"The Unlisted": Come for the Australian-Indian Culture, Stay for the Gay Subtexts

In The Unlisted, twelve-year old twins Kal (the cool one) and Dru (the smart one, signified by his glasses) are...

Did I say twelve?  They are played by sixteen-year old Vrund and Ved Rao, who could easily be mistaken for college students, and look decidedly out of place in a school full of 12-year olds.

If you can get past the jarring age discrepancy, the setting in the Australian-Indian community is interesting.  In the first episode, everyone is in a flurry to prepare for Divali.  I liked the scene where the jar of ghee breaks, so they have to run from store to store, but everyone is sold out, except for one shop which won't sell to Kal because he doesn't speak Hindi: "You can't pick and choose your culture."

In the second episode, a mean girl is spying on them,so they invite her into the family store and disgust her with Indian snacks like chili banana chips and nimboo pickles.

In the third episode, it's Multicultural Day, so Grandma introduces the school to the Indian sport of kabbadi.

Why not just make it a sitcom about clashing values of modern and traditional Australian-Indians? But instead we have dystopian sci-fi:

A corporation called The Infinity Group is providing free dental exams to all students, but Dru  is afraid of dentists, so he talks Kal into taking his place.  Tim (Otis Dhanji), whose parents refused to permit the checkup, goes missing.

Later everyone who got a "checkup" freezes in place.  They are being controlled by dental implants!  Plus they are super-strong and fast.

 Dru must pretend that he is being controlled, and get Kal to take his place for the athletic tests, while the boys try to unravel the sinister plot.

Eventually they find allies in their aunt, a doctor who got a job with the initiative without realizing what it was about, and Jiao  (Zachary Wan), whose implant never worked.

And four refugees who knew too much and are now on the run:  three girls and Jacob (Nya Cofie, right), although Gemma (Jean Hinchliffe) is so androgynous that I thought the character was meant to be nonbinary.

Originality of the plot: C-.  It's been done before.  See:  The Tripods.

Beefcake: D.  Most of the actors are too young to be of interest.

Gay characters: A.  The twins have a built-in gay subtext, two of the refugee girls are in a romantic relationship, an adult ally says she was "queer before there was a word for it," and lack of expressed heterosexual interest abounds.

Fade out kiss: C.  Dru states that he and Chloe are "just friends," but Grandma goes on and on about which girl thinks the boys are handsome and wants to date them.

Australian-Indian culture: A+.

"Into the Badlands": Beefcake without Bonding in Post-Apocalyptic Oklahoma

A post-Apocalyptic tv series without zombies?  How retro!

Into the Badlands (2015-2019) is set 500 years after our civilization ended.  The Badlands (aka Oklahoma) has developed a society nearly identical to the Warring States period of medieval China, with feudal barons (mostly elegantly-dressed ladies) struggling for power with their armies of clippers (Ninja warriors who fight in slow motion).  There are cars and electricity, but for some reason no guns.

The religion seems to be a Buddhist-Taoist mix, but the architecture, interior design, costumes, and even the cars are strictly 1930s America.

Why, after 500 years, do they mimic the 1930s?  It's a ludicrous cultural development.

The Badlands are misnamed.  Sure, most of the men are cogs (slaves), and most of the women are dolls (sex slaves), but anyone who can fight or have expert sex can rise through the ranks to become a baron.  Besides, there is sunshine, and people bathe. Outside it's a Road Warrior world with gray skies and dirt, where ragtag bands squat in the rusty relics of the old civilization.

Why has no one built anything new?  500 years ago, Magellan was just starting his round-the-world voyage, and Martin Luther had barely started the Reformation.  We've built a lot of new things since.

There are two focus characters.  Sunny (Daniel Wu, top photo) starts out as head enforcer to the evil, unpredictable Baron Quinn (Marton Csokas, left), who has a Southern accent for some reason, and a ridiculous beard.

Quinn has an ex wife and a new concubine, who also happens to be the lover of his son Ryder (Oliver Stark, below).

Sunny is morose and angst-ridden, particularly when he is assigned the task of killing the only doctor in the Badlands, who also happens to be the father of his girlfriend Veil.  Who is pregnant.

And Quinn wants her.

So Sunny tries to arrange passage out of the Badlands, but he just ends up a slave in some sort of horrible Road Warrior mine.

He spends the rest of the series trying to get back into the Badlands to retrieve the Woman He Loves.

The other focus character is the teenager M.K. (short for Monkey King in the Chinese tale Journey to the West), a teenager (Aramis Knight) with an untapped pool of Dark Energy that pops out when he's angry.  So everyone wants to apprentice him, capture him, or seduce him.

At first he's an apprentice clipper (called a colt), and then he joins a weird Buddhist fighting-ninja monastery.

Sunny and M.K. are together for the first few episodes, so I thought that they were going to develop into a gay-subtext couple.  No such luck; they never really seem to like each other, and soon they separate.

Sunny gets a comic-relief sidekick, the rotund British-accented Bajie (Nick Frost).  So how did he get all the way from London to Oklahoma?

M.K. doesn't pair up with anyone in particular, although he does kiss some girls, and he has an occasional male buddy.

Otherwise the show is rather intensely heterosexist.  A man for every woman, a woman for every man, and so on.  Chippers in training are told that they will get power "and women."








Gay references: The Woman Sunny Loves escapes from her jail cell, and later claims that she seduced her jailer, Edgar (Ladi Ereruwa).  But she is apprised that he only likes men.

There appears to be a Sapphic pair later on, in episodes I haven't seen yet.

Beefcake:  A lot.  Sunny is shirtless every five minutes, and.  M.K. and his fellow apprentices do not seem to own shirts.

My grade: D for the ludicrousness of the future society, A for some striking visuals, D for the gay characters, A for the beefcake.  Average: B.

I can take it or leave it.  Or fast-forward to the good parts.

"The Shape of Water": The Things We Do For Love

"I've been dying to watch The Shape of Water," Doug says.  This is our first date, so I'm inclined to agree to anything, but really, what a dumb title!

"Water has no shape; it fills whatever vessel it is in."

"That's the point, silly!"

I see on the blue-ray cover that the thing was directed by Guillermo Del Toro.   His movies alway trick you with a bait-and-switch: you think you're getting a cute fantasy, but instead it's about people dying.

"So what's it about?  Elves being killed during the Spanish Civil War?"

"Close.  You'll see.  Anyway, there's a gay character."

I see that I have no choice.  Doug the film buff wants to see it, so it's either watch or not get invited to see him naked later.

Well, he's cute...

We sit cuddling on the couch.  He lowers the lights so I can't even escape by reading a magazine.

Openng: a gratuitous full-frontal nude shot of a woman taking a bath.  Disgusting!  Decreasing my interest in my date's bedroom.  And completely irrelevant to the plot.

The gratuitous nude girl, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), is mute, so she uses sign language. Not important to the plot.

Every day she she gets gratuitously nude, then boils three eggs and makes egg salad sandwiches, which she shares with her elderly invalid neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), who keeps a tv on at all times.  It shows only movie musicals from the 1930s.  No importance to the plot.

Everything is so washed out and drab and unpleasant to look at that I think we're in an awful dystopia like 1984, but  it's actually some apartments over a movie theater in Baltimore in 1962 or 1963*.  They can actually look down at the movies playing.  Not that any of them are important to the plot.

They got the dates all wrong: We see Mr. Ed (1961-66), The Story of Ruth (1960), and Mardi Gras (1958).

Every night she goes to work amid a crew of cleaning ladies in a top secret government installation run by incredible jerk scientists. Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) keeps trying to have sex with the women.  This is before sexual harassment laws.

One day they bring in the Creature from the Black Lagoon (Doug Jones).  Elisa feeds it eggs and plays it some dance music, and soon discovers that it is sentient, male, and hot.

A Soviet spy (Michael Stuhlbarg) helps Elisa break the Creature out (who knew that the Soviets were the good guys during the Cold War).

Wait -- this should be the end of the movie.  The plot is resolved, right?  I ask Doug to put it on pause so I can go to the bathroom.  It's only half over!

In the last half of this endless 123 minutes, Elisa takes the Creature home and plunks him into the bathtub where she takes her gratuitous nudity,  planning to release him to the ocean on the day that the canal opens.  Um...there aren't any beaches in Baltimore?  

Meanwhile both the Americans and the Soviets are trying to find the Creature, so there's some Spy vs. Spy shenanigans.  And Elisa has fallen in love with the Creature.  They have sex twice (full female nudity, no Creature penis).

Not to worry, it all ends happily when Elisa develops gills and goes to live in the ocean with her beloved Creature.

Really?  I would think that to live in the ocean, you'd need more than gills.  It's cold down there, you can't swim around very well, and won't she eventually want to hang out with some other sentients?

Besides, the Creature is from the Amazon.  How is he going to handle the ecosystem of the North Atlantic?

Beefcake: None.

Interesting sets:  None.  Everything is washed out and drab.

I wasted two hours on this garbage, just to get invited into a guy's bed?

Gay characters:  Oh, I forgot.  Giles isn't an elderly invalid after all, he just acts like one.  He's actually a graphic artist who gets fired from a lot of jobs.  He makes a series of strange fumbling come-ons at the counter man (Morgan Kelly) at the local pie restaurant, who finally catches on and recoils in homophobic horror (not to worry, he's also racist, an all-around bigot).

Ok, an elderly gay man in the early 1960s should know how to determine if someone is gay before grabbing.

So Giles is one of these depressed, lonely gay guys who knows nothing about gay culture but happily facilitates the True Love of the heterosexuals.

My grade: F-.

All this for a penis?  Next time I'm just going on Grindr.

Deadly Class

Deadly Class (2019), based on the American comic book series, is set in a weird dystopian Reagan-era, gay-free San Francisco.  Marcus (Benjamin Wadsworth) lost his parents in a freak accident, was put in an orphanage, and then went on the lam when he was blamed for blowing it up (with the orphans inside).  Seeing potential in him, the mysterious, brutal Master Lin (Benedict Wong) sponsors him for the King's Dominion, a training school for murderers.

The curriculum is rather brutal: in Poisons class, some of the kids actually get poisoned to demonstrate how they work.

Meanwhile Marcus has the usual "poor kid in a snob school" hijinks, including a snarling enemy, a doofus best friend, romancing the Girl (who, of course, finds him "arrogant"), negotiating between feuding gangs,  and avoiding being murdered as part of another student's final exam.


I don't know which made me more nauseous, the extreme violence or the constant girl-on-boy cruising.  These girls are ludicrously horny.  They act like stars in a porn movie, who pounce on any man who comes within 10 feet.

Or the racism.  The school is stratified into rival gangs: the nerds, the preppies, the losers, and various racial minorities displaying their own stereotyped violence (black, Hispanic, and Asian).  Marcus is half-Hispanic, so he doesn't know where he belongs.

I saw a little bit of reflection of heteronormativity in the outcasts, who don't really want to be killers, but were forced into the academy by their parents.  When I was in high school, just a few years before 1986, boys had to pretend to be girl-crazy.  Forget to stare, drool, and moan at the big breasts bouncing by, or to make a statement suggesting lack of interest, and your friends would simply not believe  you.  Your enemies would attack: "Fairy!  Fag!  Girl!"

But it's only a reflection.  The producers envision a world where gay people do not exist.  Two gay characters from the comic books have been erased.  This series is about violence, cliques, and female horniness


1. Benjamin Wadsworth

2. Benedict Wong (right); I don't know who the boyfriend is)

3. Ryan Robbins as Rory, Marcus' first kill, a homeless guy who preys on other homeless guys.

4. Willie (Luke Tennie), Marcus's sidekick, a member of the First World Order gang. a black guy whose girlfriend is a neo-Nazi white supremacist. I guess she just likes him for one thing.

5. Billy (Liam James, left), son of a punk rocker and aspiring murderer.

6. Chico (Michel Duval), the snarling enemy, leader of the Soto Vatos.  His girlfriend Maria kills him and starts dating Marcus.

7. Viktor (Sean Depner), a celebrity at the academy, the son of Joseph Stalin's top assassin (Stalin died in 1953, and this is 1988, so the dates sort of work out).

8. Juan (Juan Grey), a member of Maria's Soto Vatos.

9. Chester "Fuckface" (Tom Stevens), the Big Bad of a series about Big Bads in training.

10. Shabnam (Isaiah Lehtinen, left), portly, gay-coded, and a rich banker's son, three strikes against him, so he tries too hard to make friends.

Handmaid's Tale Season 2: Bleed, Scream, Cough, Repeat

"Torture Porn" is the unofficial name for a genre of fiction designed not to scare you, but to hurt you.  You have to endure reading about or watching people undergoing horrible ordeals of pain and degradation, pain and degradation, with no moments of happiness, no humor, no hope, nothing but agony.  The person being tortured is not necessary the fictional character, but you, the viewer.

A literary example that springs to mind is "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," by Harlan Ellison, in which a sentient computer takes over the world and kills all humans except for a group it keeps alive to torture.

A tv example is the second season of The Handmaid's Tale, the adaption of Margaret Atwood's novel.

In the first season, we learn about a dystopian society, Gilead, today's fascist America multiplied by a thousand, except instead of white supremacy, it's built on religious fundamentalism and patriarchy.  June (Elisabeth Moss) has been conscripted as a Handmaid, forced to have a child for a member of the ruling class whose wife is infertile.

Episode 1: The handmaids are being punished for an act of civil disobedience, refusing to stone an errant handmaid to death.  They get electric shocks.  They are burnt on a gas stove.  But June escapes, with the help of her boyfriend Nick (Max Minghella) and other members of the Resistance.  First she has to cut a microchip out of her ear.  Blood, agonized screams, burnt flesh.  Pass the popcorn.

Episode 2:   It's rather an inept Resistance. June  is brought to the deserted office of the Boston Globe and left there for two months. We spend the entire second episode there, watching June be bored.   Oh, wait -- we visit the Colonies, radioactive wastelands where "unwomen," political prisoners, recalcitrant Handmaids, and lesbians, live in concentration camps, dig up toxic waste, and die of radiation poisoning. Cough, cough.  And in flashbacks, we find out what happens to the gay people: the men are hanged, and the women, if fertile, become handmaids; otherwise it's the concentration camp.  Are we having fun yet?

Episode 3:  Finally!  June is picked up to go to a safe house,but it is compromised, so she goes home with Resistance fighter Omar (Yahna Abdul-Mahteen), a closet Muslim.  He'll take her to an airfield that night, and she'll get on a plane to Canada.  But Omar and his loving family never return from church -- they've probably been discovered and executed --  so June gets to the airfield herself  (is that a good idea?).

But just as the plane is about to take off, the Gestapo arrive and shoot the pilot and other passenger, a gay man.  He bleeds out.  Oh, and in a flashback, the handmaids are shown a film of the Colonies -- cough, cough -- and one of the Unwomen  is June's mother.  Talk about unlikely coincidences.

And June goes back to being Offred, the handmaid.   Pain, degradation, tongues cut out, fingers cut off, strangulation, vaginal bleeding, dying babies, executions of various types.  Isaac (Rohan Mead) and his girlfriend are chained together and drowned.   Even the Commander (Greg Bryk, top photo), one of the architects of the new society, is targeted.  June is covered in blood more times than I can count.   Meanwhile, at the concentration camp...cough, cough.

And I'm wondering, why am I watching this?  I have the complete Seinfeld series on DVD.

Other than the unrelenting agony, the series hasn't thought out how the society works very well.  Margaret Atwood didn't really need to, since she was writing through June, who didn't know what was going on.  But the tv series expands far beyond June to various players and parts of the society, and they are nonsensical.  For instance, in one scene, all of the Econowives (apparently regular women who haven't committed any crimes) get on a subway by themselves at 5:00 pm on a Sunday night (in a New England winter, although it's broad daylight), and get off at the last stop.  Where are they going?  We don't know.

How do the lights stay on?  How are good manufactured?  What happened to the world's economy when the Midwest turned into radioactive waste?,

To be fair, the cinematography is striking, especially the overhead shots.  And it's sort of fun seeing ruined landmarks, like the Boston Globe headquarters, deserted.

But I don't watch tv shows about the Holocaust.

See also: The Handmaid's Tale, Season 1

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale (1997) is difficult to watch now, when there are so many parallels between its near-future dystopia and the real society that the U.S. is becoming.  Our own Orange Fuhrer and his cronies might start ordering the round-up of "gender traitors" at any moment.

The Republic of Gilead, in what used to be the Northeastern United States, is run on strictly Protestant fundamentalist principles.  If the Bible says to stone adulterers to death, that's what we're going to do.  Adulterers, fornicators, sodomites, Catholics, and Jews are all executed, unless they are fertile women who can become handmaidens, given the job of getting pregnant in the place of their owner's wife.

June (Elisabeth Moss) was a book editor before, but women are no longer permitted to have jobs, or even to read -- if they are caught reading, their hand gets chopped off.  Because she was married to a divorced man, she is an adulterer, sentenced to become the handmaiden to Commander Fred Waterhouse and his wife, Serena Joy.  Her name was changed to Offred (Of-Fred) to designate that she was his property.

Serena Joy is not altogether happy with the world she helped to create.  She was once a conservative Christian activist who wrote books and held rallies on why women should stay home, and now she is cut off from all decision making ("we have men working on it").

Male infertility doesn't exist.  If Offred doesn't get pregnant, she will be sent to the Colonies for a quick, painful death handling radioactive waste.

Although these are fundamentalists, they don't follow any of the rules I knew as a Nazarene.  They smoke and drink.  There is no religious music.  There don't seem to be any church services.  One gets the impression that they're Protestant fundamentalists without religion.


There are no gay male characters -- they've all been killed.  There are several lesbian characters, including June's best friend from before, Moira (Samira Wiley), and Emily (Alexis Bleidel), married with a child before, now forced to become a handmaiden, first Ofglen, then Ofwarren. When she is found in a relationship with a Martha (a household servant), the Martha is executed, and she is "fixed" through genital mutilation.

Although there are parallels with today's facist society, there are significant differences.  Racism doesn't exist in Gilead.  There are black and Asian Commanders and wives.  Nor is anyone screaming about illegal aliens.  One assumes that the society is anti-Muslim as well as anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic, but this is never mentioned.  The main injustice is that of women, "restored to their rightful place" in the household, with men in charge.

You don't watch The Handmaid's Tale for beefcake.  It's about women's thoughts, women's lives, women's bodies.  There are very few men around, except for soldiers with guns, and only three men in the main cast:

1. O.T. Fagbenle, who is gay in real life and a star of Looking, as Luke, Ofred's husband, who managed to escape and helps runs a resistance force called Mayday.  He appears mostly in flashbacks.

2. Joseph Fiennes, who played a gay character in Running with Scissors, as the singularly unattractive Fred, who has a fetishistic interest in watching Offred do forbidden things like play Scrabble and read fashion magazines.  He's always fully clothed, even in the scenes where he has to have sex with Offred.

3. Max Minghella, who played a gay character in The Mindy Project, as Nick, the Commander's chauffeur, also an Eye of God (informer) and possibly a member of the resistance.  He begins an illicit romance with Offred.   He's the only one to appear shirtless, and we even get a shot of his butt.

See also: The Handmaid's Tale, Season 2

The Giver: Heterosexist Conformist Dystopia

The Giver (2014) just showed up on my Netflix recommendations.   It was about a teenager who "thinks thinks" in a conformist dystopia -- pretty much the protagonist of every young adult movie -- and discovers that "the adults are lying -- only real is real," pretty much the plot of every young adult movie.

But the boy has two friends, a boy and a girl, and there's something about a younger boy who also "thinks thinks," so I figured there would be some moments of gay-subtext buddy bonding, plus the muscular Brenton Thwaites shirtless in at least one scene.

Thwaites plays Jonas, who, along with his inseparable childhood chums Asher (Cameron Monaghan) and Fiona (Odeya Rush), has just graduated to adulthood in a close-knit community with no name -- although there are others, according to the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep), who appears mostly in holograms.

It's like the Village in The Prisoner tv series, with sculpted grounds and lovely architecture, and everyone always polite to each other. with everyone constantly being monitored, drugged, and lied to. For instance, Jonas' father (Alexander Skarsgaard) has the job of testing newborn babies and killing the rejects -- but because of his daily drug injection, he believes that he is "sending them to Elsewhere," a beautiful Otherworld.

People who are too old to be productive citizens are also "sent to Elsewhere." Shades of Logan's Run.

Also, everything is in black and white, no one is taught the history of what happened before, and no one is allowed to fall in love.  Shades of Brave New World.

I wonder what their high school classes are like.

After their graduation, Asher is assigned a job as a drone pilot (shades of Star Wars),  Fiona goes to work at the baby-killing facility, and Jonas becomes the apprentice to the Giver (Jeff Bridges), an old man who lives in a cabin at the edge of the world and is the only person permitted to lie, be impolite, and remember the past.  He shares memories  of the past with Jonas by touching him.

The memories are of everyday events from "back and back and back":  a gypsy wedding; a Jewish Shabat; some kind of Hindu festival; someone riding a sled to a cabin with a Christmas tree; and lots of people laughing and hugging and kissing.

The past was great!  Jonas concludes.  People felt things then!  They experienced love!

Trying to feel what they felt in the past, he stops taking his daily drugs, and becomes aware of the horrors of the Village.

His parents brought home a new baby, Gabe, but it failed its Maturity Test, and so must be sent "to Elsewhere."  Jonas knows what that really means, and vows to save Gabe.

He asks Asher and Fiona for help.  Guess which one helps, and which one rushes off to tattle to the Elders?

Yep -- guys always betray you, girls are true blue.

Freudians say that the goal of adolescence is to move from the "latent homosexuality," with same-sex pals, to "mature" heterosexual love.  It's complete garbage, of course, but this movie is definitely selling it.


So Jonas grabs the baby and rushes out of the Village, down the steep cliffs, and into the northern California wilderness, being pursued by a murderous Asher (who relents at the last minute and just throws him into a river to drown instead of zapping him).

He didn't bring any baby food or diapers, but Gabe doesn't complain through at least 24 hours of falling off cliffs, nearly drowning, and finally sledding through the snow.  Their fate is ambiguous; presumably they freeze to death.

BUT: Jonas' defection has somehow turned off the memory-zapping device, and now everyone remembers things that happened long before they were born.  So the world is saved.

I guess.  I don't understand it, either.  I'm still angry that EVERY young adult movie is about a Boy and a Girl falling in love, with the Male Friend, when he is present at all, turning into a betrayer.

Another contender for the worst heterosexist movie of all time!

By the way, nobody takes their shirt off.

See also: Logan's Run; 

Contemporary Graphic Novels: Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Gore

I grew up on comic books -- all of the Gold Key jungle adventures, Uncle Scrooge, Little Lulu, the Harvey ghosts and witches, Archie, an occasional Batman or Superman.

And comic strips -- Peanuts, B.C., the Wizard of Id, Beetle Bailey, Doonesbury.  More recently I've been buying complete runs of classic comic strips like Popeye, Li'l Abner, and Pogo.

So I want to like modern graphic novels.  I really do.

I keep buying them off Amazon, after careful researching plot summaries and reviews.  They must have a male protagonist, no wife or girlfriend mentioned, and no "homophobia" in any keyword search.  I also search for "gay" and the author's name, to see if there are any casually homophobic comments.

I rejected The Goon because the muscular lug believes that he's too ugly for "any woman" to want him,  The Sandman because Morpheus, the God of Sleep, goes to the underworld to rescue a woman he once loved, and Stormboy because the cover had a naked woman on the cover.

Still, after all that research, I'm usually disappointment.  Heterosexist boy-gets-girl plotlines are everywhere, just not mentioned in plot summaries, and homophobic comments are more common than in 1980s Brat Pack movies.

My latest haul:

1. Kill Shakespeare, by Connor McCreary and Anthony Del Col.

"A fantastic concept, cleverly executed with style and smarts"
"Lke the best of Shakespeare himself."

In a weird fantasy world where all of Shakespeare's characters are alive and co-existing, Hamlet joins Falstaff and Juliet to seek out their Creator.  Othello and Iago have a bit of a subtext, but Falstaff wenches outrageously, and Hamlet falls in love with...you guessed it.

2.Deadly Class, by Rick Remender and Wes Craig.

"Enough good things cannot be said about Deadly Class.  It' a book that can make people fall in love with comics."

 A homeless boy enrolls in a private school for teenage assassins, and learns the art of murder, in dialogue peppered with homophobic statements, including a liberal assortment of "fags" and "c*ksuckers."  Oh, and he has sex with an assortment of naked ladies.

3. Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory

"Overflowing with big imaginative ideas."
"An entertaining and surprisingly compelling bit of storytelling that almost defies description."

In a future dystopia, detective Tony Chu is cibopathic: when he eats meat, he can see the animal's final moments.  Good with murder investigation, if you don't mind eating parts of a human corpse. He has a partner, who is killed before any buddy-bonding can occur.  And -- wait for it -- he falls in love with a woman.

4. Billy the Kid's Old Timey Oddities, by Eric Powell and Kyle Hotz.

"Six-shootin' satisfaction."
"This is one crazy book -- well-written and worthy of your hard-earned cash."

Billy the Kid joins a traveling "freak" show to search for a mystical object called "the Golem's Heart."  It turns out to be the Heart of Frankenstein.   On the way, he litters his speech with homophobic epithets, from "sissy" to "daisy pickin', knob-polishing', pickle-swallowing, effeminate sack of mule crap."

I'll admit, that is one of the more colorful ways that someone has expressed how much they hate gay people.

5. Manifest Destiny, by Chris Dingess, Matthew Roberts, and Owen Gieni.

"The monsters of the western frontier in the adventure of a lifetime."

In 1804, Lewis and Clark set out to find the Northwest Passage.  But their real task is to find monsters.  They do: Buffalo minotaurs, fairies, a telepathnic carnivorous flower, and disgusting plant-zombies.

Still, sure fire buddy bonding, right?

Wrong.  They meet any number of shapely young ladies, dream of them nude, and discuss the special characteristics of Native American women's pubic hair.  Nauseating.

Well, we'll keep on keeping on.  I just ordered:

1. Incidents in the Night, by B. David.  The hero goes on a tour of Parisian bookshops and uncovers a plot to change history.

2. Birthright, by Joshua Williamson.  When a boy is swept away to a parallel universe, his father must join forces with a man from the world to save him.

3. Battling Boy, by Paul Pope.  A boy is swept away to a crazy alien world, where he is hailed as a superhero.

4. Top 10, by Alan Moore. A cop patrols the streets of Neopolis, inhabited entirely by superheroes.

5. Age of Bronze, by Eric Shanower.  A graphic novel retelling of the Trojan War.  How can you go wrong with half-naked Greek heroes?