This Space for Rent

Fanboy-ish Squeee!

A long long time ago, I picked up a copy of Tim Barela's collection Domesticity Isn't Pretty (Leonard & Larry #1) which I adored, but couldn't find any follow-on collections or even any place where his comic was syndicated. I should point out that I'm not a bear (well, not that kind of a bear; it's a long story) but more of a stealth twink, so the obvious solution of browsing through various bear magazines never really entered my mind. So Domesticity Isn't Pretty remained forlornly alone in my small collection of orphaned gay comics, to be pulled out every now and then when I (a) had enough time to read something and (b) my reading list worked its way away from railroads to comics collections.

Well, these days I also read a lot of online comics, including a few writers from Minnesota. Today, one of those comics had a cryptic comment about Dreamhaven books, which turned out to be that they'd been robbed recently and they'd love it if people who bought books there would buy one or two extra books to help make up for the uninsured part of the damage.

I don't read scifi anymore -- the deadly combination of successful author's disease (where they fire their editors and as a result the books get longer and longer and longer as the plots get weaker and weaker and weaker,) creeping Epic Fantasy, and the sort of militarism that mirrors the United States movement towards fascism all took the fun out of browsing for new authors -- but I thought it would be worthwhile to quickly browse the bookstore to see if there was anything interesting to see.

And what to my wondering eyes did appear? A sidebar that mentioned a bunch of stuff you can do, a link to a Neil Gaiman bookstore, and then a link to a LeonardandLarry.com. Hello, now that's a familiar looking name, so time to click it and ...

Squeee! Squeee! Leonard & Larry! Squeee! Squeee!

Tim Barela is, no doubt, shuddering in horror at this very moment.

As for me, I'm buying one of everything.