Category: Adult/Erotica

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Zora and the Hibernauts


By Fernando Fernández (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 978-0-87416-001-7

Multi-disciplinary Spanish artist Fernando Fernández began working to help support his family at age 13 whilst still at High School. He left in 1956 and immediately began working for British and French comics publishers. In 1958 his family relocated to Argentina and whilst there he added jobs for El Gorrión, Tótem and Puño Fuerte to his ongoing European and British assignments for Valentina, Roxy and Marilyn.

In 1959 he returned to Spain and began a long association with Fleetway Publications in London, producing mostly war and girls’ romance stories.

During the mid-1960’s he began to experiment with painting and began selling book covers and illustrations to a number of clients, before again taking up comics work in 1970, creating a variety of strips (many of which found their way into US horror magazine Vampirella), the successful comedy feature ‘Mosca’ for Diario de Barcelona and educational strips for the pubshing house Afha.

Becoming increasingly experimental as the decade passed, Fernández produced ‘Cuba, 1898’ and ‘Círculos’ before in 1980 beginning his science fiction spectacular ‘Zora y los Hibernautas’ for the Spanish iteration of fantasy magazine 1984 which was eventually seen in English in Heavy Metal magazine. His later graphic spectacles include ‘Dracula’ for the Spanish iteration of Creepy, mediaeval fantasy thriller ‘La Leyenda de las Cuatro Sombras’ (working with Carlos Trillo), ‘Argón, el Salvaje’ and a number of adaptations of Isaac Asimov tales in ‘Firmado por: Isaac Asimov’ and ‘Lucky Starr – Los Océanos de Venus’.

His last comics work was ‘Zodíaco’ begun in 1989, but his increasing heart problems soon curtailed the series and he returned to painting and illustration. He passed away in August 2010, aged 70.

The stunning adult epic Zora and the Hibernauts exploits classic science fiction themes of sexual politics to explore the perceived role and character of men and women and opens, after a truly breathtaking biography and gallery section, with the first staggeringly lush chapter as, far into the future, warrior-women from the artificial moon Honeycomb (home to the censorious, draconian colony of the Sisterhood) land on the deadly and biologically inimical planet Earth searching for lost technology and other objects of interest or value.

The crew is led by the competent Zora, a space veteran who has won the love and devotion of her crew through years of sterling service. The ancient birthplace of humanity has long been quarantined: a pestilential hell-hole where radiation and disease have created unspeakable horrors, but the explorers have no idea what shocks await their first forays into the unknown landscape they call Terra-Lune…

The search goes badly and crew-women are lost to plants, beasts and things which qualify as both and neither, but Zora is intent on finding some specific unknown treasure. Meanwhile, back on Honeycomb, scientist Nylea breaks the Queen’s taboo and searches the ancient archives for proscribed information on the extinct creature once called “man”…

On Terra-Lune the invaders have broached a long-hidden chamber and found six hibernation pods from before the Earth died…

They contain frozen men and Zora, defying orders and centuries of custom, decants and revives the perfectly preserved creatures rather than destroy them, setting herself on a path that will lead to civil war and the restoration of the natural order…

She is strangely drawn to one of the men: Astronaut Commander Amon, who holds crucial knowledge of the fall of humanity and whose presence stirs the quizzical Zora in ways she doesn’t understand…

Taking her prizes back to Honeycomb where they are interviewed by Supreme Sister Rasam, Zora is ordered to keep the hibernauts in personal custody, but isn’t surprised when Nylea informs her that the queen is planning to destroy her and the men who threaten the hegemony and beliefs of the all-female, in vitro parthenogenetic culture.

Following a brutal battle, Zora, Nylea and the males take refuge on toxic Terra-Lune where they encounter another man: an incredible immortal named Rob who has survived on the poisoned planet for uncounted ages and aids the fugitives when the Sisterhood ships come hunting them…

Escaping the stalkers, the refugee band hides deep within the horror-world and inevitably Zora and Amon perpetrate an act of love not seen on Earth for millennia, after which Rob reveals the location of a fully-functioning ancient starship and offers them a means of fighting back against the tyranny of Rasam.

But whilst Rob relates the secret of his incredible longevity, on Honeycomb long-suppressed antagonisms begin to re-emerge.

Terra-Lune still holds many threats and horrors however, and whilst the outcasts battle for survival against beasts and monstrous sub-men on the debased planet, a deadly civil war erupts on the artificial satellite led by ambitious hardliner and second-in-command Sharta. By the time Zora and her followers are ready to attack Rasam, Honeycomb is in the midst of civil war…

Just when events are their most fraught, the universal implications of the struggle are revealed when a god-like timeless entity appears, disclosing Zora’s cosmic importance and that her womb now carries the first naturally conceived and developing human baby in thousand of years. Zora has been chosen by the higher powers of the universe to restore and perpetuate the human species…

The grand concepts come thick and fast in Zora and the Hibernauts and although the narrative is a little muddled in consequence, this breathtaking yarn delivers fast paced, action-packed, staggeringly beautiful and astoundingly exciting adult science fiction thrills in the tradition pulp manner. Being Spanish, however there’s a slight tinge of macho, if not subverted sexism, on display and of course, there is extensive female nudity throughout – so much so that by half-way through you won’t even notice…

If naked bald women are liable to offend you, give this as miss, but for all the normal red- blooded fans out there this is a superb tale by a master craftsman you’ll certainly want to track down and savour.

© 1981 Fernando Fernández. English edition © 1984 Catalan Communications. All rights reserved.

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Joost Swarte’s Modern Art


By Joost Swarte, translated by Martin Beumer (Real Free Press Int. Foundation)
No ISBN:

Joost Swarte is national treasure of the Netherlands: a Dutch New Master whose too-rare forays into comic art have always produced challenging and stunning work which manage to be simultaneously forward looking and aggressively retro and nostalgic.

He has won awards and acclaim as a writer, artist, illustrator, printmaker, graphic designer, stained glass and mural creator and furniture/architectural designer.

Born on Christmas Eve 1947, Swarte grew up in Heemstede in North Holland Province, before studying Industrial Design at the Academy for Design in Eindhoven. He gravitated to the comics field in the late 1960s, becoming adept in the classical ligne laire style of illustration favoured by Belgian star artists such as Hergé, “Bob” (Robert Frans Marie) De Moor and E.P. (Edgard Félix Pierre) Jacobs, producing children’s strips for magazines such as Tante Leny Presenteert and Jippo whilst also working as a newspaper illustrator.

In 1971 he began his own magazine Modern Papier and over the years created many evocative, stylish and memorable series such as Jopo de Pojo, Katoen en Pinbal, Anton Makassar, Dr. Ben Cine, ‘De Blauwe Berbers’, ‘Caesar Soda’, ‘Toon en Toos Brodeloos’ and Niet Zo, Maar Zo– Passi, Messa.

With his works translated into many foreign languages, including storming appearances in Art Spiegelman’s seminal Raw magazine, Swarte formed his own publishing house Oog & Blik in 1985 (a distinguished and prominent source of many superb books and albums) and in 1992 was the co-founder of the Haarlem Stripdagen, Holland’s International Comics Convention. In 2004 he was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

He first gained international prominence in 1980 when he was a guest at the prestigious Salon International de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême, France and from that year comes this superb celebratory collection of translated past works in a full-colour, board-backed signed and numbered edition which is as much objet d’art artefact as book.

From 1973 and scripted by “Willem”, ‘Enslaved by the Needle’ is a dark, extremely adult and fantastic Art Deco tribute to American gangster movies set in the metafictional 1930s wherein dissolute Parisian thug Fred Fallo becomes accidentally involved with the deadly Mr. Skunk – a Yankee criminal so crazy-dangerous that all the other mobs pay him to stay out of America.

Soon however, the lethal gang-lord has manipulated Fallo into sneaking him back into the USA, where the deranged mastermind begins a campaign of terror by flooding the streets with a horrifying new narcotic. As the city reels, Skunk then turns on his own confederates…

Unique style icon and bored hard-luck kid Jopo de Pojo stars in ‘Imago Moderna’ (1974, and with a clever cameo from Anton Makassar); pestered by ennui, a street missionary, subversive organisations and wicked women before being sucked into a madly paranoid midnight world whilst ‘A Second Babel’ from 1976 focuses on Nazis in Paris and a fantastic plan to build a colossal tower under the city…

Jopo de Pojo returned in ‘Une Chance sur cent Mille’ (A Chance in a Million from 1975), falling ignominiously and ineffectively into a bizarre kidnap plot whilst ‘Goodbye’ from 1977 finds inept detective Tony Priggles in well over his head investigating a string of seriously ludicrous suicides after which this beguiling tome ends with unconventional scholar Anton Makassar similarly all at sea as he tries to make his mark in the uncompromising arena of ‘Modern Art’ (1978)…

These captivatingly dark, deceptively witty and staggeringly beautiful yarns are magnificent examples of a master storyteller at his playful best and even if this particular volume is hard to find – but still well worth every effort – Joost Swarte’s work is something every mature art-lover should see.

Lucky for you then that a few other collections have been released in the last few years…
© 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1980 Joost Swarte. This edition © 1980 Real Free Press Foundation. All rights reserved.

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Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales of Horror


Adapted by Richard Corben & Rich Margopoulos (Catalan Communication/Del Rey)
ISBNs: Catalan signed hb 0-87416-013-8   Del Rey pb 978-0-34548-313-3

Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest proponents of graphic narrative: a legendary animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist surfing the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in pictorial storytelling with his own unmistakable style and vision. He is renowned for his mastery of airbrush and captivatingly excessive anatomical stylisation and infamous for delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror and beguiling eroticism in his fantasy and science fiction tales. He is also an acclaimed and dedicated fan of the classics of gothic horror literature…

Always garnering huge support and acclaim in Europe, he was regularly collected in luxurious albums even as he fell out of favour – and print – in his own country. This collection gathers a number of adaptations of works by Godfather of eerie fantasy Edgar Allan Poe, first seen in issues of Creepy magazine between 1974-1975 and in Pacific Comics’ A Corben Special in 1984.

This superb hardback Catalan collection was re-released in 2005 in softcover by prose publisher Del Rey Books in July 2005.

The terror commences with the moody monochrome madness of ‘The Oval Portrait’ (from Creepy #69, February 1975 and adapted by writer Rich Margopoulos, as were all the Warren originated stories here) wherein the wounded survivor of a duel breaks into an abandoned chateau to recover and falls under the sinister spell of a beguiling painting and seductive journal…

‘The Raven’ is a fully airbrushed, colour phantasmagoria from Creepy #67 (December 1974) which perfectly captures the oppressive majesty of the classic poem, as is the next macabre vignette wherein the focus shifts to ancient Greece and the inevitable approach of death amongst the warriors at a funeral: a wake tainted by an invisible ‘Shadow’ (Creepy #70 April, 1975).

The obvious and worthy star turn of this tome is the artist’s own adaptation of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, created for the comicbook A Corben Special in May 1984 and here expanded and reformatted for the larger, squarer page of this European album.

Traveller Edgar Arnold is trapped in the bilious swamp where the ancestral seat of the ancient Usher clan is slowly dissolving into the mire that surrounds it.

The tainted blood of the melancholic master Roderick and his debauched clandestinely closeted, sumptuously seductive, deranged sister Madeline proves certain to extinguish the family long before the dank Earth reclaims the crumbling manse, but if it doesn’t Roderick is determined to expedite matters himself.

Madeline however, has other dreams and desires and is not above using her unique charms to win her objectives…

Corben – with the assistance of colourists Herb & Diana Arnold – perfectly captures the trenchant, doom-laden atmosphere, erotic charge and cataclysmic denouement of the original and this seminal, seductive work is undoubtedly one of the very best interpretations of this much-told and retold tale.

The artist’s sublime acumen in depicting humanity’s primal drives has never been better exemplified than with these immortal stories and this is a book no comics or horror fan should be without.
© 1974, 1975, 1984, 1985 1993 Richard Corben and Richard Margopoulos. All rights reserved.

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Kramers Ergot volume 8


By various, edited by Sammy Harkham (PictureBox)
ISBN: 978-0-98458-927-2

Since the 1980s when “Underground” creators and cartoonists of adult and mature English-language comics first began to find mainstream and popular acceptance by re-branding themselves as alternative or Avant Garde, there have periodically emerged groundbreaking anthologies which served to disseminate the best of the best in challenging sequential art. Following on the groundbreaking heels of Raw and its descendants, Kramers Ergot launched as a 48-page mini-comic in 2000 and grew into a vari-format, anything goes visual and intellectual banquet before suspending publication with #7 in 2008 with a hugely proportioned (536x414mm) 96-page deluxe hardback starring sixty of the art form’s most beguiling pantheon of stars.

Now founding father Sammy Harkham returns with another stunning array of top-notch new creations and a smattering of sublime vintage material in a gloriously accessible 240-page clothbound B-format hardback that once more brandishes the sharpest of cutting edges at fans of the medium at its most uncompromising…

The magic begins with the abstract and glittering Overture by Robert Beatty, after which Washington Punk musician Ian F. Svenonius (Nation of Ulysses, Weird War and Chain and The Gang) contributes a fascination and informative essay on the shape of American arts with Notes on Camp part 2.

Alternative star and social commentator ‘Jimbo’ returns in a trek across tomorrow’s wastelands in a sharp monochrome yarn from Gary Panter after which C.F. explores isolation and human relationships in the placidly eerie ‘Warm Genetic House-Test Pattern’ whilst Kevin Huizenga redraws an old Charlton Comics fantasy tale (“The Half Men” by Bill Molno & Sal Trapani and possibly scripted by the prolific Joe Gill) in the quirkily disturbing ‘Mysteries of Unexplained Worlds’…

Leon Sadler produces the first of two contributions in the colourfully pensive ‘Friendship Comic’ whilst the muted hues and jolly style of Gabrielle Bell’s ‘Cody’ successfully belies the tale’s violent underpinnings and Frank Santoro & Dash Shaw shock and stun with their chilling ‘Childhood Predators’.

‘Ain’t it So?’ is a smart cartoon by Tim Hensley and ‘Get Your Ass to Mars’ is a set of stunning art photo pieces from Takeshi Murata, whilst ‘Mining Colony X7170’ is a typically dark and savage sci fi shocker from anti-art iconoclast Johnny Ryan before

Leon Sadler returns with the expansive and picaresque ‘Goblins Orbit the Earth (I’m Here! It’s Me!)’.

Chris Cilla takes a different look at love in ‘Secret Tourist’ and ‘Barbarian Bitch’ by Anya Davidson joyously screws with all the traditions of the hoary old genre and Ben Jones plays cunning mind-games and perpetrates dire puns in his shaggy doggish and charmingly primitivist ‘The Ultimate Character 2002’ after which Editor Sammy Harkham picks up his own pens to describe the silent horror and driving melodrama of ‘A Husband and a Wife’.

‘Epilogue’ is another visual voyage from painter Robert Beatty and this tome concludes with a long lost delight.

The last contribution is a true joy for me reprinting as it does a selection from what I believe to be one of the most delicious and clever British strips ever created. ‘Oh, Wicked Wanda (Select Excerpts)’ reprints in sublime full glossy colour Ron Embleton & Frederick Mullalley’s brilliant socio-sexual satire which ran in Penthouse magazine between 1973-1980.

Journalist, editor (of left-wing magazine Tribune), columnist, novelist and political writer Mullally was hired to script the exotic, erotic adventures of Wanda Von Kreesus, the richest woman in the world, Candyfloss, her insatiable jailbait paramour and an outrageous coterie of faithful employees including an all-girl army, a mad scientist and a brutal looking thug with the soul of a poet. To illustrate he secured the talents of oil painter and comic strip veteran Ron Embleton who had astounded comic readers with his lush and vibrant strip Wulf the Briton in Express Weekly and his illustrations in Look and Learn.

Oh, Wicked Wanda! was originally a prose serial illustrated by Bryan Forbes, beginning in 1969 before becoming, in 1973, the unbelievably lavish and torrid strip reprinted here, continuing until 1980 when it was replaced by Sweet Chastity, also painted by Embleton, and scripted by Penthouse proprietor Bob Guccione.

The bored and mischievous hellion is a sexually adventurous woman from a time when sexual politics and liberation were huge issues, and therefore prime targets for low comedy and high satire. Mullally peppered his scripts with topical references (many, sadly which would escape today’s casual reader, I’m sure) and the phenomenal Embleton would depict them with hyper-realistic accuracy. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Ted Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Mao Tse-tung, John Wayne, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and even comic-strip greats like Pogo, Mutt and Jeff or Krazy Kat, all meandered through the glossy pages, a cross between a Greek Chorus and pictorial ad-libs.

Many celebrities were actively parodied, participants and classical and contemporary erotic allusions abounded; ranging from a little nymphette lounging about reading William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to visual and verbal references to Shelley’s Leda and the Swan.

Here some of the earliest adventures are re-presented as Wanda destroys, debases, abducts and mounts (no, not necessarily that way) the obnoxiously rich and famous for her Museum of Misfits and Deviancy; consequently taking on the Mafia, the CIA and South American Nazi war criminal Martin Boorman. Her personal Mad Scientist Homer Sapiens also reveals his sordid connections to some of the 20th century’s nastiest personages…

Oh, Wicked Wanda! is still a funny, sexy read and inarguably one of the most beautiful British strips ever crafted. Hopefully this selection will lead to a new audience and a comprehensive reprinting …

As well as being a comics-lovers dream, Kramers Ergot is a book-lovers delight with excellent design and a reassuringly high-class print values. This package is something no lover of the medium can afford to miss.

All material © 2011 respective authors and owners. All rights reserved.

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The Bodyssey


By Richard Corben & Simon Revelstroke (Catalan Communications/Fantagor Press)
ISBNs: Signed/numbered Limited Edition 0-8741 603-2-4, softcover 978-0-8741 603-2-1
1993 Fantagor edition 978-0-96238-418-9

Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest proponents of graphic narrative: an animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist, springing from the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in comics storytelling with his own unmistakable style and vision. He is renowned for his mastery of airbrush and captivatingly excessive anatomical stylisation and infamous for delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror and beguiling eroticism in his fantasy and science fiction tales.

Always garnering huge support and acclaim in Europe, he was regularly collected in luxurious albums even as he fell out of favour – and print – in his own country. This particular hilarious adult saga developed in response to a stunning 8-plate art portfolio ‘Scenes from the Magic Planet’ from 1979. After serialisation in Heavy Metal #97-102 in 1985, the complete scandalous graphic novel epic was first released in December 1986 and re-published by the artist’s own Fantagor Press company in 1993.

The necromancer Hunghoul has run off (flown actually in a fantastic cloud machine) with Pilgor the Barbarian’s faithless wife Smegmella and the obliviously cuckolded hero is hunting them through the skies but their inevitable death duel doesn’t go well and the hero is dumped into the oceans far below.

Washed ashore in a strange country the massively-thewed champion becomes an object of imminent affection for an undulating Pudenda Beast until rescued by a reptile man named Ytgna – a scurrilous creature with plans of his own which sorely need a mighty muscled dupe and puissant fighter…

The wily lizard enlists the lovelorn hero in his own a quest to locate and liberate the amply pulchritudinous Ammora, and soon their search brings them to the fleshpot quarter of cesspit city Foulmouth where Pilgor catches the eye and steamier regions of androgynous Succulus Agripper, the Brothel Queen of the degenerate metropolis. Being a healthy upstanding chap Pilgor violently refuses the unwholesome unwelcome advances, effecting a spectacular escape and making another implacable, powerful and unforgiving enemy…

Eventually Ytgna and Pilgor locate their quarry – or so they think – but she proves to be far more than they bargained for and the searchers find themselves unwelcome guests of the formidable Amazons of Tumeschia and about to lose their he-man standings until a giant comatose goddess awakes and an extremely phallic giant titan invades. And that’s when the still most-piqued Agripper and his army turn up…

Meanwhile at Castle Bilious the first bloom of love is fading for Hunghoul and Smegmella so the wizard is happy to turn his attention back to Pilgor – who is still keen on exercising bloody vengeance upon them.

With the Amazons and Agripper hard on his heels and the nasty necromancer waiting for him the witless warrior is heading inexorably for a spectacular, eye-popping climax…

I’ve only got the signed and numbered limited edition so the remaining pages might not be in either of the softcover editions, but if you can, ensure you find a copy which ends the saucy fantasy extravaganza with the original portfolio plates from 1979.

In magnificent textured monochrome grey-tones and washes ‘Pilgor Discusses Politics with his Friends’, ‘Hunghoul’s Guards’, ‘Ytgna and his Faithful Ammora’, ‘Machola Seeks a Remembrance’, ‘Uncle Hunghoul Collects a Titbit’, ‘Pilgor Works his Work’, ‘Pilgor drops in at Dinnertime’ and ‘Pilgor’s and Ammora’s Happy Ending’ cap off the wry and whimsically debauched fantasy in a wave of sheer artistic excellence.

Like the cross between the World’s smuttiest Conan story and “Carry On, Barbarian!” this tale perfectly epitomises Corben’s unique visual style, love of the dark and scathingly sharp sense of humour. Combine that with humanity’s apparently insatiable hunger for sex, nudity, monsters and magic and this book becomes another utterly unmissable indulgence…
© 1986, 1993 Richard Corben. All rights reserved.

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The Complete Crumb Comics volume 3: Starring Fritz the Cat


By Robert Crumb (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-0-93019-375-1

Robert Crumb is a unique creative force in the world of cartooning with as many detractors as devotees. His uncompromising, excoriating, neurotic introspections, pictorial rants and invectives unceasingly picked away at societal scabs and peeked behind forbidden curtains for his own benefit, but he has always happily shared his unwholesome discoveries with anybody who takes the time to look…

In 1987 Fantagraphics Books began the nigh-impossible task of collating, collecting and publishing the chronological totality of the artist’s vast output and many of those engrossing compendia are now being reissued.

With the material in this third volume the isolated and secretive artist began to break into the wider world as his first great creation escaped from Crumb’s self-published minicomics and into regular paying venues…

Once again, if intemperate language, putative blasphemy, cartoon nudity, fetishism and comedic fornication are liable to upset you or those legally responsible for you, stop reading this review right here and don’t buy the book.

The son of a career soldier, Robert Dennis Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943 into a functionally broken family. He was one of five kids who all found different ways to escape their parents’ shattering problems and comics were always paramount amongst them.

As had his older brother Charles, Robert immersed himself in the strips and cartoons of the day; not simply reading but feverishly creating his own. Harvey Kurtzman, Carl Barks and John Stanley were particularly influential, but also newspaper artists like E.C. Segar, Gene Ahern, Rube Goldberg, Bud (Mutt and Jeff) Fisher, Billy (Barney Google), De Beck, George (Sad Sack) Baker and Sidney (The Gumps) Smith as well as illustrators like C.E. Brock and the wildly imaginative and surreal 1930’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated shorts.

Defensive and introspective, young Robert pursued art and slavish self-control through religion with equal desperation. His early spiritual repression and flagrant, hubristic celibacy constantly warred with his body’s growing needs…

Escaping his stormy early life, he married young and began working in-house at the American Greeting Cards Company. He discovered like minds in the growing counterculture movement and discovered LSD. In 1967 Crumb relocated to California and became an early star of Underground Commix. As such he found plenty of willing hippie chicks to assuage his fevered mind and hormonal body whilst reinventing the very nature of cartooning with such creations as Mr. Natural, Devil Girl and the star of this particular show, the utterly amoral, unpredictable, almost human Fritz the Cat…

The rest is history…

From this point onwards the varied and exponentially impressive breadth of Crumb’s output becomes increasingly riddled with his often hard-to-embrace themes and declamatory, potentially offensive visual vocabulary as his strips grope towards the creator’s long-sought personal artistic apotheosis and this third volume covers material created and published between 1960-1966 as the self-tormented artist began to find a popular following in a strangely changing world.

The mercurial pictorial parade is preceded by another fascinating reminiscence from life-long friend Marty Pahls describing ‘The First Girl That Came Along’…

Crumb’s early artistic style was utterly transformed by the introduction of Rapidograph mapping pens and ‘Fritz the Cat, Ace Salesman’ (August 1964) has a raw, mesmerising scratchy linearity that belies the subversive sexual undercurrent of the piece, after which the feline philanderer went hard-core in ‘Fritz Comes on Strong’ (published in satire magazine Help! #22, January 1965). From the same issue ‘Harlem: a Sketchbook Report’ displayed the artist’s gift for visual reportage.

Fritz appeared in the silent and extremely trenchant bobbysoxer strip ‘Fred, the Teen-age Girl Pigeon’ (Help! #24, May 1965), whilst ‘Fritz Bugs Out’ (Cavalier, October 1964-February 1965) found the cat misbehaving in a Bohemian college setting before setting out on an extended hippie-style vision-quest whilst three dumb-show episodes of ‘The Silly Pigeons’ (November 1964-March 1965) perfectly display the creator’s hardwired slapstick roots.

‘Bulgaria: a Sketchbook Report’ (Help! #25, July 1965) saw the artist turn his probing pens on a Cold-War alien culture after which ‘Fritz the Cat, Special Agent for the CIA’ (March-May 1965) perfectly parodied the political scene and the planet’s fascination with suave super-spies. Next up are three more, increasingly surreal, snippets from ‘The Silly Pigeons’ (Spring 1965) and a swift swipe at the modern working woman in ‘Roberta’ (Spring 1965). Working in the production department of a vast greetings card company gave the insular Crumb access to new toys and new inspiration and he would return repeatedly to the white-collar world to for inspiration and pictorial spleen-venting…

‘Fritz the Cat, Magician’ (Summer 1965, and published in Promethean Enterprises #3, 1971) is a sweetly seductive puff-piece whilst the exigencies of earning a little extra cash clearly influenced the speculative pieces ‘Guitar Models of the Future’ (Yell #3, September 1965), Topps Promotional Booklet ‘The Road to Success’ (Fall 1965), ‘Illustrations for Nostalgia Enterprises’ (Fall 1965), ‘The Heap Years of the Auto’ (intended for Nostalgia Illustrated, Fall 1965) and ‘The Small Small Businessman’ (again intended for Nostalgia Illustrated, Fall 1965): all showing Crumb’s versatility, passion for the past and imagination.

‘Punchlines for Color Cards’ features the interior messages for the artworks amongst the large Colour Section which opens here with a spectacular succession of sketches designated ‘Letter to Marty Pahls’ (covering April 4th, June 3rd, October 30th 1960, May 28th and November 5th 1961), after which two ‘Cards to Mike Britt’ (December 1963-January 1964) are followed by the wonderful covers for ‘Fritz Bugs Out’ (February 1965), ‘Agent of the CIA’ (March 1965) and ‘Roberta’ (Spring 1965).

Swiftly following are the aforementioned ‘Selected Topps Monster Greetings Cards’ (Fall 1965) and general ‘Cards for American Greetings’ (1964-1966) which close the rainbow section. Back in black and white another ‘Card to Mike Britt’ precedes the ‘Cover for Fug #1’ (Fall 1965) and the untitled group sex-romp ‘Fritz the Cat’ intended for that debut Fug, before a copious collection of ‘Greetings Cards for American Greetings’ (1964-1966) and the ‘Cover for Gooseberry’ #2 (Fall 1965) complete this meander through the Master’s formative years.

If Crumb had been able to suppress his creative questing he could easily have settled for a lucrative career in any one of a number of graphic disciplines from illustrator to animator to jobbing comic book hack, but as this pivotal collection readily proves, the artist was haunted by the dream of something else – he just didn’t yet know what that was…

Crumb’s subtle mastery of his art-form and obsessive need to reveal his most hidden depths and every perceived defect – in himself and the world around him – has always been an unquenchable fire of challenging comedy and riotous rumination and this chronicle begins to show his growing awareness of where to look.

This superb series charting the perplexing pen-and-ink pilgrim’s progress is the perfect vehicle to introduce any (over 18) newcomers to the world of grown up comics. And if you need a way in yourself, seek out these books and the other fifteen as soon as conceivably possible…
Introduction © 1988 Marty Pahls. Greetings cards © 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1988 American Greetings Corporation. Monster Greetings trading cards © 1965 Topps Bubble Gum, Inc. All other contents © 1964, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1974, 1988 Robert Crumb. All rights reserved.

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Heavy Metal Presents New Tales of the Arabian Nights


By Richard Corben & Jan Strnad (Heavy Metal Books/Simon & Schuster)
ISBN: 930-36844-4

Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest proponents of graphic narrative: an animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist, springing from the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in comic storytelling with his own unmistakable style and vision. He is equally renowned for his mastery of airbrush, captivatingly excessive anatomical stylisation and delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror, fantasy and science fiction tales.

Until relatively recently Corben steered clear of the Fights ‘n’ Tights comicbook mainstream. He didn’t sell out – American publishing simply caught up, finally growing mature enough to accommodate him, due in no small part to his broad and pervasive influence…

Born in Anderson, Missouri in 1940, he graduated with a Fine Arts degree in 1965 and found work as an animator. At that time, the neutered comicbooks of the Comics-Code Authority era were just starting to lose disaffected, malcontent older fans to the hippy-trippy, freewheeling, anything-goes publications of independent-minded creators across the continent who were increasingly making the kind of material Preachers and Mummy and her lawyers wouldn’t approve of…

Creativity honed by the resplendent and explicitly mature 1950s EC Comics, Carl Barks’ perfectly crafted Duck tales and other classy early strips, a plethora of young artists like Corben responded with a variety of small-press publications – including Grim Wit, Slow Death, Skull, Fever Dreams and his own Fantagor – which featured shocking, rebellious, sexed-up, raw, brutal, psychedelically-inspired cartoons and strips blending the new wave of artists’ unconventional lifestyles with their earliest childhood influences… honestly crafting the kind of stories they would like to read.

Corben inevitably graduated to more professional – and paying – venues. As his style and skills developed he worked for Warren Publishing in Eerie, Creepy, Vampirella, Comix International and outrageous adult science fiction anthology 1984/1994. He famously coloured some strips for the revival of Will Eisner’s the Spirit.

Soon after he was producing stunning graphic escapades for a number of companies, making animated movies, painting film posters and producing record covers such as the multi-million-selling Meatloaf album Bat Out of Hell. He never stopped creating comics but preferred personal independent projects with collaborators such as Bruce Jones, Jan Strnad and Harlan Ellison – who provided an effusive introduction here.

In 1975 Corben approached French fantasy phenomenon M̩tal Hurlant and became a fixture of its American iteration Heavy Metal Рfrom which this stunning saga was collected.

Always garnering huge support and acclaim in Europe, he was regularly collected in luxurious albums even as he fell out of favour – and print – in his own country. This particular tome gathers a particularly impressive fantasy serial from the early days of Heavy Metal (specifically from June 1978 to August 1979) which cunningly reveals the final voyage and fate of a legendary hero…

This superb, criminally out-of-print but still readily available fable opens with a history of the charismatic storyteller Shahrazad and how she charmed her murderously strict husband, then goes on to concentrate on the tale she kept from him; and only shared with her wayward sister Dunyazad… ‘Sinbad in the Land of the Jinn’.

‘The Last Voyage of Sinbad’ begins when merchant Badr al-Bakkar recognises a Sufi sage as the legendary seaman and begs to know what turned such a worldly warrior into a penitent priest. As the broken old wanderer speaks of his secret Eighth Voyage a saga of tragedy and wonder unfolds…

Sinbad was a bored and restless husband who broke many of the Prophet’s Holy Injunctions and, whilst drunk one night, encountered a Jinn who attacked him, claiming the sot had killed his wife.

In retaliation the supernatural horror demanded the life of Sinbad’s beloved spouse Zulaykha, but could not find her…

The woman had vanished from the face of the Earth and the terrified adventurer resolved to find her and save her from the vengeance of the merciless Ifrit.

He is aided in his quest by the enigmatic Akissa, who claims to be the selfsame demon wife Sinbad supposedly murdered. She wishes to be divorced from her brutal trickster husband and offers to guide Sinbad and his crew to the magical realm of Zu’l Janahayn, the Jinni King of Kings who can grant any wish should he please. All they must do is find his floating citadel of Ketra…

And thus begins a quest of shocking terror, stupendous action, wanton debauchery and stunning duplicity, which resulted in the near-breaking of our hero, magical horrors and valiant perseverance…

The artist’s infamous signature-stylisation includes abundant nudity, excessive, balletic violence and astoundingly proportioned male and female physiques and these are all prominently displayed in this cunning and beguiling continuation of the fabulous legend of an immortal hero, which still finds room for a brilliantly contemporary twist…

Richard Corben is a unique visual stylist blessed with a love of the dark and graced with a scathingly sharp sense of humour. Combine that with our apparently insatiable hunger for monsters and mystery and this book becomes the ideal treat to while away the witching hour…
© 1978, 1979 Richard Corben and Jan Strnad. Introduction © 1979 Harlan Ellison. All rights reserved.

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Requiem Vampire Knight Tome 5: The City of Pirates and Blood Bath


By Pat Mills & Ledroit (Panini Books UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-496-6

As is so often the case Europe is the last and most beneficial arena for the arts and untrammelled creativity, and none more so than comics and sequential narrative. Mercifully the Continent cherishes the best of the world’s past as well as nurturing the fresh and new, without too much concern for historical bugbears of political correctness, transient social impropriety and contemporary censoriousness – which is why so many established English language strip creators produce their best work there.

Perhaps it’s simply that they revere not revile the popular arts as much as all those hoity-toity classical ones….

Requiem Vampire Knight is an impressive example of self-publishing done right, and happily with commensurate rewards. For years writer Pat Mills wanted to break into the European market and in 2000 he did so by setting up Nickel Editions with publisher Jacques Collin (whose Zenda Editions produced some of the nicest looking albums of the 1980s) and artist Olivier Ledroit who illustrated the first four books of the incredibly popular Chroniques de la Lune Noire (Black Moon Chronicles) for Zenda before the series transferred to Dargaud. Mills and Ledroit were already old comrades having previously worked on the impressive Sha.

Mills is well known to readers of this blog (see for example Marshal Law: Fear and Loathing and his incontestable masterpiece Charley’s War) but perhaps Ledroit is not so familiar. After studying Applied Arts he began his career as an illustrator for games magazines and broke into Bandes Dessinee (that’s comics to us Anglaise) in 1989 with the aforementioned Black Moon Chronicles, written by François Marcela Froideval.

Specialising in fantasy art Ledroit drew Thomas Mosdi’s Xoco (1994) before teaming with Pat Mills on the acerbic, futurist thriller Sha, set in an ultra-religious fascistic USA (1996-1999 and thematically in the real world any minute now).

His lush painterly style was adapted to fairytales in 2003 with L’Univers Féerique d’Olivier Ledroit, and he is credited as one of the founding fathers of the darkly baroque fantasy sub-genre BD Gothique.

From a financially shaky start Requiem Vampire Knight quickly proved that quality will always find an audience and Nickel swiftly expanded whilst continuing the excessively adult adventures of deceased warrior Heinrich Augsburg. The saga is released as annual albums in France and has been serialized in Germany as Requiem Der Vampirritter and in America’s Heavy Metal (beginning in Volume 27 #1, March 2003).

Two years ago Panini UK brought this evocative series to Britain in superb oversized, A4 format, double-editions presenting two albums per volume and the fifth compendium is here just in time to assault the Christmas market. The City of Pirates and Blood Bath continues the hell-bent saga of a conflicted Nazi doomed to unlive his life as a vampire warrior in a macabre inverse world of evil, which began in Requiem Vampire Knight Tome 1: Resurrection and Danse Macabre.

Augsburg was a German officer killed on the Eastern Front in 1944. As he died all he could think of was his guilt over a doomed affair with the Jewess Rebecca whom he chose not to save when the Gestapo came for her…

Resurrection is a brooding, blood-drenched world of eternal strife and warfare: a grim, fantastic, necromantic mirror of Earth with the seas and land-masses reversed, where time runs backwards and denizens grow younger day by day – if they’re not “expired” first by any of a billion-and-one friends, allies, total strangers or archest enemies.

The charnel realm is populated by all the worst sinners of Earth reincarnated as monsters of myth in a damned domain where the dead mortals are reborn in ranks and hierarchies determined by their sins on Earth. Their only purpose is to expiate or exacerbate the sins of their former lives…

Heinrich (now called Requiem) is a Vampire: one of the top predators in this bloody post-existence reality, pinnacle of Hell’s pyramid of puissance and a full knight at the court of Dracula.

Requiem and his blood-draining kin are trapped in a spiral of bloodletting, debauchery and intrigue and his position is far from secure. Not only has he earned the enmity of the treacherous faction of elite Nosferatu led by Lady Claudia Demona, Lord Mortis and Baron Samedi, but it appears that he may be a returned soul…

Long before Augsberg died on a frozen battlefield, killed by a Russian he was trying to rape, the Templar Heinrich Barbarossa had committed such atrocities in the name of Christianity that he was guaranteed a place in Dracula’s inner circle when he inevitably reached Resurrection.

However the remade Barbarossa/Vampire Knight Thurim committed such an unpardonable crime that he and it were excised from the court and Resurrection itself.

But in this volume, Requiem, plagued by memories of a doomed affair with a proscribed Jewess named Rebecca, is in the midst of a cataclysmic all-out war involving every ghastly inhabitant of the blazing inferno they’re pent within…

Amidst the factions of Vampires, Gods, arcane Archaeologists, Lamias, Werewolves, Ghouls and so many others, Rebecca too has reconstituted in Resurrection. Her only chance of eternal rest is to expire the one responsible for her being there…

I’d strongly advise picking up the previous chronicles before this one if back-story means much too you, since Mills & Ledroit don’t waste any time or space on catching up, but storm straight into the unfolding epic with a staggering climax to the all-encompassing war between the unruly desperadoes of Aerophagia, The City of Pirates and Dark Harbour, capital and stronghold of the Vampire Court of Draconia.

Along the breakneck way we discover that the second most important man in post-War America was the earthly identity and hideous soul reconstituted as the deadly Buccaneer Queen Lady Mitra, who has been trading with the living world of Earth for holy weaponry capable of destroying Nosferatu, whilst the conflicted and irresolute warrior Requiem makes an unlikely conquest who will again divert him from his quest for Rebecca.

Also drawing attention is the samurai vampire Dragon, bound to the pirate cause by his ancient – and therefore baby-like – sensei Tengu, but whose own unholy dream is to find and expire the man who caused the atomic death of Hiroshima…

As the conflict escalates to a bloody, burning climax all of Resurrection is embroiled in the constant carnage and even the most exalted monsters begin to falter and finally “die”…

With everything in uproar Dracula begins his final moves in the bloody game as Requiem, torn between desire, duty and despair faces off against his martial and spiritual counterpart Dragon…

Blood Bath combines the incredible end of the war with Mills’ signature blackly mordant bad-taste humour, as a peerless duel between the Vampire Knights devolves into murderous slapstick as demon-infant Tengu battles his own master (Requiem’s teacher and sponsor Cryptos – an even younger baby-thing) whilst a euphoric Lady Mitra invades the Vampire sanctum intent of sealing her victory in the ichor of undead elite Lady Zarkov and Queen Bathory.

Tragically for her, Mitra succeeds and learns a horrifying ultimate truth…

Meanwhile, in a far corner of the realm the race of dragons who once were England’s greatest champions are moving against their once-ally Draconia…

Unrelentingly hard and heavy, this spectacularly decadent, opulent, Machiavellian dalliance with the wildest dreams – and grim, black wit – of a new De Sade, this book ends on yet another cliffhanger as the Vampire Lord prepares to make his endgame move, but that a blood-drenched spectacle for a later day…

For any fan of Mills’ work there nothing truly new here to be shocked by, but the liberating license to explore his favourite themes guided only by his own conscience and creative integrity has resulted in a complex, intensely compelling epic of revenge and regret on the most uncompromising of worlds where there is literally no justice and no good deed ever goes unpunished.

Blending cosmic warfare with sardonic deadpan humour, wrapped in the ludicrously OTT trappings of sadomasochistic fetishism, this is a truly epic saga of Gothic hopelessness perfect for the post-punk, post-revisionary, lavishly anti-reductionist fantasy fan.

But it’s probably best if you don’t show your gran or the vicar and certainly not your – or anybody else’s – kids. They’ve probably got their own copies anyway…

Ledroit’s illustration is utterly astonishing. In places delightfully reminiscent of Druillet’s startlingly visual and deceptively vast panel-scapes from such lost masterpieces as Yragael: Urm as well the paradoxically nihilistic energy of such decadent Michael Moorcock civilisations as Granbretan or Melniboné, he has created a truly unique scenario with his vibrant palette. Never has the horrific outer darkness been so colourfully captured and the sheer scope of the numerous ambulatory nightmares and eye-popping battles is utterly mind-boggling.

A darkly grim and mordantly cynical secularist dream, this is a fabulously realized adult fantasy of blood and thunder both beguiling and addictive.

Dark, dark magic!

© 2009, 2010, 2011 Nickel/Mills/Ledroit.  All rights Reserved.

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The Complete Crumb Comics volumes 1 and 2


By Robert Crumb and Charles Crumb (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBNs: 0-930196-43-1(hb)   & 978-0-930193-62-8

Robert Crumb is a unique creative force in the world of cartooning with as many detractors as devotees. His uncompromising, excoriating, neurotic introspections, pictorial rants and invectives unceasingly picked away at societal scabs and peeked behind forbidden curtains for his own benefit, but he has always happily shared his unwholesome discoveries with anybody who takes the time to look…

In 1987 Fantagraphics Books began the nigh-impossible task of collating, collecting and publishing the chronological totality of the artist’s vast output and many of those engrossing compendia are now being reissued.

These earliest volumes have been constantly described as the least commercial and, as far as I know, remain out of print, but contrary as ever, I’m reviewing them anyway…

The son of a career soldier, Robert Dennis Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943 into a functionally broken family. He was one of five kids who all found different ways to escape their parents’ shattering problems and comics were always paramount amongst them.

As had his older brother Charles, Robert immersed himself in the strips and cartoons of the day; not simply reading but feverishly creating his own. Harvey Kurtzman, Carl Barks and John Stanley were particularly influential, but also newspaper artists like E.C. Segar, Gene Ahern, Rube Goldberg, Bud (Mutt and Jeff) Fisher, Billy (Barney Google), De Beck, George (Sad Sack) Baker and Sidney (The Gumps) Smith as well as illustrators like C.E. Brock and the wildly imaginative and surreal 1930’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated shorts.

Defensive and introspective, young Robert pursued art and slavish self-control through religion with equal desperation. His early spiritual repression and flagrant, hubristic celibacy constantly warred with his body’s growing needs…

Escaping his stormy early life, he married young and began working in-house at the American Greeting Cards Company. He discovered like minds in the growing counterculture movement and discovered LSD. In 1967 Crumb relocated to California and became an early star of Underground Commix. As such he found plenty of willing hippie chicks to assuage his fevered mind and hormonal body whilst reinventing the very nature of cartooning with such creations as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl and a host of others. The rest is history…

Those tortured formative years provide the meat of the first volume The Early Years of Bitter Struggle which, after ‘Right Up to the Edge’ – a comprehensive background history and introduction from lifelong confidante Marty Pahls – begins revealing the troubled master-in-waiting’s amazingly proficient childhood strips from the self-published Foo #1-3 (a mini-comic project passionately produced by Robert and his older brother Charles from September to November 1958).

Rendered in pencils, pens and whatever else was handy; inextricably wedded to the aforementioned funnybooks, strips and animated shorts cited above, the mirthful merry-go-round opens with ‘Report From the Brussels World’s Fair!’ and ‘My Encounter With Dracula!’: frantic and frenetic pastiches of the artists’ adored Mad material, with Robert already using a graphic avatar of himself for narrative purposes.

Closely following are the satirical ‘Clod of the Month Award’, ‘Khrushchev Visits U.S.!!’ and ‘Noah’s Ark’.

From 1959 comes ‘Treasure Island Days’: a rambling gag-encrusted shaggy dog Russian Roulette experiment created by the lads each concocting a page and challenging the other to respond and continue the unending epic, after which ‘Cat Life’ followed family pet Fred’s fanciful antics from September 1959 to February 1960 before morphing, or perhaps “anthropomorphing” into an early incarnation of Fritz the Cat in ‘Robin Hood’…

That laconic stream of cartoon-consciousness resolved into the raucous and increasingly edgy saga ‘Animal Town’ followed here by a very impressive pin-up ‘Fuzzy and Brombo’, before the central full-colour section provides a selection of spoof covers.

Four ‘R. Crumb Almanac’ images – all actually parts of letters to Pahls – are complemented by three beautiful ‘Arcade’ covers, swiftly followed by a return to narrative monochrome and ‘A Christmas Tale’ which saw Crumb’s confused and frustrated sexuality begin to assert itself in his still deceptively mild-mannered work.

A progression of eleven single-page strips produced between December 1960 and May 1961 precedes three separate returns to an increasingly mature and wanton ‘Animal Town’ – all slowly developing the beast who would become Crumb’s first star until Fritz bows out in favour of ‘Mabel’ – a prototypical big and irresistible woman of the type Crumb would legendarily have trouble with – and this initial volume concludes with another authorial starring role in the Jules Feiffer (see Explainers) inspired ‘A Sad Comic Strip’ from March 1962.

 

The second volume Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle continues the odyssey after ‘The Best Location in the Nation…’ – another Pahls reminiscence – describes the swiftly maturing and deeply unsatisfied Crumb’s jump from unhappy home to the unsatisfying world of work.

‘Little Billy Bean’ (April 1962) returns to the hapless, loveless nebbish of A Sad Comic Strip whilst ‘Fun with Jim and Mabel’ revisits Crumb’s bulky, morally-challenged amazon after which the focus shifts to her diminutive and feeble companion ‘Jim’. Next, an almost fully-realised ‘Fritz the Cat’ finally gets it on in a triptych of saucy soft-core escapades from R. Crumb’s self-generated Arcade mini-comic project.

From this point onwards the varied and exponentially impressive breadth of Crumb’s output becomes increasingly riddled with his often hard-to-embrace themes and declamatory, potentially offensive visual vocabulary as his strips grope towards the creator’s long-sought personal artistic apotheosis.

His most intimate and disturbing idiosyncrasies regarding sex, women, ethnicity, personal worth and self-expression all start to surface here…

Therefore, if intemperate language, putative blasphemy, cartoon nudity, fetishism and comedic fornication are liable to upset you or those legally responsible for you, stop reading this review right here and don’t buy the book.

Working in the production department of a vast greetings card company gave the insular Crumb access to new toys and new inspiration as seen in the collection of ‘Roberta Smith, Office Girl’ gag strips from American Greetings Corporation Late News Bulletins (November 1963-April 1964), followed here by another Fritz exploit enigmatically entitled ‘R. Crumb Comics and Stories’ which includes just a soupcon of raunchy cartoon incest, so keep the smelling salts handy…

A selection of beautiful sketchbook pages comes next and then a full-colour soiree of faux covers: letters to Pahls and Mike Britt disguised as ‘Farb’ and ‘Note’ front images as well as a brace of Arcade covers and the portentously evocative front for R. Crumb’s Comics and Stories #1 from April 1964.

The rest of this pivotal collection is given over to thirty more pages culled from the artist’s sketchbooks; a vast and varied compilation that ably displays the artist’s incredible virtuosity and proves that if Crumb had been able to suppress his creative questing he could easily have settled for a lucrative career in any one of a number of graphic disciplines from illustrator to animator to jobbing comic book hack.

Crumb’s subtle mastery of his art-form and obsessive need to reveal his most hidden depths and every perceived defect – in himself and the world around him – has always been an unquenchable fire of challenging comedy and riotous rumination, and these two tomes are the secret to understanding the creative causes, if not the artistic affectations of this unique craftsman and auteur.

This superb series charting the perplexing pen-and-ink pilgrim’s progress is the perfect vehicle to introduce any (over 18) newcomers to the world of grown up comics. And if you need a way in yourself, seek out these books and the other fifteen as soon as conceivably possible…

Report From the Brussels World’s Fair!, My Encounter With Dracula!, Clod of the Month Award, Khrushchev Visits U.S.!! & Noah’s Ark © 1980 Robert and Charles Crumb. Other art and stories © 1969, 1974, 1978, 1987, 1988 Robert Crumb. All rights reserved.

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The Pin-up Art of Humorama


By various, edited by Alex Chun & designed by Jacob Covey (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-959-3

You’ve all done it; laughed at something you know you shouldn’t have and for us utterly reconstructed modern men – and, let’s face it, women too – sometimes a sexually, racially or otherwise politically incorrect joke or scene in an old movie or TV clip. You know it’s wrong, you know it’s wicked but dammit! – funny just is…

Once upon a time when we were all trapped in our cruel and unthinking hidebound world of stereotypes and pre-judgements, there was a thriving market for staggeringly coy smutty books, naughty cartoon joke periodicals and girly magazines for men.

Women read other things and we never enquired. It’s the only sensible example of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that I can think of…

After volumes of Pin-ups from specific comics stars (Dan DeCarlo, Bill Wenzell, Jack Cole, Bill Ward) this anthology celebration gathers the Rest of the Best from the prolific Humorama pulp-digest division. They provided saucy gags and male-oriented mirth from 1938 to the mid 1980s – when hardcore porn ended all the tamer men’s mag markets – ubiquitous little throwaway digests with titles such as Gaze, Jest, Stare, Joker, Zip, Breezy, Cartoon Comedy Parade and Romp, packed with photos of saucy vixens like Tina Louise, Sophia Loren, Betty Page, Irish (Sheena of the Jungle) McCalla, Julie (Catwoman) Newmar and her cheesecake ilk – and oodles of deliciously daring cartoons.

The company was part of the Goodman publishing empire which included Atlas/Marvel Comics and reached its pulchritudinous peak during the 1950s when Editor Abe Goodman was the biggest buyer of cartoons on Earth.

Once the sexual revolution began, however, the oddly innocent, clandestine “men only” craft atmosphere was lost to increasing in-your-face frankness and a steady decline into vulgar X-rated smut as good old-fashioned raciness and stolen illicit glimpses became the meat of TV and cinema.

After an illustrated foreword by Howard Chaykin and a comprehensive history from Editor Alex Chun the parade of risqu̩ gags Рpopulated by the kind of girls that made Mad Men such a hit and Marilyn Monroe immortal Рworks its wiles, stretches its intellects and stuns its willing prey in a glorious panoply of old-fashioned fun and frolics. These racy renditions are superbly rendered in colour, monochrome and all points in between Рink and wash, cont̩-crayon, pen and even photo-montages, and this tome even finds space to squeeze in a few amazing house ads.

From amongst the memorable proponents you’ve already heard of are gags by Ward, Wenzell, Jefferson MacHamer, Dan DeCarlo, Vic Martin, Kurt Schaffenberger (AKA Schaff), Louis Priscilla, Niso “Kremos” Ramponi, Bill Hoest, George Crenshaw, Michael Berry, Stan Goldberg, Jim Mooney, Dave Berg and Basil Wolverton, but there are so many others by unsung pencil-pushers equally deserving of your attention.

This charmingly innocent compendium of Lush Ladies, Willing Wantons, Savvy Sirens, Naive Nymphs (always stunningly beautiful women) collects more than 200 or so rude cartoons from a time when boys thought girls didn’t actually like sex – when in fact they just didn’t like us or the way we did it.

Technically, this isn’t a graphic novel or trade collection, it’s a picture book – but an absolutely stunning one, collecting some of the best and most guiltily funny illustrations ever produced: a beguiling remembrance of a different time and the sexual mores of an entirely alien generation which nevertheless presents an enticing, intoxicating treat for art lovers and, I’m afraid to admit, many hearty laughs. This is work which is still utterly addictive and the book is an honest-to-gosh treasure beyond compare.

© 2011 Fantagraphics Books. Foreword © 2011 Howard Chaykin. Introduction © 2011 Alex Chun. All rights reserved.