Stuff: Words

The Koala Bares
The following was written by my good on-line friend Tom Roark as an introduction to The Koala Bares. Tom is a writer, cartoonist, artist, musician - a very creative guy! The one greatest things about having my comics on-line is how it gives me the opportunity to meet so many friendly and talented people.
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Introduction
I have been a nudist (or, to be more politically correct, a naturist) for as long as I can remember. When I discovered the world-wide web, I started looking for sites that could tell me what other people like me thought about our shared taste for social nudity.

This book is the product of the most singular nudist website I found - loxieandzoot.com. Over the year-and-a-half that it took Australian artist Stephen Crowley to produce his serialised comic - 'Loxie & Zoot: The Koala Bares' - I looked forward eagerly to Wednesdays, when he would post to the site his latest, airy, sunny drawings of naturists at play, at work, at life.

When Stephen finished that story, I emailed him this quote from George Bernard Shaw:

'This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.'

Then I went, “Gee, it's not like he wrote ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. He drew a cartoon about a nudist colony.”

I have always been a little conflicted about my nudism, because I was embarrassed by my strong longing for something that seemed - well - trivial. I think of myself as somebody with acres of perspective, and here I was acting like a little kid running around naked behind the barn.

Two kids in Stephen’s story, Chrystel and Nick, call it ‘being in the nuddy’. I thought frisking around in the nuddy was a kind of oblivious, childish hedonism, not exactly wrong, but frivolous in the face of hunger, global warming, and nine-one-ones.

That has changed, thanks partly to Stephen. I still play with my politico-enviro-economic mind toys, but I have become convinced that, over eighty or ninety years, a happy nudist will do more for the world than a politically correct bore.

The first time I visited a nudist camp, I told another nudist, “This is surreal”. She wanted to know if that was good or bad. It was good. It was right. But it was very, very strange.

And, you know, that is why frisking around in the nuddy is not trivial. If we are so alienated from the parts of our bodies that lurk between collar and cuff - the solid, physical 'us' - that it is strange to play and relax with those parts exposed, we have our wires crossed.

If I can strike up a friendship with a cartoonist on the other side of the planet; if we have deduced the periodic table, DNA, and quarks; if we are beginning to realize the subtle but real connections between our individual choices and the welfare of billions of contemporaries and descendants; then the pleasure, the beauty, the strangeness of naturism is a blessing.

In Loxie & Zoot, Stephen Crowley has presented us with a gift. Comics are a friendly medium and Stephen’s cartoon nudist resort is an inviting place. It is an island of sanity, even of healing, in a world that is - in a word - nuts. I know Stephen thinks about the big issues, and his characters do too. But that is not what Loxie & Zoot is about. It is about fun.

Loxie and Zoot are a woman and a man who own a naturist resort, the ‘Koala Bay Bares’, near a coastal town in Australia. Zoot was raised a naturist, and he introduced Loxie to naturism. They are enthusiasts, and nudity is no longer strange to them. In fact, they are so used to being naked that, early in the story, Zoot goes into town, having forgotten to dress.

Other Bares are Willow - the hotel-management student, working at the resort for room and board; Tasha - Willow’s dreadlocked cousin; Fred and Janet - the resort’s former owners; an indigenous fellow living in a paisley-decked yurt; three guys named Herb, and an emu named Oscar. There are more, but you will meet them as you go along. They are bright, well-adjusted, friendly folks who, in this story, are hosting an open-house to show the public that social nudity is not scary.

I think Stephen’s characters are attractive, and if there were more of them, if more of us embraced their lighthearted surrealism, we could expect all that politico-enviro-economic whatsit to get a little less threatening.

Stephen Crowley knows what we look like, and draws our naked bodies in a relaxed, open way. But I expect you already know that, since you looked at the pictures first. He also knows how to time a joke and tell a story. So, what are you waiting for? Turn the page and enter a world that is about as strange as curling up naked with a book, in your cosiest chair. You will never be the same.

Tom Roark