PRIDE MONTH 2025! Derek Charm has lent his talents to some of the biggest franchises in comics, from Star Trek and Star Wars to Archie and Marvel’s Squirrel Girl. Here, in Toxic Summer, we get the welcome opportunity to see Derek Charm’s original characters.
Leo and Ben are two typical besties looking for summer fun after graduation. However Charm flips the script by having them lust after ripped studs instead of buxom babes! Leo has the perfect summer planned for the duo, but upon reporting for work as lifeguards at Port Dorian, Leo and Ben find out there has been a toxic spill off the coast that has closed the beach. After their summer seems ruined, the guys settle in at Leo’s grandmother’s house and scope out the town in the morning. They spot a cute guy and his friends at the local diner, possibly saving their lost summer. That night Leo and Ben are cleaning up dead fish from the beach when they spot a figure in the contaminated water. Saving the man, they notice he has glowing eyes. There the mystery begins.
This setup could lead to the facile observation this is simply a raunchy teen sex comedy by way of a Scooby-Doo whodunit. That does not take into account the writing skill of Derek Charm. All the characters are introduced casually in the first part of the story without any shoehorning of exposition. Likewise everything the reader needs to know about the mysterious spill is subtly hinted at. This allows the readers to engage with the characters and their highly absurd situation more convincingly as events spiral.
Surprisingly, for a story being about two horny young men Toxic Summer is quite “all ages” in tone, aside from the brilliant two-page spread at the beginning of the book depicting Leo’s memory of a beach Bacchanalian orgy. Even that is tastefully staged more for laughs than titillation.
Special mention should be made of Derek Charm’s colouring in Toxic Summer. The whole colour scheme of the book seems to be in service of evoking an emotional or visceral response in the reader, as opposed to consistently rooting the scenes in reality. The outdoor scenes are claustrophobic in their murky green monochromatic fog. The combination of the building suspense and this fog combine to bring a feeling of unease and menace throughout the book. Charm wisely breaks up this conceit with brighter coloring for interstitial daytime and indoor scenes.
The true strength of Derek Charm’s Toxic Summer, beyond the silly hijinks, is the friendship of Leo and Ben. In today’s increasingly insular world it’s great to see two same-sex gay friends in a relationship usually exclusively depicted in the past in straight buddy movies: the goofy overeager extrovert and the calmer more in control introvert. The pair survive an ever escalating series of horrors, in fact, because of this friendship. Charm should be commended for using his talents to show us good clean fun through an LGBTQIA+ lens.
Derek Charm (W/A/L/C) • Oni Press, $19.99
Review by Gary Usher
