If it weren't for the Go-Gos, Jamaica Plain rocker/cartoonist Craig Bostick might never have met his husband and band-mate, Jon Hetman. Bostick, a transplant from St. Louis, had moved to Boston in 1998 after his previous band, The Smarties, broke up, and he was in the market for a new boyfriend, preferably a musician. Lo and behold, in December 1999 a friend brought him to a talent-show-themed party where attendees had to show off some sort of talent for their fellow partygoers. When Bostick walked through the door he saw Hetman, playing guitar and singing a song by one of Bostick's favorite bands.

"He was playing the song 'Head Over Heels' by the Go-Gos, and so I went in, and I really like the Go-Gos, and I was always looking for a musician to date, and so I was immediately very interested," said Bostick. "And I ended up playing guitar for him after the whole show part of it was over, and I played him a Go-Go's b-side. So he was impressed that I not only knew the song but I knew how to play it on guitar. And so that was the whole thing, we started dating because we were both really into music and we were both musicians. That was the main thing that made us notice each other."

That first meeting planted the seeds not only of their relationship but also of Bostick's next band, Spoilsport. About a month after they started dating Bostick, a guitar player and singer, and Hetman, who, despite showing off his guitar skills at the talent show, primarily performs as a drummer, began playing together, and soon they decided to form a band. They recruited two friends, Marla Greenman on bass and Suzanne Hinton on guitar, and Spoilsport was born. The band's sound is a mix of punk and pop, incorporating everything from surf guitar to 60s girl group to rockabilly; think the B-52s meets the Go-Gos meets the Ramones.

The band has played shows around the Boston area, along with some gigs in New York and a show back in St. Louis, and in 2003 they put out their debut album, They All Want Cake, which won rave reviews from the Boston Globe, Out magazine, and Punk Planet. Most recently Spoilsport played a show at O'Brien's in Allston and another in that queerest of venues, the basement of Jacques Cabaret in Bay Village. The band has written enough new material that they hope to enter the studio to record a new album early next year.

The Go-Gos may have helped Bostick find his future husband and his future band, but it was a chance article in the graphic design magazine Print that sparked Bostick's interest in another creative medium, comics. As a kid Bostick was a fan of Archie and superhero comics, but he lost interest as he grew older. As an undergraduate graphic design major, he picked up an issue of Print highlighting the world of alternative comics of the 80s and 90s, creators like Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Lynda Barry, Dan Clowes and Charles Burns. Bostick immediately became a fan.

"And so I read that [article] and I really liked it, and I was always doing art and stuff, and I kind of wanted to do it, but I didn't really know how to do it," said Bostick. "But finally when I moved here, I used to also be a photographer, and I didn't have the money to be a photographer, and I didn't have a dark room or anything like that, so I was like, 'What can I do that's relatively low overhead, doesn't take up a lot of room?' And I was like, 'I'll just start drawing comics,' and that's what I did."

Like his music, Bostick's comics run the stylistic gamut, from self-published mini-comics starring campy heroines like the intergalactic songstress Fuchsia Galactica and the hard-drinking Go-Go Girl, to sexy and subtle meditations on gay desire published in the gay comics anthology Boy Trouble, to how-to cartoons illustrating Greg Der Ananian's 2005 punk rock craft book Bazaar Bizarre. His comics have been published in several anthologies including the independent comics anthology Expo 2001 and the gay web comic compilation Young Bottoms in Love, edited by fellow local gay cartoonist (and Bay Windows contributor) Tim Fish.

Beyond his cartooning and his music, Bostick pays the bills as a freelance graphic designer. And in between all of that work he also paints; last October he showed his work at Magpie, Davis Square's hipster craft store, and this month he sold his paintings and comics at Der Ananian's Bazaar Bizarre craft fair at the South End's Cyclorama. Bostick said with each of these different outlets it is a constant struggle balancing his work schedule and trying not to over-commit himself. When Bay Windows spoke with him last week he was working steadily to finish his contributions to the next volume of Boy Trouble and a series of commissioned paintings, in between his graphic design work.

While the rock club and the comic shop might seem worlds apart, Bostick said in his career the lines between those two worlds have had a tendency to blur. Among his most successful comics works is "Crash: The Life and Death of a Germ," a short biographical mini-comic about Darby Crash, the lead singer of L.A. punk band The Germs, who killed himself in 1980. Bostick was a fan of The Germs and the L.A. punk scene as a whole, and he originally created the comic for an anthology of biographical comics; the story was rejected, but he decided to release it himself. "Crash" sketches out Crash's rise and fall, including his struggles with his sexuality. The San Francisco alternative comics publisher Last Gasp distributed the comic, and Bostick said it's become one of his biggest sellers, likely because it appeals to fans of the Germs and the L.A. punk scene.

"Whenever I do shows I always sell a ton of them," said Bostick.

Bostick's comics and music careers crossed over again when Fish asked him to write a song for a fictional band, The Cupcakes, in his Young Bottoms in Love web comic. Fish asked him to write lyrics for a song called "Frosted," but Bostick and Spoilsport decided to go one better, writing and recording a full-fledged song. When the strip debuted online it included an audio file of Spoilsport performing the song as The Cupcakes.

"It was funny, because we like that song, but it wasn't something we would have done without, somebody's like, 'Write a song called 'Frosted,'' and you're like, 'Okay.' It was one of those things where we wrote it really quickly and recorded it really quickly," said Bostick.

Bostick's work in the alternative comics world also inadvertently gave him and Hetman the chance to become a part of gay history as one of the nearly 4000 same-sex couples married in San Francisco. Back in February 2004 Bostick and Hetman traveled to San Francisco for the Alternative Press Expo, an annual convention showcasing independent cartoonists. By chance the convention coincided with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's decision to begin marrying same-sex couples at City Hall. Bostick said he and Hetman had discussed getting married when it became legal, and with several months to go before the Goodridge decision went into effect in Massachusetts, the couple decided to tie the knot while they were in town for the convention. The first two days they went to City Hall the line was too long for them to get in before closing. On the third day they rose at the crack of dawn, determined to get hitched that morning.

"The next day we got up really early and we went at five o'clock in the morning and waited in line all day in the rain and just barely got in. ... Even though we were there so early there were people already there in line. So it was a really cool experience, and we really enjoyed it, it was great, but those marriages were voided by the state of California, so now it's like, 'Are we married, are we not married?'" said Bostick.

He said he and Hetman plan to marry again in Massachusetts, but after their elopement in San Francisco their families have made it clear that the second time around they expect a full-fledged wedding ceremony, and at least some sort of party for family and friends. But with their packed work schedules and various creative commitments the couple has not found the time to make it happen.

"So we're like, 'We need to plan this,' but we're just bad at doing that, so we haven't done it again here," said Bostick.

For more information on Bostick's comics and graphic design work visit www.aquaboy.net. To learn about Spoilsport visit www.spoilsport.net.
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