The most successful gay comic book series of all time is MEATMEN, edited by Winston Leyland for Leyland Publications. Begun in 1992, the series now has 25 volumes. What began as a balance between humorous and erotic comix soon began to tilt towards the erotic; so that a typical MEATMEN volume today consists mostly of explicit, gayrotic comic stories with plenty of male nudity.

Jack Nichols, reviewing an earlier volume for GayToday, called the series "explicit erotic fantasy adventures packed with greater arousal power than any photographs in my memory."

Though some MEATMEN volumes are sadly out of print, volumes 2, 6, 10 to 12 and 14 to 25 of this series are still available. Since the cost of the entire series would be beyond the means of the average reader, I asked Winston Leyland which 4-6 volumes he would recommend to a new reader who's starting to collect MEATMEN but cannot afford to buy every one that's available.

MEATMEN 25, the latest in the series, is more of the same, which is OK by me. Once again we have a Zack story ("Teasy Meat") and a Coley story ("Stagecoach"). We also have a Belasco story ("Down n' Dirty") and 16 cartoons by Donelan. Three of the features in MEATMEN 25 are science fiction-oriented: the fascinating "Newcomer" by Stepan Zubinski; the so-so "Before Space and Time" by Jeff Jacklin; and my personal favorite: "Camili-Cat and the Djinns" by Patrick Fillion.

Fillion, a young French-Canadian artist who now lives in Vancouver, has worked on a series of comic zines in Canada (and in French) for years before he finally made it in the Anglo-American world. Camili-Cat, Fillion's favorite character (and mine), is a lean, mean and oversexed "felinoid" - and an insatiable bottom - who gets it on with assorted aliens and outworldly characters during the course of his sci-fi adventures. We hope that Leyland brings back both Fillion and his Camili-Cat in the next volume of MEATMEN.