20Hardcore_001

Hardcore

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20Hardcore_001

Punk kinda has a reputation for being homophobic (and racist, sexist, nationalist ….) and yeah, there are a lot of insecure little men who are drawn to the scene, mistaking anarchy for fascism. But it’s really all about being your own person, doing what you dig, and not being forced to conform to the way other people think you should be, and that’s a downright queer philosophy. So yeah: there are lot of queer punks.

One of the fun challenges of this series is matching artists to stories. When I got to know Drub‘s work (by way of “The Welcome Back Fuck“, his collaboration with Dale Lazarov), I’d already written this script, and I knew that he’d be perfect for it. Not just because he’s got the right style for it, but he’s got the right attitude and background for it. He’d understand gobbing as foreplay. He knows the sweaty homoeroticism of the mosh pit, and probably had to go thru a whole series of shirtless mohawked punks in his head to choose which one to model this one after. I even went thru the script and removed a bunch of information I’d included … Drub clearly wouldn’t need me to explain what a Black Flag t-shirt was, or describe Punk’s boots, or paint a mental picture of the setting.

I also knew that he had the storytelling chops to draw a Tale with no dialog, as he’d done for “TWBF”. That’s one of Dale’s signature stylistic choices, and it’s hard to pull off (so to speak). Page 3 here isn’t actually how I scripted that page to look. I’m all for trying unconventional panel layouts, but I’m not about to describe something like this to an artist and expect him to make it work. I wrote this as four panels. Drub broke it down into eight.

In fact, I wrote this whole Tale out as four-panel pages, probably thinking of it in terms of a simple rock beat. But Drub had other ideas, and he ran them past me in the sketching stage to see what I thought. I gave him a little feedback – I didn’t get what was happening in one panel, the expression wasn’t really what I was looking for in another, the hair should be longer – but I liked what he was doing, so I told him to go for it.

How this serves as a metaphor for sex is left as an exercise for the reader. :)