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1 / voyage
Bill Ward began drum as a completely blank figure, with no history, starting coming out in a gay bar and starting on a trip – sexual, spiritual, and perhaps more than a little psychedelic. We see throughout his work the theme of a voyage, a trip, an adventure and fantasy repeats in endless variation. Classical…
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2 / hero
What would a action comic strip be without a hero? Bill starts to wrap drum in the mantle of justice, and lone protector like any good writer. But no superhero, he’s also dependent on those around him to realize his intentions against the powers of evil, particularly for young defenseless gays.
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3 / timewarp
As Brad and Janet know, nothing is quite so nice as being invited to a party by rich weirdos, a costume party at that. As Bill frequently states in his comic strips “anything can happen”, and as with the original dizzying switch of drum between bar and hades, the dizzying switches between today, ancient Rome,…
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4 / dreamer
The two best plausible ways to deny a sexual experience is either “I wasn’t awake” or “I was drunk” (same thing). Our drum has a wide range of tastes in dream fantasies, if by wide range we mean aggressively masculine men forcing grotesquely huge and distended cocks into him in singles, doubles, and groups everywhere…
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5 / leather
Masculine male bar and club culture went through a revolution over the two decade span of these stories, from the indignities of police raids and harassment which dropped off somewhat after Stonewall, to being somewhat embraced, or perhaps respected by popular culture in establishments such as The Mineshaft in New York, and the various Eagle…
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6 / muscle
Bars and clubs are one place to meet men, but if you want to meet mostly naked men, the gym is a hell of a lot easier. Bill drops drum in and out of gyms throughout his strips, helping the character cultivate his thick, extremely muscled body – I suspect he’d tip the scales at…
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7 / porno
Bill hinted very often drum being in porn movies, often to make fun of the contrast the appearance of masculinity and obsessive sex with the reality of the men in the roles while still turning on the reader. These panels also begin to introduce, as desirable, men who don’t have six-pack abs, in fact quite…
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8 / work
Bill’s character drum was 100% blue-collar through and through. He’s frequently found building skyscrapers, a unusual fetish if ever I heard one. My way of thinking about it is that for all the public sex he has, maybe there’s a correspondence between the danger of on-the-girder fucking and the chances taken in the clubs and…
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9 / action
Not daydreaming anymore Bill’s drum in his later work initiates sex everywhere he can, but with Bill himself drawn in to comment on what’s happening directly, or through the character to the reader, punctuating the story. A way of writing frequently commented on in postmodern literature of the 80’s and 90’s, it was quite common…
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10 / roadtrip
If there are two things which tie every theme in Bill’s work together in the drum series, one is “roadtrip” and the other is “daddy”. This entire book is, in its way, a roadtrip.
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11 / bear
The last strips Bill made of drum on the road were of the mysterious bear figure he meets, and moves in with. This time, forced sex isn’t fun and playful, and our hero is the most defenseless he’s been, and relying on his partner to rescue him, instead of the other way around.
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12 / daddy
As the old saying would be paraphrased for drum, “home is where the Daddy is.”
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13 / closure
The largest fully completed sets of panels by Bill are a long complex action sequence involving most of the preceding people, places and acts in a fully integrated way.
