Dreamboys, Meatmen and Werewolves: Visualizing Erotic Identities in All-Male Comic Strips

The homoerotic comic strip, as a medium and genre in its own right, integrates several media including illustration, cartoon, animation, graphics, physique art, and pornography. In these subaltern texts, when the characters are of the same gender the rites of masculinity are both indulged and subverted. Hence, this graphic subculture provides a radical perspective on sexualities, intimacies, body worship and contemporary phallic regimes. This article focuses on Jon Macy’s ‘Tail’ (published in 1997 in Meatmen, an American anthology of gay male comics), a hard-core comic strip that eroticizes and politicizes Sigmund Freud’s homophobic myth of the Wolf Man.