A Couple of Guys

» see acoupleofguys.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The first one was printed in The Weekly News, a gay paper in Miami, in September 1996. Dave Brousseau had put the strip into syndication that June. What it was about stayed the same for the next twenty-one years: Eric Parker, an actor from Columbus, Ohio who paid rent by waiting tables, and Joey Romelli, a New York City police officer, living together in an apartment building in New York with their neighbors in and out of it.

It ended in February 2018. The reasons given were production costs and Brousseau wanting to stop, which between them describe most of what happens to a one-person comic strip that has been running since the Clinton administration. By then it had been syndicated into gay and alternative papers in cities all over the United States and had spent most of its second decade on the web as well.

One of the strip's regulars had been around longer than the strip. Marty Dinkleman, the boorish radio shock jock married to Eric's sister, first appeared in Guy Average, Average Guy, which Brousseau drew for the Xavier University Newswire while he was a student. The college version had curly hair and was not openly homophobic. He was not a New Yorker either, and the only thing that carried over into the strip was the name.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cast list ~

The supporting cast got the kind of detail a daily strip can afford over two decades. Sue Fletcher upstairs is an English professor at NYU who speaks in stilted sentences and patronizes Eric; her partner Simone is a sculptor from Washington. Eric's brother Andy is a punk musician in Columbus who in 2008 was recruited by a fictional ex-gay outfit called P.R.E.Y., for Positive Relationships Enrich You, and left it again a few months later, more or less unchanged. Hector, thrown out by his parents, was taken in by Joey's retired former partner and eventually got a job reporting and editing at The Gay Old Times, which is the gay newspaper Brousseau invented inside a strip that was itself living in gay newspapers.

Eric's niece April was the clock. She was introduced as a child and grew up at the speed everybody else was growing up, which for a comic strip is an unusual commitment to make. Most strips freeze their cast on purpose so the archive never goes stale; this one let the archive become a record of how long it had been running.

~ married twice, in two states ~

Eric and Joey were married in Massachusetts in 2004, the year the state became the first in the country to allow it. Seven years later New York passed its own law, and across three weeks of strips beginning on 12 September 2011 the two of them renewed their vows at the Boathouse in Central Park. That same month, Archie Comics ran the wedding of Kevin Keller, and the gay press covered the two together as a pair of milestones. The strip was fifteen years old that September.

I had no way to run into this. It traveled through a distribution system that does not exist where I live: free papers stacked by the door of a bar or a bookshop in an American city, picked up on the way out, with the strip somewhere near the listings. The web copy was there the whole time, but a website is only available to you if you already know its name, and nothing in Ankara was going to tell me this one.

What the wedding strips make clear is who the audience was. Readers were watching two drawn men get access to something at roughly the same moment they did, in the same states. A strip has to have been running a long time before it can do that at all.

~ what the domain says now ~

The site had a page per character, built by somebody who expected to be at it for a long time. The hosting gave out first: the Internet Archive's capture of 12 April 2018 is not the strip but a single line reading "Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details. (24)", and by the 19th the whole domain was answering 403. Today acoupleofguys.com is a sales listing at HugeDomains. The picture Wikipedia uses to illustrate the strip is a panel about New Year's resolutions, in which Joey points out that Eric always breaks his.

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