Books

I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together (Cover)

Pantheon Books, New York City / Random House Canada February 2024

(*Insert:
1. Inside front flap description
2. 3 blurbs from Back Jacket)

More information at Pantheon Books and Random House Canada (links to websites)
I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together will be available on February 27, 2024. You can preorder at your favourite bookstore.
(Links to Amazon, Chapters Indigo, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s)
(Link to Pantheon Graphic Library)

(3 or 4 spreads to come…)

The World of Gloria Badcock (Cover)

Join Gloria and her friends in a silly, symphonic celebration of sexual freedom.

Koyama Press 2011

Do you like comic books about licentious fashion magazine editrixes and time-traveling scientists with big cocks and a taste for Swedish bodybuilders? Then The World of Gloria Badcock may be for you.
This delightful little stapled comic continues Vellekoop’s chronicles of the titular heroine first introduced in his 1997 strip collection Vellevision. Loyal readers will remember Gloria as a very stylish sexual adventurer with a liberal assortment of friends, lovers, and bespectacled, chinless, bun-wearing, yet-still-sexy administrative assistants. Professional magazine illustrator Vellekoop is part of the 80s-90s Toronto post-punk-comics generation and specifically forms a kind of alternative or polymorphically perverse flipside “Toronto 3” alongside Seth and Fiona Smyth, and his current book reads like a queer version of one of those classic issues of Jimmy Olsen or Lois Lane, complete with crackpot inventors and bull-dyke genies, with a couple of longer stories sandwiching a few one-page features and gags, drawn in Vellekoop’s trademarked Herge-meets-Boody-Rogers-meets-Tom-of-Finland cartooning style. See Gloria enjoy kinky sex amid the French Revolution! Watch as a very young Gloria comes to associate Adam and Eve, spanking, Nancy Drew, and masturbation. Ogle a series of wonderfully-delineated stock hardcore gay porn poses disguised as a science fiction plot! Read droll dialogue mixed with cartoon cliches and 1960s fashion references! Vellekoop’s art is beautiful and quite boner-inducing, and I recommend examining his clear-line approach in the privacy of your own home, the family Christmas gathering, at work, or on public transit, regardless of your sexual orientation or comic art preferences. -BK Munn

Maurice Vellekoop’s Pin-ups (Cover)

Green Candy Press 2009

A collection of pictures of sexsational men of all types and sizes, from Maurice e Vellekoop, the creator of Maurice Vellekoop’s ABC Book, A Homoerotic Primer. Inspired by the golden age of great girlie artists like Vargas and Gil Elvgren, Vellekoop brings the cheekiness and wit of those masters to the world of gay erotica.

A Nut At The Opera (Cover)

Drawn and Quarterly 2006

Graphic artist Maurice Vellekoop, a contributor to just about every major North American magazine in the last two decades, describes his latest book-length work as a tribute to his late mentor and friend, Paul Baker, who taught Vellekoop at the Ontario College of Art in the early 1980s. Baker introduced the suburban Vellekoop to many of the city’s joys, including a trip to the opera. Baker loved all things operatic – the music, the costumes, the larger-than-life personalities of the performers – a love that his young protégé soon adopted.

Over the years, Vellekoop paid homage to his mentor and their shared passion with a series of birthday and Christmas cards he created for Baker, each showcasing an imaginary opera star conceived and drawn by Vellekoop. A Nut at the Opera collects these illustrations, along with the brief, witty bios of his imagined stars.

The antics of Vellekoop’s divas and divos don’t seem any more ridiculous than anything from the pages of a typical celebrity tabloid, but they are further enlivened by the emotional and aesthetic excesses associated with an artform known for its flamboyance. An appreciation for flamboyance and camp is a necessity for enjoying Vellekoop’s candy-coloured caricatures, but this love letter to a friend also makes for a gentle introduction for the operaphobic. -James Grainger

Maurice Vellekoop’s ABC Book, A Homoerotic Primer (Cover)

Gates of Heck 1997 / Green Candy Press 1998

A is for Astronauts floating in Space, B is for Bikers having a race, C is for Cowboys under western skies, D is for Dancers at their exercise, E is for Executives reaching their goals, F is for Firemen sliding down poles! Written by award-winning artist Maurice Vellekoop, this delightfully naughty ABC book for adults, from Jailbirds to Opera Singers, Hairdressers to Truckers. Each letter of the alphabet provides the key to a hot and funny scenario of gay sex. With erotic drawings reminiscent of a cross between Tintin and Tom of Finland, Vellekoop commemorates and honors these classic homoerotic fantasies with great humour and gaiety. A greta gift, and a must for every gay household.

Vellevision, A Cocktail of Comics and Pictures (Cover)

Drawn and Quarterly 1997

“Matt Groenig, Kaz, and Maurice Vellekoop share a clarity of vision that drives their cartoons straight into the psyche unimpeded. Maurice somehow achieves that clarity in ambitiously complicated scenes and makes it look effortless.” -Gary Panter

“Where else are you going to go for so much colour, glitz, and an almost iridescent sense of human fickleness? I just wish he gave art lessons.”
-Chris Ware