The Adventures of a Joe Boy! Vol. 1

by Joe Phillips (Illustrator)

Book by

Genres: Comics, LGBT

48 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2004

About the author

Comic books author.

Reviews

[Anthony McGill · Rating 4 out of 5]

As per the author/artist:
"The life of a Joe Boy seems to be so easy and full of joy. Every day you meet another hot guy, everybody is looking gorgeous, and the weather is great anyway."

This beautifully drawn and quality produced comic book is made up of eleven short Joe Boy adventures, which shows how everyday life can get mixed up by strange and funny situations.

Originally published in the gay pop magazines XODUS and XY, each little story barely runs to half a dozen pages with cute titles including "The Out-Fielder"/ "Beach Bummed!"/ "Mid-Man-Madness"/ "emale!"/ "School Daze"/ "Straighten Up!" / "Club Survival 101" and "Gaydar."

The artwork by Joe Phillips is sublime. Bright and colorful with an amazing eye for detail, Phillips is in a field of his own in portraying ever so cute young gay men experiencing everyday life in a world of boy meets boy.

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Silly and rather shallow, but harmless and sometimes cute.

Favorite bit of dialog (summarized):

Guy #1: "You didn't know I was gay? But I drive a pink Bug!"
Guy #2: "I thought that meant you were vegan."

[Justin Rodgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite artist. A collection of his first published comics. Cute, funny, and sexy.

[Martyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't quite sure what to expect with this one. It's my first Joe Phillips book. It proved better than I feared in some respects, but in other ways it was a disappointment. I'm used to Bruno Gmunder comic books and graphic novels being quite explicit in their content, and that was what I was hoping for. But Joe Phillips' illustrations here are very tame by comparison, with no full-frontal nudity at all. But in spite of that, I do like his style of artwork. This slim 40-page book contains eleven short stories, all about a different range of characters. You might think that would make them all very shallow and trivial, without enough substance to get your teeth stuck into or to get the reader engaged. But actually some of them did prove very engaging, and it's just disappointing - from my perspective - that they weren't worked out in fuller detail and with more explicit illustrations. I think a book-length graphic novel from Joe Phillips would be great.

The most irritating thing about the book is the proliferation of typos. There isn't a huge amount of text and what there is is all in large and clear print so it's rather hard to see how it was allowed to pass all the editorial checks.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun short story collection in a graphic novel format.

This is what Archie comics would have been like if Archie were invented today in West Hollywood.