"Poppers" by Jerry Mills (part I)

In the above Poppers strip, Billy is showering as we're introduced to Buster, a parasitic "crab" that lives in Billy's very active pubic hairs. Billy and Buster were the creations of Jerry Mills who was a gay cartoonist. Jerry became popular particularly for his creation of the Poppers comic strip. The comics told of the adventures of Billy, a West Hollywood handsome hunk who's in demand all over the gay community for his hot body. Indeed, in real life this was a time (before AIDS) when the gay liberation fight for equal rights in major cities had resulted in a new sexual freedom that many men took advantage of.

The strip's title also referred to alkyl nitrites. These drugs were commonly used by people (both gay and straight) who frequented pickup bars and they were especially popular in the gay communities. The rush of sensations experienced when poppers were inhaled were believed to make the pleasures of having sex even better. For better or worse, the drugs were often part of the sex culture from the 1970s disco scene into the 1980s. As one guy noted to a reporter for The New Romans (just after receiving anonymous oral sex from another man in a downtown Chicago club) "It takes getting your rocks off to another dimension". As awareness of how AIDS was actually being transmitted became better-known, poppers were viewed by many within the medical and gay health communities as dangerous. Like the bath houses where they were often used at, they promoted risky sexual activity. In his novel A day and A Night at the Baths, Michael Rumaker described the scene as being "permeated with that particularly inert, greasy odor of poppers. Wherever you went, the musky chemical smell of it was constantly in your nostrils." Poppers were not as safe as many thought for other reasons: Apart from causing localized damage to nasal membranes, poppers they were linked to anemia, strokes, heart, lung, and brain damage, arterial constriction, cardiovascular collapse, and a chronic depletion of T-cell ratio's associated with severe immune dysfunction.

The comic Poppers strip began in the early 1980s when Mills worked for In Touch for Men magazine. The editor at the time encouraged Mills to write a regular comic strip to add variety to the magazine's content. Poppers began in April 1982. Where many earlier gay-related comics were stereotypical, Mills was one of the first to present his characters as real everyday men with desires for love, friendship and a happy life.

By the mid-1980s the strip was also being published ( in translation ) in Gai Pied Hebdo, a French-language gay magazine, and was translated into Japanese. As well as writing Poppers Mills also created ad hoc cartoons and wrote a history of gays in comics for the first Meatmen anthology.

It's reported that when Mills moved to the classifieds department of Advocate Men, the Poppers strip followed him. But by the beginning of the 1990s Mills' health was deteriorating and in his final few years he worked less. He designed posters for Queer Nation and sadly died in January 1993. He was survived by his partner, Sal Lucarello.