Art by Gengoroh Tagame.
Gengoroh Tagame, one of the undisputed masters of bara art turns 48 today! This year of the dragon, 2012, also marks Gengoroh Tagame’s 30th year as a manga artist! What a milestone! Happy Birthday and happy 30th anniversary as a manga artist from us here at SpunkToons.com.
Over the recent holiday period I’ve been researching the origins of Bara and Yaoi art, reading a ton of Wikipedia articles and following links to an uncountable number of websites and blogs trying to get a good grasp on the origins, history and timeline of Bara and Yaoi art. I’ve gone back in history to the early 1600′s in ancient Japan when woodblock printing, Ukiyo-e, was one of the most sought after forms of art.
Like most almost every art medium in our history, there are always those artists that will use their talents to explore sexuality and Ukiyo-e is no exception. In Ukiyo-e art, Shunga is the niche that focused on the depictions of erotic scenes.
While most of the Shunga artists focused on female-male sexual relationships there were those that would venture into scene depictions of men having sex with men, women with women (even more rare) and men having sex with younger men, very much similar to what would later become the overriding concept behind Yaoi art.
In this print by Kitagawa Utamaro, a younger man in the role of a temple page has been made available to one of the monks who is pursuing the “Way of the Youth”, in what appears to be a common practice of the day. This was common not only in temples among monks and their pages, but also among the samurai class of famed warriors.
As I continue to read and follow history back I can’t help but wonder if the Shunga niche within the Ukiyo-e art style was one of the earliest forms of what today we call Yaoi.
What do you think? Is Shunga one of the earliest forms of Yaoi or does it go back further than this? I’m researching on to find out more. If you know of any references to male on male art that predates the 17th century, please let me know in the comments below.
I remember growing up all the aliens I ever saw on television or in movies were either slim, slimy or grotesque with oversized appendages, except in the case of Kang and Kodos from the Simpsons who are not much more than gooey octopi. I’m sure there are many more alien types that have been portrayed in cinema and television, but what I never remember seeing is a hung, hunky muscle bound Bara alien.
I think one of the SpunkToons artists and I think alike, as he just sent in his newest art collection which contained this huge, muscle bound, and quite well hung Bara alien. You can see this artists entire Bara collection now in the members area of SpunkToons.com
In the latest SpunkToons.com update to our Bara men collection, we did a tribute to big muscular sportsmen on the playing field..but as we always do, we perverted the games just a bit and added in a whole lot of Bara man action sex, right in the middle of their games! In this pinup set our artist captures baseball players playing with more than wooden bats, wrestlers in a lycra busting cock suckoff, football players trying to see whose ass can take the entire football, and even boxers shoving dildos up their ass in the lockeroom!
In this cover pinup example the victorious boxer is inviting his vanquished contender to get up and suck his big fat cock! Who needs a title belt to strap around your waist when you get victory benefits like that?
Check out the latest and see the full pinup set of our Bara Men collection in the members area of SpunkToons.com now.
Even bara muscle boys have a kinky side! This pinup of a sexy young muscle boy shaving his cock is from the latest Bara gallery set just activated in the spunktoons.com members area. There are 10 full color large format pinups in this gallery featuring muscular bara men in a variety of sexual encounters. For all you bara lovers out the muscle boys in this gallery should get you all pumped up. Check out this gallery in our members area now.
Whew, it’s a hot hot summer in many parts of the world! Heat waves are blanketing large swathes of various countries leaving millions of their countrymen seeking any way possible to stay cool. Many people get very creative in these heat waves…playing in water sprinklers, park fountains, dipping in local lakes or reservoirs but for some … their best hope of staying cool is to wear as little as possible and do as little physical activity as they can. That’s what our hot little cartoon stud in this pin is doing. As you can see he’s stripped down to nothing at all and sitting out the heat in comfortable chair in his home. Unfortunately for him it’s one of those times when his cock has a mind of it’s own and decides to become engorged with blood, just begging to be stroked into jizz spewing relief, but that’s going to make things even more hot for our cartoon boy isn’t it? Quite the dilemma he’s found himself in. Stay still and stay cool or answer natures call and whack off to relieve his pent up sexual energy and become a sweat dripping mess. What would you do? For me, I think I’d have to answer the call of the cock, maybe the pleasure of cumming would lessen the agony of the heat.
This pinup is from the newest Bara cartoon pinup set now active in the members area of SpunkToons. Join SpunkToons now to see the complete set of these pins as well as gain access to all the thousands of pins in our archives and all future updates as long as you remain a member.
As I’ve said in previous blog posts, we are heading in some new directions with the art in our SpunkToons members area, moving away from more general gay art categories and focusing more on specific categories that I feel appeal more to our members. Five new categories of art pinups were added to the members area this week and will be updated monthly. These include, Bara, Big Cocks, CosPlay, Manga Boys, and Horny Dieties. Here are brief descriptions of the art in each category:
Bara – Manly men, chubbs, bears, and muscle hunks. These pinups will focus on men having sex in a variety of situations that we all have heard of, or perhaps fantasize about. Men having sex in a truck stop, greasy mechanics fucking in a dirty garage, or daddy bears stroking their meat and much more. This section will be updated every month with a new pinup set.
Big Cocks – This one pretty much goes without explanation! I mean if you need me to explain what might be in a Big Cocks gallery then perhaps you are reading the wrong blog! LOL! All kidding aside, this gallery category will feature pinup sets focusing on men and huge cocks emphasizing both the pain and pleasure they can bring for the owners of these protruding monsters! A new pinup set will be added every month to this category.
CosPlay – This section was born of an idea from one of our regular contributing artists and is a series of pins of guys dressing up as their favorite anime / manga character and instead of just being in character according to the original manga or anime storyline, we take it one step further and let our CosPlayers enjoy the sex between characters that we all dream about seeing in our mangas or anime videos. We will be adding a new set of gay sexual CosPlay pins to this category every month.
Manga Boys – Everyone has their favorite manga characters, many of which aren’t gay, but that never stopped us from wishing they were! In this gallery collection your favorite male manga characters come alive as parodies of their original characters, but in our pinups they are surely gay, and doing what horny gay men love to do! There will be a new set of Manga Boys every month.
Horny Dieties – As I mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been doing research on the Greek and Roman dieties and mythology, and in that research realized quickly that there was a lot of sexuality among these hulking and apparantly very horny men! So after testing some pinups of Greek Gods with one of our artists and loving the result, I’ve decided to make it a regular gallery section in our members area. We will update this section every other month for now until I know more about how it is received by our membership.
Gay Superheroes – We have actually been having pinup sets of gay superheroes drawn for us for some time now, however I decided to finally put them in a category of their own so that they are easier for our members to find. You will find parodies of your favorite men in tights in this category and it is updated monthly with a new gallery.
Check back here at our blog every week becasue I’ll be posting samples of the new galleries as they go live in our members area so you sample some of our artist works before becoming a member. If you aren’t a member now, please consider supporting us and joining SpunkToons so we can continue to develop more art pinup galleries and bring new artists onboard to enjoy their art as well.
My step father is a truck driver and I used to go with him on many long hauls across the country. We used to drive for hours on end on roads that never seemed to end, pulling into truck stops for fuel, showers, cheap food, and sometimes a sleep over if we were ahead of schedule. I used to see many men that I thought were hot dudes milling about the truck stops and always wondered what it would be like to have sex with some (okay, many) of them. My fantasies would sometimes get the best of me to the point that on more than one occcasion I’d have to slip into the toilet to release a little tension before I could get back in my dad’s truck. This went on for a very long time until one day, in a truck stop in eastern Tennessee, I was in the toilet alone and a very handsome blond trucker came into the washroom and pulled up to the urinal next to me. Being young and curious and of course naturally horny, I kept looking out of the corner of my eye trying to catch a glimpse of his truck driver cock. One look too many and I was busted! Instead of an ass kicking that I’d expected, instead I got a smile and a head nod toward one of the stalls.
Truck driver dude then headed into one of the stalls, dropped his pants and faced me with one of those “well are you just going to stare at my cock or do something about it?” kind of looks. Hesitantly I started toward the stall, thrilled with the prospect that I was going to get to play with this hot dudes cock when the door to the men’s room opened and my step dad walked in saying he’d been looking for me everywhere and it was time to go. He caught my eyes drifting over toward the open stall door where the truck driver, was hurredly zipping his pants and acting like nothing was going on. My dad, always the perceptive one, grabbed me by the back of the neck and shoved me out the washroom door. He never did say anything to me about what was going on in there but I’m pretty sure he knew he’d interrupted something he should not have seen. For me, my frustration was palpable, my hormones were raging and my balls were blue with the agony of unreleased cum. Ever since then my step dad never took me on a trip with him again and my truck driver sex fantasy has never been realised.
This bara truck driver pinup from a series of truck stop pinups in the members area of Spunktoons, by one of our bara artists brought back the memory of what had transpired and what might have been had my step dad not interrupted me on that one stop over in an east Tennessee truck stop.
I have often heard the advice given “do what you love, love what you do” given to others unsure of where to go in their lives or what course to pursue in a career. I suppose the underlying message meant to be conveyed is that what you love doing you will do well and it won’t seem like work. This is exactly what Gengoroh Tagame, the next artist in our gay cartoon artist profiles is doing in his life. He could very well be the poster child for doing what he loves and being very good at it. And to him, it’s not work, it’s a way of life.
From the time he was a boy his whole life seems to have been channeled toward the time that he would become famously known as one of the best gay erotic manga artists in the world. As far back as he can remember he was influenced by art that involved male submissiveness, humiliation, torture, or bound in slavery. As a boy he read comics by Osamu Tezuka (considered by many to be the “Godfather of Anime”) and paid special attention to any scenes involving pain or torture. He loved movies that involved men in bondage such as the fate of Charlton Heston as a slave in “The Ten Commandments”, “Ben Hur”, and “Planet of the Apes”. As a teenager his interest in Sadomasochistic sex began to really blossom and he found inspiration in books dealing with torture and pain around the world, and started reading the gay Japanese magazine “Sabu” and “120 Days Of Sodom”, a story of wealthy men seeking the ultimate sexual satisfaction in orgies, by French writer Marquis de Sade. As a young man, Tagame’s interests in male bondage, discipline, and even torture became the driving force and source of inspiration for the art he would become best known for.
Although like many artists Tagame was drawing art early in life, but it was 1982, while a student at Tama art University, that he claims is the starting point of his career as a mangaka. His first published works were not under the name Gengoroh Tagame, that name would not become his nom de plume until 1986 as the art director for a Japanese company. In 1992 he started accepting freelance work as an illustrator, art director and graphic designer and this work led to his finally leaving the corporate world to pursue his own art as a full time occupation. From his resume and the list of places his works have been published, Tagame has been a very busy artist. He has had several shows in Japan, France and Spain, been published in many books including G-Men, Sabu, SM-Z, Kinniku-Otoko, SoMe Bizzarre, Badi, and many other publications as well as having published a few art books of his own. One of the most interesting part of Tagame’s work is that it continually evolves. As a lifelong student of gay japanese erotic art and the history of gay sex, Tagame is continually learning, and exploring new areas of Sadomasochistic sex and portraying that with his art.
A man of many sexual fantasies, castration, cannibalism, toilet fantasies are his favorite, but when asked what really turns him on, Tagame says “torture is the best pornography”, “dog collars are best for slaves” and “a man used as a beast of burden is a turnon”. He personally loves bondage, chains ropes, straps, almost any gear used in bondage, and prefers using the tradional Japanese style tenugui as a gag and these implements are seen recurring throughout many of his art pieces. His best known works mainly focuses on bearish, bara type men and mainly in gay BDSM and / or violent sexually charged settings. Warning!! Some of his art is very very explicit and is definately not for the weak hearted. He likes to explore the domination of manly powerful men, stripping them of their masculinity through humiliation and pain yet allowing them to retain a sense of their strength and manliness by featuring their cocks, strong and proud, refusing to be subdued. He likes to take me to the edge of despair and bring them back again through the pleasures of painful sex. In one particular show in France he featured a series of his drawings of a fallen Samurai fighter who was bound, abused and turned into a sex slave, yet through it all, the once mighty, proud fighter found a way to rebel against his bondage, displaying his masculinity through his raging cock. Looking at many of Tagame’s works you can sense the pain the men he portrays are feeling at that specific moment in time, and you can almost sense the journy they had to go through to get to that moment, but you can also see that many have found a way, much like the fallen Samurai, to transcend the pain and channel that pain into sexual pleasure.
As specific as Tagame is about what turns him on sexually, he is equally specific about the other artists in the world who’s work he admires, and that inspire him. He likes Cavelo for the torture he portrays, Etienne for his imagination, Funayama Sanshi for his brutality, George Fuwa a.k.a. Hisatomo for his use of sweat and sperm, The Hun for the raw power he portrays, Les for his mastery of imagery, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi for the detail in his wood block printings, and of course, Tom of Finland who seems to be a source of inspiration to many bara artists around the world.
Visiting Gengoroh Tagame’s website is in itself a virtual journey through the world of gay sadomasochistic sex. You can see the influences these other artists have had on him and see how they are all masterfully blended to create very intimate, very stark portrayals of men, subdued, bound, and in pain, but seeminly having reached the point where they have crossed over the pain threshold and have begun to enjoy the current sexual journey Tagame has taken them on. In his website you will find many galleries of his work, sorted by specific genre of gay fetish sex and includes, a pinup gallery, S&M sex, Bondage sex, general fetishes, wet and dirty sex, character studies (Dessin), character development sketches and a section called Heavy and Deep, and it is! Be warned, the Heavy and Deep section of his site is NOT for everyone and contains images of violent and very painful gay sex. One of my favorite sections of Tagame’s website is the History of Japanese Gay Erotic art section where he displays at least one pinup of twelve different artists that inspire him as well as a brief history and information about each artist. You can also follow Gengoroh Tagame on facebook, twitter, or keep up with what he is currently working on in his blog. Many of his works can be purchased in his online shop, but please be aware that they are only in either Japanese or French and there are no English translations of his work available at this time.
I’d say this definately was a man that follows the maxim ”do what you love and love what you do”, and it certainly shows in his art!
Bara manga artist Kazuhide Ichikawa has just released his newest gay manga title “Beating The Bull” in which he shows the darker side of his art, exploring bondage and humiliation. This new manga release is a collection of previously published stories now collected and published together around the centralized S&M theme.
There are stories about hunky construction workers getting trained as submissives, a top secret military experiment on humans, a Samurai father and his son forced to enjoy each other, lots of shame, humiliation, and manly men getting dominated and humiliated so much that they actually start loving it..even when they don’t want to!
Kazuhide is a regular contributing artist for G-Men magazine, a monthly Japanese gay men’s magazine specializing in muscular men, older men, chubbs, and bear body types. A lot of their art is in the bara category and artists such as Kazuhide have lots of eager fans that eagerly wait their latest publications.
You can order a copy of Kazuhide’s “Beating The Bull” at the G-Style website. You can follow Kazuhide on his facebook page or on twitter here.
