It recuperates Greek mythology to reweave the male queer body into history and finds a form of sexual freedom in a proto-post-AIDS climate. Greek Love, finally, stands in contrast to the other two comics by merit of its wordless nature. The figure only appears in renderings of photographs, which are used comparatively to illustrate the characters who are otherwise only present in the narrator’s appeals.

Émile, on the other hand, is dependent on the juxtaposition of words and imagery, but Neaud highlights the male form by its absence. Playing on the butch/swish dynamic, he uses satire and camp to generate punchlines. Johnson parodies this pneumatic, exaggerated masculinity and contrasts it with a more feminine, graceful line.

Miss Thing satirizes work of its time such as that typified by Tom of Finland’s oeuvre. On one hand, the dierences between these works reflect shifting attitudes towards the presentation of the male gay body on the other, each of them corresponds to a dierent distribution platform: the periodical gag strip, webcomics, and prestige hardbacks, respectively. It compares three works: Miss Thing, by Joe Johnson, Fabrice Neaud’s Émile, and Greek Love, by Dale Lazarov and Adam Graphite. This article explores how representations of the gay male form in comics have changed over time in relation to shifting social and cultural contexts. If we are to construe a model to analyze graphic style in visual narratives like comics specifically, we should take into account aspects like the internal coherency and the functionality of drawings for the narration. So we can assume that there is an interaction between the way biological evolution has shaped our visual perception and the way particular cultural or personal conditions play a role in the way an artist draws and in the appreciation by an individual perceiver. The development of particular graphic styles is, on the other hand, rather a matter of cultural preferences at a particular period of time (but probably also unconscious choices may play a role).

Though line drawings with their black contour lines may seem quite artificial and quite different from natural scenes, there is some empirical evidence that the line drawings use the same visual processing system. Line drawings are particularly efficient, thanks to their simplification and expressive qualities. Though the concept of graphic style is used in quite different ways, it is important to try to define it as a particular way of drawing, of a rather conventionalized way of grasping of the (fictive) world by visual means. Graphic style, as part of the larger style of a visual narrative, plays an important role because it is through its components (marks on paper or screen) that the reader has to form a percept of the diegetic world of the story.

Umberto eco corto maltese