After first round of comic geekery with Archie and Alison Bechdel, here's round two with an online gay comic strip I recently discovered - do others know of it? Please be warned, if you are at all inclined towards comic geekery, then only click on the link below if you are willing to waste about an hour reading through the strip till the latest episode (its an ongoing series). You will not be able to stop. Also be warned that nothing much happens. The strip is about two guys, TJ and Amal, who meet in a gay bar where Amal is trying to get blind drunk (and succeeding) in order to forget his disastrous coming out to his parents. The parents seem to be very traditional in the way that some Indian Americans can be, so despite the fact that their kid is doing one of the required desi professions of studying medicine (and really wants to), and despite the fact that he seems to be a nice kid and despite the fact - though admittedly this would count less with parents - that he is seriously hot, they've disowned him. This, btw, is the one reason to read the strip even if you aren't interested in comic geekery - for the first time I can remember the desi guy is really hot, the stud in fact, while the white kid is the scrawny hipsterish guy. There is, no really explicit sex, but plenty of scenes showing how hot - and believably hot - Amal is. I suppose that could count as a spoiler, but really its a no-brainer, one of the founding propositions of gay comics is that if there are two male characters they are going to sleep with each other at some point. The slight surprise, if any, here is that this doesn't happen after the night at the bar. All that happens is that TJ takes Amal to his home where he wakes up the next day with a massive hangover, to be informed that he had agreed that the two of them would drive across the US, from Berkeley, where they are, to Providence, Rhode Island, for various plot serving reasons. The main point is that this sets out what this comic will be - a road trip, or more specifically, a gay road trip. And that's it really. Currently they are somewhere in a motel in the Midwest: http://tjandamal.com/
