A BOY'S OWN COMIC BOOK.

Comics creators (and fans) David Kelly and Robert Kirby tell real, funny queer stories in Boy Trouble

Queer cartoonists David Kelly and Robert Kirby, like most comics fans of their generation, were raised on Charles Schulz's "Peanuts." "Back in the '50s and '60s you just couldn't touch it--it was brilliant, and it changed comics forever," Kirby gushes. "And Schroeder was cute, artistic, and he didn't like Lucy, so who knows. Maybe he liked Shermy."

Boy Trouble, a comic book anthology whose fourth issue hits stands by fall, may not quite be "Peanuts" for the new millennium. But it is their attempt at bringing a youthful air of comedy, drama, fumbles, foibles, and freshness to gay comics.

"We call it `queer boy comics with a new attitude,'" quips Seattle-based Kelly, who publishes Trouble and edits it with fellow strip contributor Kirby. "We wanted to get away from the typical `gay' comic, especially ones that just had sex in them all the time. We don't mind having sex, but we wanted a little more substance."

Indeed, there's plenty of sauce to be found within Boy Trouble's pages, which have featured darkly funny, semiautobiographical tales of young punk love, disenchantment with the gay body ideal, the virtues of "a fuzz butt," and even a bad date or two. "Yeah, I like a little bit of angst," Kirby admits. "I tend to respond to things that are personal and come right from the artist, like Lynda Barry or Howard Cruse's early stuff. I don't really want to read any more brunch jokes in gay cartooning."

Kirby's syndicated weekly strip, "Curbside," depicts young gay guitarists and frustrated writers as much as muscle boys. And it was while Kirby was working on another gay alternative-comics anthology, Strange-Looking Exile, that Boy Trouble first came to mind. "Alison Bechdel [of "Dykes to Watch Out For"] and others contributed to Exile--it was almost all women," he says. "But I really wanted to connect with other cute, slightly alienated queer boys that had the same kind of worldviews that I did."

Although they had never met face-to-face at that point, Kirby enlisted Kelly, whose strip "Steven's Comics" focused on a slightly alienated queer preteen, and the pair got to work. Boy Trouble's premiere issue was met with praise in 1994 from The Comics Journal, notoriously highbrow in its tastes. And alternative-comics fans of all ages have since praised Trouble's bittersweet stories of what Kirby calls "young gay boys trying to figure out their place in this larger gay mainstream culture."

Speaking of that culture, the new issue sees the pair caving in to--good grief!--at least one of the realities of the gay comics biz.

"Robert said I could do the cover, but he wants a sexy boy on it," Kelly admits. "We want to sell this issue too."

Ferber is a New York City-based freelance writer.