My unhealthy fixation with the season eight Buffy comics aside, I am a relative newcomer to comics and graphic novels, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect this week when I picked up comix anthology Juicy Mother 2: How They Met. But with a promotional tagline like “Comix for gender pirates and sexual outlaws,” I knew from the get-go I was a) in good company, and b) in for a wickedly wild ride. Was I ever. Edited by Jennifer Camper, this second offering in the Juicy Mother anthology series is a meandering mishmash of glimpses into the lives of — among others — queers in Utah, queers in high school, queers who work the night shift, queers looking for love in all the right and wrong places, kids with gay parents, a superhero tranny and Hothead Paisan’s cat.


The tone of the stories, some autobiographical and some fictional, ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to gut-wrenching, from sexy or heartwarming to downright bizarre. Taking on issues as varied as the fluidity of sexual identity, dating, the ethics of cradle-robbing, being queer and stuck in a small town and sexual assault-related post-traumatic stress, this anthology really runs the gamut. Standouts abound.

The Girlfriend is a coming out story that follows the sexual exploration of a punk rock, budding lesbian art student. The cartooning itself is rich with emotional nuances, all of that coming out angst, lust and rage captured in the artist’s use of silhouetted second and third faces on characters, revealing their true feelings underneath their game faces. The serialized Zion,, by Joan Hilty, about an LDS senior in high school who finds herself drawn to a girl from the wrong side of the tracks was splendid and cut off mid-story, leaving me dying to know what happened next.

Editor Jennifer Camper explores Otherness at the junction of ethnicity, sexuality and socio-economic status with an offering of her own in Night Shift, where an Arab-American lesbian finds herself a stranger in every man’s land, and every woman’s land, too. On a lighter and more sensationalistic tack, Serpilla’s Amazon Nightmare was a sense-shattering riot of sexiness (hot leather lesbians in full fetish gear), hilarity (a domination fantasy that involves literally pissing on one’s publisher) and cynicism (…).

I really dug David Hooper’s What Choice Do I Have?, in which a black gay man reflects on his attempts at finding love and satiating lust within his limited pool of frisky fishes. My delight in the carnality of the gay male sex in this one (yes, I am one of those lesbians) was heightened by the illicitness of having read it during a family beach party this weekend. (“Oh. Hi, Mom. Yes, I’d love some strawberries. Don’t look now but I’m watching little, grayscale comix men play with each other’s penises!”)

Sackhead by Scott Treleaven and G.B. Jones is a little vignette of a love story deserving of many adverbs and, as such, can only be described as oddly beautiful, starkly serene and enticingly disturbing. Erica Moen’s two contributions I Know and I Like a Boy were two of my favorites here, as much for her understated sense of humor as for her sweet, candid exploration of a lesbian who finds herself in the confusing conundrum of falling for a guy. I would be remiss not to remark upon how much I loved Meet Chicken, the story of how Hothead Paisan met her cat, which 1) was adorable, and 2) contained my favorite idiom by which to measure time since T.S. Eliot’s coffee spoons.

Reading this book was rather like opening doors in a curiously long corridor in some old house, a queer commune of sorts or a portal into the queer collective consciousness, and peering into the rooms and lives and brains of the people who live and love there. There was definitely a voyeuristic, prurient pleasure to the experience. I laughed, I lusted, I empathized and, at times, was compelled to dust off my brain and think a bit. Really, my only complaint about this anthology is that the hot, muscle-bound, brown, butch goddesses sporting boxing gloves on the anthology’s super sexy cover were not featured in any of the stories within. Sniff. Teases.