Tom of Finland's 'Loggers' Seduction.

In my last article I mentioned the much-neglected sequence in Pekka 1, 'Loggers', where Pekka performs a Kake-style seduction of the youngest of four brothers whom he's discovered living together in a remote forest cabin. 

In the story Pekka stumbles across the family whilst out rambling and with true backwoods hospitality is invited to stay the night . Pekka notices the brothers are all very shy and obviously don't have many visitors. They go to bed early and fall asleep straight away, tired from their day of logging work. 

Pekka lies awake thinking.

1

  Surrounded by all this young masculinity, he starts to fantasise about having sex with them all. 

He wonders if he can jerk off without them noticing. 

Then the youngest brother in the next bed stirs and his blanket slips, exposing his torso.

Attracted by this pleasant sight, Pekka soon notices the young man has an erection under the blankets. 

He can't resist having a closer look.

2

Trying not to awaken the sleeping beauty, Pekka draws the blanket down

.......and all is revealed.

3

It's an irresistible challenge, Pekka immediately homes in.

4

The young man awakes (from an interesting erotic dream, no doubt)

to find the stranger in their midst feasting on his dick.

It's a rather delicate moment and some Kake-style panache is required

if an unpleasant, negative reaction is to be averted.

5 (click to enlarge)

 Pekka proves to be no slouch in the seduction stakes.
He intuitively taps into the young man's secret desires and embarks on a romantic oral exploration of his body, ending up firmly engaged in a passionate kiss. Simultaneously he's exploring between the

the young man's legs with his free hand and getting an enthusiastic response. 

It proves to be enough to ensure there's no unseemly disturbance
 and the other brothers sleep on, unaware.

6

In due course Pekka obtains some sort of release.
But Tom, uncharacteristically, draws a veil over the details of how he gets there.

 ~

This extract illustrates aspects of the Pekka series which may explain their relative neglect.

The mix of cartoons and fully developed artwork doesn't really fulfil the erotic expectations of a reader who comes to it from seeing Tom's fully developed, photo-realist images. Even the most polished picture of this group (No 4) still lacks the complexity and detail that characterise Tom's best pieces. In fact the 'arrival scene' which I reproduced in my preceding article is one of the few in 'Loggers' that do.

Obviously it meant less work for Tom to create the simpler illustrations, offsetting the extra work involved in the ambitious painted ones. The cartoon device works OK for the lead-in to this scene (pictures 1 & 2) but the switch back into sketchy, miniature cartoons just as the encounter is hotting up (in 5) is distinctly disappointing. The structure at this point doesn't seem appropriate for the thrust (!) of the narrative.

What follows then (in  6) is a sudden jump from foreplay to glorious, technicolour ejaculation which  seems even more of a cheat. The absence of a fully expicit depiction of the two men's encounter may have been a deliberate teaser for the franker pictures which follow later on in the story as Pekka works his way through the other brothers, but it's abruptness breaks the spell of the storyline and creates the impression of an incomplete work.

The text which might have helped to erotically bridge this divide only serves to stoke our disappointment, with vague hints about what we might have missed. I haven't reproduced most of it here because the Pekka dialogue is not exactly great literature, but these two extracts give a good flavour of how it's written. (You can see read original in the refence at the foot of this article). We must make allowances for the pitfalls of translation and the difficulties of transplanting distinctive, local forms of expressions into foreign languages. However, taking the words at face value, they have a slightly patronising, pulp fiction flavour that doesn't conjure up the impression of a particularly attractive man. It doesn't fit with how I imagine the strong and silent men in Tom's other work would behave and talk. As movie stars of the 20's found, putting words into the mouths of previously unheard actors is a risky business. The predicament, you'll recall, is memorably parodied (for a woman) in the film "Singing In The Rain".

It's interesting to compare Pekka with Oliver Frey's 'Rogue' which is roughly contemporary. He's seen below negotiating a similar encounter with a Farm Boy in his own inimitable style.

click to enlarge

Unlike Pekka, Rogue is not a physically attractive man. His uncompromising, unapologetic exploitation of younger men ought to be unattractive too, but in a fictional context it isn't. Pekka (by his words) seems to need reassurance back from his prey, Rogue doesn't. Decide for yourself which you prefer for a story. Kake appears to be cast in the same mould as Rogue, but unlike Pekka he never speaks, so he can't give himself away.

To be fair, the Pekka series is a trip down memory lane for Tom, idealistically reminiscing about the natural beauty of his homeland, his youthful exploration of it and the lumberjack fantasies that embellished his adolesence. It may look like a Kake story in places, but there's a flavour of nostalgia, real life and yearning for comradeship that is a million miles from Kake's disfunctional world of exploitation, it's nicely captured in the campfire scene in Pekka 3 'Camping' (below).

Tom's also trying to find a broader audience for his work here. His experimentation with water colours and oil paint in scenes like this is very successful, more so than the (admittedly dramatic) spurt sample shown above.  All fringe artists have a yearning to go 'legit' at some point, but it's a clever man that can combine art with porn. Perhaps for Tom this was a step too far.

You can read the full Pekka 1 story with text here