10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE October 3, 2003

2

The cast of Chelsea Boys

in the funny pages

See you in the

Three collections bring the best of all worlds

Reigning Cats & Dogs

by Hilary B. Price

Andrews McMeel, $8.95 trade paper

Chelsea Boys

by Glen Hanson and Allan Neuwirth

Alyson, $13.95 trade paperback

Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

Alyson, $13.95 trade paperback

Reviewed by Anthony Glassman

From earliest childhood, one of the bestloved morning rituals is reading the comics. The rustle of the newsprint, the giggles, the sighs, the complete and utter disbelief that Ziggy and The Family Circus are still being printed after about 100 years, all these stay with the reader from his or her earliest days. As one grows up, one puts away childish things. unfortunately. One starts reading the rest of the newspaper, one starts reading different newspapers, one comes out and

Reigning Cats & Dogs

delves into LGBT newspapers.

Thankfully, even gay papers tend to have a comic strip or two, and even those without easy access to gay papers can find the work of a few struggling LGBT artists who have managed to achieve mainstream success.

Hilary B. Price's Rhymes with Orange, for instance, has been syndicated in mainstream newspapers across the country, quite a feat for the cartoonist, who lives in Massachu ́setts with her girlfriend and their dog, two cats and two fish.

Reigning Cats & Dogs is a Rhymes with Orange anthology collecting some of Price's best strips involving pets, quite often of the "See, they really do own us!" variety.

"The problems with humans is that they can't hear," one feline amusingly tells another on page 69. "Every time you say 'Me now!' they think you've said 'meow.'

It is quite obvious that the Stanford University graduate is witty, and as clear that she truly does love animals. Some might say a little too much...

Alison Bechdel, while winning mainstream comic awards for her Dykes to Watch Out For strip, has yet to run in mass-market dailies, which is fine. Her work is so narrative, so serialized, that it would be difficult reading it every day and a complete shame missing a single strip. Dykes and Sundry Other... is the tenth collection of her strips, which have been running for 20 years (including in the pages of this newspaper, alternating with Curbside and The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green). Bechdel's strip is always timely, tied to the front page of the

newspapers and the latest information from CNN. But the strips don't seem dated when reading them in a collection published two years after the events happened.

This collection, for instance, includes the strips that ran around the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The power in the strip that responded to the attacks, which

contained no text, is palpable even now. Similarly, the imminent death of a treasured pet dog can cause tears to roll down a cheek as readily now as when the strip was first read three years ago.

Glen Hanson and Allan Neuwirth's Chelsea Boys, however, is not timely, nor is it particularly emotional. What Chelsea Boys is, however, is fun.

Both of them have worked on various popular cartoons, including Hanson's character designs for MTV's Daria, an intelligent spin-off of Beavis and Butthead that left its progenitor in the dust. The duo have created a gay ·Odd Couple, only with three people. And a dog. Nathan, the queer Woody Allen-esque nebbish, decides after the death of his lover that he must take in some roommates. He winds up with sensitive, albeit a little dense, stud-puppy Sky and the vipertongued drag diva Soirée.

Throw in Miss Marmelstein, Nathan's dog named after Barbra Streisand's first stage role, and hilarity is guaranteed to ensue.

The strip does occasionally get a little serious. Soirée deals with his estranged father, who soon after dies of cancer. It's pretty serious, and definitely socially relevant. The dynamics in African-American families with LGBT children are often rocky, and seldom work out as well as they do in this series, but it's a tender, touching moment nonetheless.

Thanks to the work of these four tireless artists, and a multitude of others like them both famous and relatively unknown, those little joys of childhood can stay with us through adulthood.