Boy of he West End by Zack

The Adventures of Gil Graham & Mike Smith #5

by Zack

1980, Rome's famous Cinecitta film studios, and wet-behind-the-ears "gofer" Gil Graham from Los Angeles meets British "gofer" Mike Smith. They're the Boys of Vice City and their tempestuous love affair rocks them to London - Disco City - splits them between Two Cities, and reunites them in the Fast Lane of London again. But Gil knows Mike has a past, that their nemesis, the movie mogul James Rosen, "picked Mike out of the gutter." So how does a privately educated Latin scholar fall so low? Boy of the West End takes Mike back in time and follows his trail of discovery, perdition, and eventual redemption.

Paperback

First published February 1, 2014

About the author

Born in Switzerland, Oliver Frey a.k.a. Zack, ended up in London and, after supporting himself while attending the London Film School by illustrating war comics, he plunged into gay art and publishing. Innumerable illustrations poured from his pen and brush for British magazines HIM International, Vulcan, Teenage Dreams, the HIM Gay Library series, and Mister magazine. For HIM he created the mold-breaking Rogue comic strip and later The Street, which was part of the inspiration behind cult TV series Queer As Folk. His work has been seen widely through the medium of Gay Toons on the Internet (and in many blogs) and in several strips in America’s Meatmen books. He collaborates with his partner Roger Kean in creating illustrated fiction, the first available being Boys of Vice City, published by Bruno Gmünder. Recently, Gmünder published his comic-strip story compilations Bike Boy and Hot For Boys—The Sexy Adventures of Rogue. A third, Bike Boy Rides Again, is due in february 2012. He lives with his partner in a medieval town on the edge of Wales.

Reviews

[Preston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This highly sexy and revealing prequel to the "Boys of…" series tells the story of Mike Smith before he met his super hot lover Gil Graham. Follow Mike as he goes from a posh, elite school in England (where you'll meet his little brother too) to the freedom of being on his own and his travels leading to Italy where he gets a job with the infamous film crew made so familiar in the first book in the series, Boys of Vice City. Many worlds are opened up to Mike some for the better and some for the worse but always an education in gay sex. Since this is a prequel you can start here or if you've read the books starting with Boys of Vice City up through the outrageously sexy story of Gil and the teen-star brat in Boys of the Fast Lane read Boy of the West End to see how it all started. Find out how Mike acquired his famous silver ear stud; how movie tycoon James Rosen got his greedy hands on Mike; and compare Mike's arrival in Rome's airport to Gil's Graham's misadventures with Italian customs. A truly loin stirring triumph in words and (in the paperback version) illustrations by the legendary gay artist Zack (aka Oliver Frey) See zack-art.com and oliverfreyart.com

[Paula´s Brief Review]

Lo dejo. Más de lo mismo.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boy of the West End is a prequel to Boys of Vice City and the rest of the `Boys Of` series of books written and illustrated by Roger Kean and Zack the Artist. The book serves to expand the characters that we met in Vice City and fills in the blanks of the dramatic narrative that are the circumstances that lead to Mike Smith and Gill Graham meeting and falling in love in Rome, and their subsequent adventures in Disco City, Two Cities and the Fast Lane. However, Boy Of The West End is in itself a standalone story where we follow Mike as a Grammar School boy through his formative gay years as a questing teen in want of experience, finding out the hard way what it is to be an attractive youth equipped with a leanly muscled swimmers build and a near overwhelming sex drive.

Roger Kean whose experienced hand in writing shows an innate sense of capturing this adventure from a boys perspective, and has in Boy of the West End squeezed the ripened fruit of Gay liberation that was the hedonism and sexual exploration of the 1970s and has splattered the pages of Boy of the West with these juicy sexual shenanigans that take Mike on a journey from callow youth to kept boy toy of a Hollywood Film Producer. In between we find out about how our handsome teen`s good looks lead him in to one sexual scrape after another, be it the BBC studios of Top Of the Pops, or London`s Piccadilly Circus, finding and losing a chance for lasting love along the way; Mike learns hard and fast his trade in pleasuring men before falling prey to the predatory James Rosen who deposits him in Rome to await his exclusive pleasure in 1980.

Again Roger Kean and Zack have used their considerable talents to write and illustrate a moment in time, and this book is packed with details of the period and the very real emotional turmoil of coming out, in any age, for a boy finding sex, then love, losing it, and finding true love and companionship after many mishaps and adventures along the way, played out in this first chapter of the overarching saga of two boys thrown together by chance and the sometimes cruel whim of fate.