Seattle, WA – On August 1, 2010, at 7 PM, Kevin Boze, co-creator of The Virgin Project 2 (ISBN: 978-1-60381-440-9, 141 pp, $14.95) held a reading and signed books at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company. This adult comic book, featuring fictionalized accounts from real people about how they lost their virginity, is the second joint effort of Seattle artist K.D. Boze and his cousin, Colorado illustrator Stasia Kato. After Volume 1 appeared two years ago, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage praised it as “moving, hilarious, and heartbreaking.” About fifty people attended the event, in which Boze and his wife, Grace Reamer, read several of the stories from both volumes of the Virgin Project, including one featuring “lesbian sock puppets.” The audience, ranging in age from early 20s to 60s, included several students who had used the first Virgin Project book as a text in a community college course on human sexuality. A lively question and answer session followed.
“Just about everyone who picks up this book falls in love with it,” says Fanny Press Sales Director Nancy Johnson. “But marketing does remain a challenge. Because the book includes stories from people of all ages and sexual orientations, it is difficult to target a particular niche. And American society is still afraid of controversy. The book is a little too racy for the mainstream and too tame for most sellers of erotica. Still, we believe that, in the end, the book’s inclusiveness and universal reach are its greatest strengths. Our hope is that it will be discovered in a major way by the European market. Both the Virgin Project 1 and 2 would make fantastic textbooks for learning English in a more broadminded culture. Kevin is a beautiful writer, and his approach to these anecdotes is both sensitive and clever. We are also spreading the word to high schools, colleges and community colleges in the U.S. that these books are a wonderfully accessible way to teach young people about sexuality and health.”
So far the books are mostly underground hits, but they have also been officially recognized for their excellence. On May 1, 2010—two weeks after the book’s release—Boze and Kato were named Cartoonists of the Year by Cartoonists Northwest, which also awarded The Virgin Project 2 the Golden Toonie Award in the Comic Books/Graphic Novels Category.
The new volume includes an introduction by University of Washington sociology professor and nationally noted sexuality expert Dr. Pepper Schwartz.
Part interactive art experience and part sociological experiment, The Virgin Project is an ongoing endeavor to capture the breadth of a universally shared human experience. Like the first published collection, the stories in Volume 2 cover a wide range of experiences—sometimes wonderful, often sweet and occasionally horrific—from people of every sexual orientation.
“Every story gets a different reaction,” says Kato, who studied at Cornish College in Seattle under local cartoonist Ellen Forney. “Sometimes people laugh. A few cry. People tell me it was cathartic to share their story and see it retold in a sensitive way. Rape victims’ advocates and sociology teachers have asked for copies.”
Both volumes of The Virgin Project are available at selected bookstores. They can also be purchased online at fannypress.com, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, and Amazon.fr. Books are also available for libraries and bookstores through the Baker & Taylor catalog.