The Hard to Swallow anthology is an upcoming comic filled with hundreds of pages of dirty comic action from almost a dozen contributors, out April 11 on Northwest Press. Along with Justin Hall, Dave Davenport provided the bulk of the art. Dave works as a tattoo artist in West Hollywood. His stories are filled with erotic tales full of skater punks, hairy go-go boys and werewolves getting dirty with dragons. Steve MacIsaac, who lately has been working with gay erotic comics author Dale Lazarov, is also in the book with his story “Pas de Deux”. Horror writer and creator of the comic series Black Gay Boy Fantasy Victor Hodge created a story for the new edition about a group of ghost hunters taking on a lusty spirit from beyond.

Read what the trio had to say on the famed series and its transformation into an anthology.

What was it like creating this book? Any new efforts for the new edition?

Dave Davenport: It was fun and work, like all creative endeavors. I have a new piece in the collection which is a follow up to my "Gigantic" story from Hard to Swallow #1. “Gigantic” was about a lovers’ spat between Godzilla and King Kong. I don't want to give too much away, but the follow up is called "Gigantic Rim".

Victor Hodge: I wasn’t a part of the original Hard to Swallow, though I loved the series. I was asked to submit by Justin Hall, who has a way of getting the naughty out of me. I’m not normally smut-minded in my work. Except for all of that Simpsons porn I drew for one of my blogs. I told Justin that I couldn’t come up with anything filthy and – he didn’t believe me! So, I swallowed hard and took off my big boy panties. I challenged myself. I took a character who had the potential to be naughty and made him really naughty. The result was my story, “The Watchers: It’s Me or the Ghost”.  It’s about an insatiable ghost, an immortal and a spellbinder.

Steve MacIsaac: This is not a new story, but it was an important one for me, a bridge between my earlier erotic work and the more character- and dialogue-driven work I do now. I have never reprinted this story in my series Shirtlifter, so it's great to be part of this collection with the group of cartoonist I consider my peers.

Could you tell me about some of your favorite smutty comic artists and what you like about them?

Dave Davenport: My favorites... hmmm, Jon Macy has created a world in Fearful Hunter that I want to live in. He has a great new piece in our Hard to Swallow collection, by the way. I really like Jaraiya as well. His bara is the best, and he's done a fair amount of sexy creatures too. Justin brought me a book of his from his visit to Japan, and I've been hooked ever since.

Victor Hodge: Belasco is a personal favorite. He realllly knows how to draw black men. And, somehow in his B&W inking style, he manages to show different skin tones without using color. Plus, he shows all kind of different black men in all shapes and sizes. Thugs. Working-class people. Professionals. Church folk. Regular folks. S&M folks. Basketball players. And, who wouldn’t love his ultra sexy Adventures of Boo?

Steve MacIsaac: Tom of Finland is kind of obvious, but a truly groundbreaking artist and the origin of so much gay iconography. The silence and his choreography in his stories was definitely one of the inspirations for Dale [Lazarov] and myself in doing Sticky. I’m also influenced by gay erotic manga artists Gengoroh Tagame and Jiraiya, wholly different artists and sensibilities, but I think of them together as the absolute best practitioners of Japanese bara manga, and artists I discovered more less simultaneously while I was living in Japan. Richard Corben’s Den [stories in Heavy Metal] definitely had an influence on how I draw the male form. Even though it's a straight strip by a heterosexual artist, he was intensely sexualized, and I found he was more the focus of the strip's erotic mind than the frequently interchangeable women.

Any projects you're currently working on you'd like to share info about? 

Dave Davenport: I am currently working on my graphic novel Feral and the Ghost Skater: Stray Bullet, which I won the Prism Comics Queer Press Grant for in 2015. I've been posting it on my Patreon page as I work on the new chapter, as well as various and sundry comics work and sketches from the present and past. Check it out!

Victor Hodge: Right now, I’m compiling my comic Black Gay Boy Fantasy. Northwest Press has been releasing them digitally in bunches with new color covers and a ton of new drawings. All of the original art has been colored in shades of gray, which really help to add depth and a completely new feel. Eventually, those issues will be compiled into a printed format. I have a story in Tara Avery and Jon Macy's upcoming Alphabet Anthology called "Shady Muse." For the future, I’m working on some biographical commix about my early twenties and my first apartment. Then, I would finally like to expose my obsession with Nancy Drew and Barbie. Nothing naughty there.

Steve MacIsaac: I have released five issues to date of my comics series, Shirtlifter, most of which has been focused on a 200+ page graphic novel called Unpacking, which is focused on the relationship between a commitment-phobic gay man and a straight, married executive. I finished the book in the most recent issue, and I'm working on art and color correction for an eventual collection. Bruno Gmünder has just released the 10th anniversary edition of Sticky, my first book which I drew in collaboration with Dale Lazarov. I'm also hard at work on Shirtlifter #6, which is a collection of short autobiographical pieces, similar to the type of work I collected in my second issue. So number six is almost done, just one more short story left to complete.