Doug Melnyk’s comic image sequence Doug Melnyk’s Fruits was published in 2005 by Winnipeg-based As We Try & Sleep Press, who describe it as ‘an anti-narrative comic populated by hordes of hairy, naked cartoon men as they engage in a variety of interactive adventures and escapades.’ For our representative collection of Melnyk art we have borrowed the idea of fruit and punned on ‘passion fruit’ as a catch-all description of Melnyk’s preoccupation with the rewards of rampant gay sex.

The fruits of his imagination are seemingly endless, from fantasies about older cousins to fantasies about encounters in changing rooms; his fantasies (and maybe some aren’t quite as fantastic as others) filling collages, exercise books and whatever scraps of paper are at hand.

It won’t escape most viewers that the little guy in specs bears more than a passing resemblance to the artist. And ‘bears’ describes many of the hairy specimens encountered on his artistic quest.