A recent card from Chris Ambidge with a Doc and Raider: one in a series about travails with their cat.
D&R is a (a) gay, (b) Canadian (c) cartoon, often touching as well as funny. A couple samples to follow.
From Wikipedia:
Doc and Raider is a Canadian comic strip, created by Sean Martin. Published in newspapers and magazines for LGBT audiences beginning in 1987, the strip’s main characters are Doc and Raider, two gay men who began the series as roommates but eventually became a couple. Doc was a [brunet] writer, while Raider was a [blond] construction worker.
In its original format, the strip ran from 1987 to 1997. Martin subsequently revived the strip as a webcomic [in a 3-D format, very different from the style of the print strips] in the mid-2000s.
The strip was usually drawn as a single panel, although for some more complex stories Martin used a multipanel format. Some scenes were set in Toronto’s gay village, such as the steps of the Second Cup at Church and Wellesley… The names of the characters are taken from a long-running series of western novels by J.D. Hardin [pseudonym of Donald Bain], about a pair of Pinkerton agents in the American West in the 1880s.
… The webcomic has also allowed the storylines to become longer and more involved, with arcs that are carried sometimes over a month of dailies [and an enlarged cast of characters]. Recent stories have covered such ground as being gay in the military in the days before the repeal of DADT, the presidential election, the London Olympics, an encounter with a magic carton of milk, a terrorist who wants to give it up, the temptation of sexual activity outside the relationship, a film production gone hopelessly wrong, and — since the comic travels more or less in real time — growing old. It has also dealt with the problems of relationships across international borders
… A spin off web comic chronicling the early days of Doc and Raider’s relationship has also begun. “François et/and Raymond” is a completely bi-lingual comic, with language usage, either French or English, dictated by character and circumstance. A good part of the comic’s humour comes from the relationship between Québec and the “rest of Canada”.
The promised strips from classic D&R. First, one with several uses of the V + Prt combination get off — the most salient one sexual:
(#1)
And one in which the more intellectual partner, Doc, tries explaining to Raider the plot of the opera they are about to see (Carmen) through analogies to their gay buddies in Toronto:
(#2)
(All the guys — not just Raider — are hunky. The strip is realistic only up to a point.)
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