nexus: Eros is a somewhat controversial division of Fantagraphics, with some of its straight/‘lesbian’ titles having been criticised for being misogynist. Did you have any qualms about being published by them?
Steve: None. Because while I share your opinion about titles that are “lesbian” in name only, they’ve also published a fair amount of erotic work of high quality and artistic significance, much of which is by women. I’m thinking specifically of work by Molly Kiely, Colleen Coover, and Jessica Fink. They’ve also published hardcore books by some significant artists, such as Gilbert Hernandez. I prefer to judge a company by the best work it publishes, rather than the worst, and their openness to more mature work was one of the reasons that we approached them.
Dale: In my secret heart of hearts, I want The Comics Journal to love my work. This might be why I wanted to go with Eros in the first place.
The Nexus: What title is your favourite erotic comic of all time?
Steve: Birdland is up there, as are any of the Kake titles by Tom of Finland. Black Kiss is up there as well, even though I don’t pretend that it’s at all morally admirable. And Richard Corben’s Den, which functions an erotic comic much better than it functions as a fantasy/science fiction one.
Dale: What Steve said. I also want to add that Flaming Artist’s middle-aged daddy gay erotic comics totally turn my crank even when the guy doesn’t have one.
The Nexus: Pornographic/Erotic comics are currently receiving unprecedented coverage due to the controversy over Alan Moore’s Lost Girls. Do you think that the publicity generated by having comics’ premier writer working in the field will increase interest in erotic comics?
Steve: Not particularly. I think it will sort of be like Madonna’s sex book, and wind up being the erotica book that people who don’t normally buy erotica will buy and display on their coffee table. If that comes across as dismissive I don’t at all mean it to be. I just don’t think, no matter how good it is, that it’s going to cause people to think “Wow! Porn Comics can be art, too!” and then go out and buy a copy of TENTACLE RAPE COMICS #17. Alan has a justifiably sterling reputation, and people are going to buy it due to its creator, and they will enjoy it, but I doubt it’s going to spearhead a wave of interest in erotica. I think if it’s successful, its influence would be more on creators, prompting people who don’t necessarily work in porn to consider creating smut that’s a bit more complex and involved.
Dale: I hate to say this, as an Alan Moore fanatic, but…I would hate it if people thought LOST GIRLS was the best that could be achieved in comics erotica. It’s porn that’s too cerebral to justify its aesthetic and ideological ambitions as either literature or porn so it fails on both counts. That said, I’ve been stealing good ideas from it since I read the first few chapters in the early 90s.
The Nexus: Do you think porn/erotica can ever be Art? Is STICKY Art?
Dale: What a preposterous question! Of course it is. I am also working on a three-volume slipcase of tentacle rape comics which should put a small press out of business.
Steve: If it’s a drawing, print, painting, photograph, story, film, or video, it’s already Art by definition. Can they be good Art? Well, theoretically, sure. It’s not likely to happen, due to both the means of production and the intent of production. But it’s certainly possible. As for whether STICKY is art, I can’t really answer that question. I think it has value, and was worthwhile to do. Whether its significant or not outside of that is for other people to decide.
The Nexus: Steve, you’ve said you that the two of you have no plans to make any more STICKY. Why is this?
Steve: Well, we’re both busy working on other projects. At the moment I’m working on material that I both write and draw, which I’ve always done, but STICKY was the focus of most of my creative energy for almost three years. I think my drawing improved a lot while doing STICKY, simply because I spent so much time working on it. I’d like to see a similar progression occur in my writing, and the only way to do that is to spend some time working from my own scripts.
Dale: I am completing STICKY 2 with Bastian Jonsson and have another artist contracted for STICKY 3. I’d love to do another volume with Steve, though.
The Nexus: What are the two of you working on at the moment?
Dale: Besides STICKY 2 and 3, GREEK LOVE with Theo Bain of BritDoodz fame, and BURLY with Amy Colburn.
Steve: I released the first issue of SHIRTLIFTER this year, which is a venue for my non-erotic work. I’m currently working on a few pieces for a couple zines and anthologies, and planning/writing the second issue. I’ve also just started a bi-weekly webcomic called “Roughs” at the portal Adultwebcomics.com.
The Nexus: Lastly, which of the characters in STICKY do you find the most attractive?
Steve: I think I like the bouncer on the talk show the most, if only because that was the first story that I finished and he was really the first character that gelled.
Dale: The Hawaiian shirt daddy in “Hold On”, not only because he is totally my type, but his eyes, face and body language are alive with feeling in every panel. That character has a lot going on behind his eyes and that makes him adorable.
The Nexus: Thanks for sharing your time with us guys.
Dale: My pleasure!
Steve: Dou itashimashta.
