Spread Love Comix
Comic, Issue 8, Various, 40 pgs, Spread Love Comix, spreadlovezine.com, $9
There’s a lot of passion on full display in the eighth issue of Spread Love, and I’m not just talking about the smut! Honest!
More so than the numerous instances of porking and bodily fluids flying about, the passion of each of the contributors to Spread Love is clear. All of the work seems as though each contributor was clearly having a hog heaven good time conjuring these heavy petting pages. Whether intentional or not, there’s a shared weight of linework and exaggeration of proportions throughout. Peter Bagge’s cover is especially fitting when a lot of the contents feel inspired by him.
My biggest issue with Spread Love comes with the territory: it’s kind of gross. Characters across each contribution verbosely muse about sex over highly detailed drawings, with descriptions like “While that velvety ribbed inner tube stroked along my erectile muscle to inevitably mas-sage me into a momentary ecstasy of thick silvery globs of pleasure.” A little lost in the sauce, and it can be hard to get lost with them. This continues throughout most of the pieces — decidedly unsexy moments and jokes that are mostly puerile, or don’t really land. It’s certainly a comix tradition, but it doesn’t really change the fact that, in 2023, the transgressiveness of this is a bit harder to achieve. How can you pay tribute to the past with-out winding up outdated.
Maybe this isn’t the best example of what Spread Love has to offer, but I still commend them for trucking along and giving artists a nicely produced and physical place to spread their work.