What to expect "come the revolution…"
Interestingly, this comic is listed in the "Discontinued Tracts Still Available" section. If they’re discontinuing it and they still have stocks it must be because nobody is buying it! I wonder why…

SYNOPSIS: As I said, there isn’t really any coherent plot, just a string of "examples" of what we can expect to see in our streets when the gay revolution finally gets underway. Never mind all the unnatural sexual practices, what about that hair! And those clothes! Towards the end we get a brief rehash of another comic called "Doom Town" (also reviewed here), which is, (you know it, you love it): the story of Sodom and Gommorrah.

ARTWORK: Generally it’s pretty good, drawing-wise, but as I said, totally unrealistic, subject-wise. The opening few panels depicting a "gay wedding" are priceless. The guests (all male – how realistic is that) all look like the walking dead out of a vampire movie, presumably to emphasise their miserable, Godless existence. Most of them are very conservatively dressed clothing-wise, with severe-looking business-like glasses and so on, but they all seem to either have perms, or be wearing blonde polyester wigs.

Of the paltry two panels that dare to allude to – gasp! - lesbian activity, the first has something rarely seen in a Chick comic – style! What a splendid little human drama-ette is portrayed here – all in a single panel.

We have the demure and conservatively dressed young blonde lassie bolting from the apartment of the obviously older and more experienced dark-haired vixen. The glimpse of dark hair’s bare shoulder and her general posture plus the fact that she doesn’t run after blonde hair, suggests that dark hair is naked, and leaves little doubt as to what has gone down here (so to speak). All in a single uncluttered panel.

If I can be allowed to lecture just a little here, surely this is what comics are about! Drawn properly, a picture is truly worth a thousand words, and that is the true power of comic book "art". But that’s something you’ll rarely see amongst this tripe…

The adjacent panel is quite astonishing. What exactly is Chick getting at here? Is he trying to suggest that gay girls invariably get up to the same wicked thing that we just know that all gay boys get up to. You know: the "S-word". God, does that ever raise more questions than it answers… On the other hand, Chick seems to have resisted the temptation to draw stereotype Butch Dykes, (or maybe he just doesn’t know they exist…)

MEMORABLE POINTS: This picture! Any comment from me could surely only amount to gliding the lily… I’m not sure if the woman is simply a concerned mother or an outraged editor of Vogue. Surely, though, if she wants to turn the lad away from the heady paths of deviancy it might be kinder (albeit briefly traumatic) to simply let him see the fate awaiting him if he should choose that path!

The one below pretty cool too. I don’t know what kind of archaeologists they must be if they’ve never encountered "the love that dare not speak its name" before, although one might also think that they must have eventually gotten over their nausea, if they’d been at it for five years (1904 – 1909)!

WEAK POINTS: None to speak of. Like I said, there’s no real story.

SPANISH VERSION: Oddly enough, the only foreign version of this tract I could find was the Spanish version. A lot of the comics are funnier in other languages, although I’m not exactly sure why. I particularly like the way the Spanish Repentees refer to the saviour as "Senor Jesus"

Download The Gay Blade from Chick Publications

Download Un Galan Diferente (Spanish version)