Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(or maybe his gay cartoon world. either way, this posting gets right into men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain talk, so it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

Encountered on Pinterest some time ago, an item from the Jason Lloyd Art website, with a work much like this one, two men in the act (but without a visible penis, so I can show it to you here):

(#1) “Just Relax” — I think Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1983 hit song is an inevitable association here — is about taking pleasure in getting fucked, and it’s in JL’s least cartoonish and most realistic (but soft-focus) style, which can be either simply erotic (and touching) or actually pornographic (and arousing), depending on how you approach it

All of JL’s work is at least somewhat simplified in its lines, and most of it is straightforwardly cartooning, all of it skilled, some of it notable.

The work comes in three broad categories:

— sex art: men displaying their goods (genital or anal) or engaging in sex acts (as in #1 above)

— appreciations of the male body (especially, but not limited to, hairy bears), as here:

(#2) “Stretch”: beard, armpits (one focus of JL’s work), carefully trimmed torso

— captioned vignettes from gay male life (that is, classic cartoons, but wryly, comically, or pointedly queer in content), as in these two examples:

(#3) “Good Dick”: a cartoon portrait (plus the pink tank top), to which any queerboy sentiment could be added in the thought bubble

(#4) “Unfollow Him”: cartoon fellatio (simple sketching, except for the vividly tactile feel to the way the cocksucker’s head is held by the guy he’s servicing) — to which any snappy quip on sucking cock can be added (this is an especially poignant one, though softened by the playful rhyme)

About Jason Lloyd. The About section of his website is stunningly uninformative:

Hello, I’m Jason Lloyd and I paint [and draw] both traditionally and digitally. Thank you for checking out my work [of which there’s a huge amount; he must produce several cartoons a day]. This is my small business art shop. I print and ship all the art myself.

From his Facebook page, we learn that he lives in Macungie PA (a suburb of Allentown, which is cool because I was born in Allentown and spent the first few years of my life in a different suburb of the city). And that’s it. No further information. If any of the cartoon portraits are self-portraits, he doesn’t tell us.

The gay world he shows us is just individual guys or couples, not a larger social world, and they’re depicted with virtually no context or background  (beyond the occasional bedclothes and the like). This is a fantasy world of gay sex, period. Nothing wrong with that (I’m entertained by a lot of it, and aroused by a lot of it too), Just don’t expect Donelan or Howard Cruse or Tom of Finland or William Haefeli (all very different, but all of whom locate their characters in social worlds and actual locations).

This entry was posted on May 4, 2024 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Captions, Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Male art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.