Max and Sven Book

Max and Sven are childhood friends who maintain their friendship into adulthood despite Sven's being straight and Max's being gay. With equal doses of laugh-out-loud humor and wry insight, artist Tom Bouden highlights and dispels many misconceptions about gay and straight culture. Created in 1990 as part of an advertising campaign for a gay youth club, Max and Sven quickly rose to stardom with leading roles in their own comic.

Publishers Weekly

Belgian comic artist Bouden's U.S. debut is a breezy and refreshingly angst-free tale that traces Max's gay sexual awakening from preteen friskiness to furtive all-boys school rendezvous and, finally, full-blown love when he meets Sven. When Max finally summons up his courage to confess his feelings, he must deal with the fact that Sven's feelings are not mutual. The friendship survives and grows. Along the way, Max's awkwardness and youthful paranoia are played for laughs, sometimes outrageously. The first 60 pages are Max and Sven's tale; the rest of the book is composed of one- or two-page sexy and humorous vignettes from Bouden's syndicated work, some of it dating back to 1994. One episode shows two men having sex while thought bubbles betray their complaints of sandpaper kisses, awkward positions and aching jaws only to end with both exclaiming, "That was the best sex I ever had!" Bouden's agreeably friendly drawings somewhat resemble Howard Cruse's Wendel strip. Both artists chronicle the social, political and sexual life of a gay community filled with witty, attractive (but not overly buff), sexually active men with normal neuroses and strong camaraderie. The art is sexually explicit (especially in the later vignettes), but the images aren't meant to be erotic. The playful frankness seems designed to demystify and normalize sexual activities between two (or among 10) men. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.