about
drum
by joe
My introduction to drum was as I wrote at the beginning of this website – Circus Books in LA, 18, Drummer Magazine… and decades of buying Drummer thereafter. As I saw more images through time, I gradually found that a lot of the images which I enjoyed were not exactly what you would call handsome. The French phrase for that is “joli-laid”. The equivalent I use is “ugly-hot”. That’s Drummer, and Bill Ward’s creations. These men were pre-bear, pre-daddy, before all the things we are familiar with today in gay visual culture. They had craggy brows, big jaws, lumpy bodies, hair puffing out all over. They looked mean, they had missing teeth, frowned a lot, but you couldn’t look away. Ugly-Hot.
Beyond the characters, the stories were fantastic. Having grown up with comic books in the rural south, the visual language was familiar, the flow of panels, a few characters pulled out of the page with an incredibly distorted perspective. Detailed, exaggerated facial expressions, layers on layers of panels with characters walking in and out, twisting bodies floating through space, and naturally the “Kaboom!” sound effects straight out of Batman. It’s just, the stories are… so different from a Batman. So unapologetically gay. Almost every character is somehow sexually connected to all other characters but above all drum, either in the process of having sex, about to have sex, or just finished sex. What an unusual magazine, Drummer, with these comics, written stories, and illustrations, not many photographs, Drummer was fascinating to me. In a city filled with smooth blond handsome men, my wish was to actually meet a drum.
Fast forward around a decade. I’m living in Paris, on a trip in London for eye surgery, but working out at Earl’s Court gym the afternoon I arrived. A stocky, bearded, gigantically muscular man, the spitting image of drum is working out there too. I look in the mirror and I’m also a stocky, bearded, gigantically muscular man. Not able to resist temptation I strike up a conversation, and over a period of months of my travel back and forth, we become buddies, sometimes sex partners. One day he introduces me to his friend, Bill Ward. That Bill Ward. Over tea and crumpets (literally) Bill looks at me as we talk, and I feel a shiver. Bill and I become friends, sometimes sex partners, but I knew from way I caught his eye, I was a drum.
Bill was exactly as he appeared in his photographs, and at times in the comic strip – Bill injected himself with quite some frequency in the telling of the stories. He was a soft-spoken man with a sparkle in his eye, and an enormous number of opinions on art, comics, artists, sex, gay life, we had many good long conversations, and hours going through his drawings. He did produce artwork which was not just for Drummer, and in fact also had done drawings for different commercial reasons, and there were sheaves of images from the late 60’s and early 70’s, very “Classics Illustrated” for those that knew the series. But then the rest was pure hardcore sex, individual characters, couples, entire cities of men writhing in sex on huge 17×22” sheets of soft creamy-white paper.
As I looked through the artwork in his studio, for the first time in my life I was speechless, overwhelmed sexually with the vision of a world of huge hairy ugly muscular, grotesquely hung and ever lubricating men in state of constant sex, worse than any photographic pornography because it suggests rather than just shows. It saturated my mind.
Bill was exactly as he appeared in his photographs, and at times in the comic strip – Bill injected himself with quite some frequency in the telling of the stories. He was a soft-spoken man with a sparkle in his eye, and an enormous number of opinions on art, comics, artists, sex, gay life, we had many good long conversations, and hours going through his drawings. He did produce artwork which was not just for Drummer, and in fact also had done drawings for different commercial reasons, and there were sheaves of images from the late 60’s and early 70’s, very “Classics Illustrated” for those that knew the series. But then the rest was pure hardcore sex, individual characters, couples, entire cities of men writhing in sex on huge 17×22” sheets of soft creamy-white paper.
Bill generously gave me drawings to publish at will – quite a stack of them, and I used them in a Zine I made, as well as probably the only Bill Ward Calendar ever made. Not of drum, but a host of other characters, and to this day, I’ve never seen such a variety of older, younger, bearded and smooth, dapper and punk faces and bodies. All sizes and colors, muscular to skinny to heavy, some in color (ink and goache), mostly black and white. He even did a set of drawings, the traditional three panels, just of me and an experience with at Taxi Driver in Paris. That’s for another volume to share in the future.
I treasured those drawings over the decades subsequent, and with great sadness I heard that Bill died in 1996, that his partner died a month later, and with great tragedy the hundreds if not thousands of drawings at the studio were lost.
Throw in now another three decades or so. I am in San Francisco, and as a hobby building digital tools to play with gay pulp fiction and had been trying on and off for years to digitally animate drum, which I was able to do, in a simple way. I wondered if I could ever get more drawings, but of course there is nothing on the market. He never sold any – he gave them away to auction for charity, he gave them to friends, he even regularly simply gave them to magazines. The few drawings for sale that I had ever seen were at Rob of Amsterdam, and had been sold decades prior. I set about to retrieve all the drawings I could find, considering a digital restoration. Through a slowly growing network of friends I managed to contact Guy Burch who had rescued some of Bill’s work; a London conservancy who had works; a few other archives with very few works (single pages). Then one day I met Gerry Lasky, the last owner of Drummer Magazine, husband of the late John Embry who created and grew it into a juggernaut.
Upon meeting, Gerry said one thing: “Oh my God, you are drum”. I explained to him I had a vision, a labor of love to digitally restore all of Bill Ward. I wanted to make his work as widely available as possible so people might have as much pleasure as I had, upon discovery, seeing myself as a big older sexy gay man when I was 18, and over the intervening40 years “being drum”. Gerry insisted it was destiny for me to restore the work and publish it, and he gave his full endorsement and support.
As I showed prototypes of the work to many friends, the reaction was amazing. Those who were under 50 had never heard of Bill Ward, or drum. Never seen a trace of an image. (Drummer Magazine folded in the late 90’s and was revived recently in name only ad a digital imprint). They were in shock at times, and loved the work. I was on the right track – what’s old becomes new.. We are all sensitized to enjoy comic book images and studios still crank out new comics in an ever-increasing volume and frequency. Bill’s style has an enormous audience due to his “comic book” style, and absolutely still presents the ability to surprise, excite and arouse by using that childlike style with very adult topics of gay male pleasure and quite aggressive masculinity with a touch of humor. A good time for a re-introduction.
These decades-old stories are deceptively simple, fitting in three-page slices usually, but they cover an enormous range of male sexual situations, and violence, mostly the two put together. The only thing I miss is perhaps drum as Parsifal, but I’m sure there’s a sword tucked away in some of the more complex images. We do get a 2000 year range of scenes, and lots of fodder a gay Society for Creative Anachronism festival. You also do get a large group of monsters from the Universal Classic Monsters set, because of course the most violent and dangerous monster of all is a horny man, it’s a transformative experience, so to speak. Many transformations in these pages. There are also great pop and high culture references tucked all through the stories and images – find a rework of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea (and back to ancient Rome again). Or you may see, for instance, a version of Muhammed Ali standing over George Foreman. Anyone with a working knowledge of British Art will see Hogarth many times. Bill rarely created what would be very cartooney images or stories, all googley eyes and rubber bodies, but they are sprinkled here and there very effectively, for what is really a pornographic comic strip for enjoying while masturbating. In the end, with all the fucking going on involving gargantuan, distended, wine-bottle thick cocks, it’s clear that the main thing that’s infinitely stretchable is drum’s ass.
I have organized this book in time-sequence for Bill’s work, from roughly 1975 until the early 90’s, and theme-sequence, keeping or repeating stories together. I also altered some sequences where it made better sense among different issues of Drummer Magazine and associated titles. Some characters – his father for instance – were introduced several times in Drummer Magazine and small collected works since then; they tended to re-use prior images with color added here and there. I collected the daddy origin story as one sequence, as an example, so it can be understood by itself. Daddy, gym, road-trips, and other themes are sometimes too intertwined to separate them fully as should be expected by a character like drum. Like ordinary comic strips, this organization is imposed, rather than intentional. If you were to read through the comics in sequence from Drummer magazine, in three-page bites, they would appear much more random since they follow the editorial content of the magazine rather than any large-scale structure.
However, In editing this I also found something quite surprising, at least to me. Upon close examination, the beginning and end of Bill’s work in time and sequence are fairly symmetric, as though by intent. While this book reads like a very large-scale graphic novel with a deep structure, it’s really a two-decade long accumulation of comics, but they work as what an English Major would call a bildungsroman or broad “coming of age” story. As you finish the book, look at the line “coming of age,” and have a chuckle from my effervescent play on words, but also the fact that here, the daddy and son exchange hero roles, the maturing hero becomes the protected. drum is introduced with demons and repeat throughout, but towards the end we understand he may learn to live with them as we all have learned to do less more or less metaphorically.
However, In editing this I also found something quite surprising, at least to me. Upon close examination, the beginning and end of Bill’s work in time and sequence are fairly symmetric, as though by intent. While this book reads like a very large-scale graphic novel with a deep structure, it’s really a two-decade long accumulation of comics, but they work as what an English Major would call a bildungsroman or broad “coming of age” story. As you finish the book, look at the line “coming of age,” and have a chuckle from my effervescent play on words, but also the fact that here, the daddy and son exchange hero roles, the maturing hero becomes the protected. drum is introduced with demons and repeat throughout, but towards the end we understand he may learn to live with them as we all have learned to do less more or less metaphorically.
Likewise, parts of drum’s gay sex life and cultural life change throughout the book in lockstep with the changes in gay fantasy life in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, from biker & rebel to trucker, from outcast loners to community, from endless tricks to being a partner. For people who didn’t grow up in the middle of this flux, I hope the gay cultural bildungsroman is illuminating. You will also be able to find lots of other topics – countryside romance (pastoral), naughty boy stories (picaresque: time to go watch Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon again folks), Gothic horror, police thriller, sports, historical romance, low comedy and high satire, bluecollar tales and road movie. What you won’t find is a “campus novel”, drum is strictly blue-collar. And you will also frequently find genuine affection, love, passion and joy, coming from the sheer pleasure the character radiates at his masculinity, the maleness of those around him (for better or for worse), and the enjoyment of life as a banquet. A sexual banquet to be sure, but something that can barely satisfy drum’s appetites.
The origin of these comics is in the gay fetish community, which embraces a very wide variety of sexual practices. Ordinary TV content warnings would serve here more like a bingo card, or a tasting menu. The comics involve graphic violence, abduction, imprisonment, and immobilization, which I have to say is much like most children’s comics. However, these go much further into the world of gay male sex and fetishism, including at the mild end of the scale, plenty of kissing, cuddling, and affectionate sex, including oral, anal, and manual. At mid-intensity we have drum rolling around in elements of piss, oil or mud sex, exhibitionism, group sex, fisting, voyeurism, paid sex, as well as leather, rubber, uniform, piercings, cockrings, and clothing fetishism – endless, endless torn shorts, pants and teeshirts with a few horned helmets, lots of compression gear. This book is a catalogue for fetish clothing styles. At higher intensity, you’ll see more dominance and submission, forcible male rape, imprisonment, sadistic torture, cock and ball torture, heavy flagellation, corporal punishment, incest, bestiality, supernatural sex. Well, supernatural sex can possibly be put under the furry sex category. We’re only missing balloon sex and satanic cult rituals (oh wait, was that the beginning?) with drum. The only drug routinely depicted is alcohol, giving the his work a wholesome feel comparatively, though the hallucinatory scenes which crop up certainly owe a lot to the imagery of psychedelics.
Probably the most surprising part of the series is the relationship drum has with his biological father. Bill Ward made it crystal clear that in this series, Father and Son have an active, willing, incestuous relationship – it is not a common pseudo-incestuous daddy-boy setup in name only. It is specific, graphic, consensual, and adult. But, of course, as Bill points out repeatedly, you can do anything you want in a comic strip, it’s not real. Men don’t generally have a cock as large as a forearm, and more than a foot long as frequently depicted, it’s a comic strip, it’s not real. Men don’t generally work on a skyscraper having sex on a steel girder hundreds of feet above the ground, it’s a comic strip, it’s not real. Nobody in this strip develops any kind of disease at all, and subsequently dies, it’s a comic strip, it’s not real. Real issues are sidestepped deftly throughout.
Probably the most surprising part of the series is the relationship drum has with his biological father. Bill Ward made it crystal clear that in this series, Father and Son have an active, willing, incestuous relationship – it is not a common pseudo-incestuous daddy-boy setup in name only. It is specific, graphic, consensual, and adult. But, of course, as Bill points out repeatedly, you can do anything you want in a comic strip, it’s not real. Men don’t generally have a cock as large as a forearm, and more than a foot long as frequently depicted, it’s a comic strip, it’s not real. Men don’t generally work on a skyscraper having sex on a steel girder hundreds of feet above the ground, it’s a comic strip, it’s not real. Nobody in this strip develops any kind of disease at all, and subsequently dies, it’s a comic strip, it’s not real. Real issues are sidestepped deftly throughout.
Bill also puts humor all through these comics, usually making fun of and drawing contrasts in the sex scenes he creates with drum – the delicate porn star, the sex machine who is mostly napping, constantly falling into crazy problems of his own making, with Bill himself commenting as the illustrator on how silly the activities we are actually seeing are, in some way. never annoying, very deft, his humor shines through, and for me at least makes the entire series even sexier, if that was possible.
– Joe
