No wonder comics stores remind us of porn parlors. For more than 40 years,superhero comics have supplied their sexually deprived male audience with anendless stream of masterfully marketed, four-color disempowerment. Thesuperstud books turn on their readership with a nonstop orgy of bulgingmuscles, pneumatic breasts, phallic weaponry, orgasmic explosions, ecstaticflight fantasies, brutal sadomasochistic confrontations, and guilt-riddenidentity crises between hyperpotent superselves and their less-than-adequatesecret identities. They sell mythology-deprived youth technological illusions,cut-rate cosmos, and the world's best power fantasies at a buck and a half ashot.
But, behind the well-fed boys skimming the latest first issue of the "new"Spider-Man, past the college kids and sheepish adults checking outEightball, Yummy Fur, and Buzzard , you'll reach a taboozone where under-18s are forbidden to tread. Back in the smut department ZapComix in their jillionth printing rub dog ears with a flood of titlesreleased during the past two years' explosion of sexually oriented comics. Someof these books are very good--witty, artistically delightful, and hot. Most of them, however, pack about as much pelvic punch as Madonna erotica.
Dirty comics have tickled male libidos since the 1930s, when so-called TijuanaBibles, or "eight-pagers," conflated sex and popular culture by parodying theday's favorite newspaper strips--such as Popeye, Dick Tracy, and MajorHoople--in what might has been termed the lowest form of the lowest form ofart. Usually sophomoric but occasionally hilarious (and by some accounts amultimillion-dollar industry), some of best and most situationist of thesestrips have been collected in three exuberantly uninhibited issues ofTheTijuana Bible . If their squishy graphic charms--not to mention archaicexpressions of enthusiasm like, "Now once up the old dirt road to see if all'sclear! Whee! Is this hole tight! Hot damn!" (#2, 15)--make you feel funny, youcan always take a breather and read the master's thesis helpfully included tolend this vintage smut academic credibility.
Tijuana bibles portrayed sex with unrestrained (male, hetero) pleasure and arough, cartoony jouissance rarely found in much modern porn apart from certainamateur-video moments. Curiously nonexploitative, they combine adult pleasurewith naive kiddie chuckles. The Tijuana bible tradition lives on in BobFingerman's Atomic Age Truckstop Waitresses , which parodies TwinPeaks and Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, and Danny Hellman's LegalAction Comics , which rings "Wedding Bells for Superman" and pits "TheCosbys Versus the Simpsons." Fingerman and Hellman's Tijuana apocrypha,however, is obviously more about parodying pop culture than getting readersoff.
The sixties' undergrounds marked a transitional phase in erotic comics'discontinuous history. In titles like Zap, Snatch, and whatever, R.Crumb (and, on a darker level, S. Clay Wilson) proved that comics could do justabout anything: explore social mores, épater le bourgoisie, blowreaders' minds on a visual level, and put a bulge in a young man's pants. Crumbespecially laid his personal preferences out for all to see. He is, after all,one of the world's great sex humorist. And if big butts and powerful legshappen to be your thing as well, you're doubly in luck. Both Crumb and Wilson(whose pirates, bikers, and demons constitute some of modern art's more potenticonography) play on the ambivalence of sexual attraction, portraying sexualrelationships as feisty power struggles.
More directly, Crumb's Fritz the Cat inspired Reed Waller and Kate Worley'ssexually explicit funny-animal soap opera, Omaha the Cat Dancer . Whilenot particularly enthralling, this popular female-written melodrama does offera humanist alternative (in animal drag) to male-oriented comicdom, even if youare tempted to skip ahead to the interspecies sex acts. I'd also recommend theautobiographical Melody , written by Sylvie Rancourt and illustrated byJacques Boivin, as another sex book that really isn't. Sylvie and her boyfriendmay be obsessed with the ideology of free love, but as represented throughBoivin's no-frills naturalism, whether she derives more pleasure from herorgies or her gardening is left open to interpretation.
The undergrounds begot Young Lust, Weird Sex, Bizarre Sex, and other books that were less turn-ons than put-ons of conventional sexualrepresentation. Likewise, Larry Welz's popular Cherry (advertised as"the girl you always wanted") uses parody to package pure idealized product. Agiggling blonde bimbo nymphomaniac with the brainage of a vice president,Cherry the comic nevertheless transcends the limitations of Cherry thecharacter in parodies like "The Clan of the Care Bear," a special occult issue("Hey, do like what thou wilt, y'know?"), and anything involving Cherry'scyberslut friend Ellie Dee (when she jacks in she really, oh, you know). Itaint' easy to condone, but occasionally--as when Welz draws a cutaway of apenis spurting inside a vagina, or portrays himself as a torturedartist--the book reads like a pagan Brady Bunch. Besides, there's probably morefuckage/suckage per page here than in any other hardcore comic around (with thepossible exception of Anton Drek), so it's a porn bargain as well.
Hitting the stands around the same time as Cherry 's debut, HowardChaykin's cynical, S&M-influenced Black Kiss miniseries used theerotic dimension as trendy stylistic envelope. While Chaykin's book failed bothas pornography and as genre adventure, it renewed interest in the notion ofgraphic erotica American style. European and Japanese publishers figured outlong ago that hard and soft sex sells, and America was ready to play catch-up.Question was, who would kick it off?
"There is an aura of unrespectability around erotic comics I rather like,"confesses Fantagraphics Books publisher Gary Groth. Two years ago Fantagraphicswas perched on the brink of bankruptcy in spite of publishing many of the morecritically acclaimed titles in the industry, including Love and Rockets, Hate, and Eightball . Figuring that compromise was the better part of solvency, Groth and co-publisher Kim Thompson invented Eros Comix as a meansto subsidize their riskier titles and comprehensive reprints of Segar'sPopeye , Al Capp's Li'l Abner and Fearless Fosdick , andthe complete works of R. Crumb (now up to its ninth volume).
"And it worked," Groth says. "It dug us out of a hole." Since the line'sinception, Eros has generated some 50 titles, including limited series andone-shots. It currently generates "six or seven" titles each month, accordingto Groth, with press runs ranging from 3,000 to 15,000 copies.
Imitators diluted Eros's success almost immediately, however. While onlya few erotic comics, likeOmaha the Cat Dancer and Cherry,existed before Eros hit the scene, approximately 75 titles appearedthe following year. The new smut glut meant that everyone's sales declinedbefore leveling off. Erotic comics' audience had been identified, nailed, anddrenched.
More than an economic success, the Eros experiment proves that good artist screate good porn. The best example of this is Gilbert Hernandez's jazzilytitled Birdland , whose sexually unfettered sci-fi metaphysics prettywell answers the question as to whether its creator's more artisticallyindentured Love and Rockets stories haven't seemed to have grown stalelately. A free-flowing stream of cummy consciousness inseminates thisunceasingly clever graphic novel, which kicks off with one endlessly spewingcharacter on the verge of discovering the secret of the universe in his lover'ssnatch. Amid the strippers, aliens, and Herculean body builders, an unethical,lisping female therapist is the main attraction of this sensually relentlessbook. "No whining!" barks Felice as she simultaneously tweaks her guy's nipple,bites his back, and rams a vibrator up his ass following ejaculation numberthree. "Your lipth may thay no (ital), but your prothtate gland thaythyeth...yeth...yeth.... " (ital) (57)
Other artists in the Eros line less successfully merge art and eros. InSpank , M. Scott Campbell leans heavily on the influence of Mark Beyerin his story about the eponymous unlovely stuffed doll's sexual self-discovery.Or maybe I just have trouble getting into smut with characters named"Meathook." Brian S.'s Box , on the other hand, is eerie but erotic inspite of a homicidal lunatic's presence. This violent and tense book's subtextactually concerns who gets to come, and when.
Neither of these, however, holds an art-damaged candle to Mike McCarthy'sover-the-top Bang Gang . Mushroom goddesses, porn stars, TV sex queens,and Rat Finks a Bo-Boo come together in McCarthy's supercharged splash pageswith titles like, "The Psychedelic Steranko Hairspray Queen Meets the BananaSplits." His porn recuperates the history of comic art--or at least suchinfluential paragons as S. Clay Wilson, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Crumb, JimSteranko, and Robert Williams. The titillation factor is practically nil, butthe overall effect is one of candycolored (even in black and white)inscrutability.
Equally inscrutable to me is the dominant male-heterosexual orientation of thesmut industry (not counting the guy-oriented lesbian erotics of Terry Hooperand Art Wetherell's 2 Hot Girls on a Hot Summer Night ). Groth claimshis industry-wide call for submissions elicited not a single female respondent.While great cartoonists like Roberta Gregory, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, JulieDoucet, Mary Fleener, and others produce work encompassing the sexualdimension, none of them has yet produced a bona fide fuck book. Even the lateDori Seda's Lonely Nights Comics is an attempt that ends in afigurative fit of nervous giggles.
Craig Maynard's fact-based Up From Bondage , however, is a powerfulexample of politically conscious homoerotica. Radically ambivalent, Maynarddepicts a hardcore S&M scene that turns fatal when a passive safe-houseorganizer unknowingly submits to a CIA dominant. The moral polarities, violentsex, and art are as clear as black and white (the cover depicts a pissed-offUncle Sam rolling up his sleeve to fist the hero), while the pleasure one mightconceivably derive from the leftist's torments threatens to redefine thepolitics of pornography.
Other books rip their stories from everyday life. Dennis Eichhorn's RealSmut is an all-sex version of Real Stuff , wherein, à laPekar, different artists illustrate Eichhorn's stranger-than-fictionadventures. Eichhorn episodes tend toward the antierotic, usually because hispenis is somewhere it probably shouldn't be (at a freshman gang bang, orsexually comforting a lonely single mom he meets through a wrong phone number).The other great Eros true confessions title is the aptly Eros Forum ,whose reader-writers are rewarded with ten copies for submitting the true sexstories excellently illustrated by pseudonymous artists. Unlike the comic'smagazine's Penthouse -column namesake, these arousing tales of lustfulfilled ("My pelvis was bruised for days. I never saw her again.") are thereal thing.
One of Eros's worst sellers, Bob Fingerman's Skinheads in Love is anutterly naturalistic and truly erotic punk-sex document. EverythingSingles (the movie) could never be, Skinheads gets inside theheads (and beds) of Roy and Simone, politically correct bristle brains whoselives are wallpapered with perfectly captured East Village anarchist graffitiand handbills for imaginary hardcore bands. Rendered from Roy's emotional POV("I'm fucking . . . I'm actually fucking. Oh my God, what kind of loser am I tothink that? It's not as if it's the first time. Shit, I wish I could stopthinking, from time to time . . ."), the pair's sex is refreshingly honest andarousingly erotic (the latter, however, cannot be said of an aborted three-waywith their friend Naomi).
Pretty much the opposite holds true for the commercially percolating work ofthe pseudonymous Anton Drek (Donald Simpson). Beyond the smirking frat-boymisogyny of Wendy Whitebread: Undercover Slut lies a strangeinfatuation with disembodied penises, which Drek depicts spewing endlessgallons of mayonnaise about the faces and breasts of his comely females. Drek'sapotheosis of the cum shot actually has the effect of reducing it to thesilliest common denominator. Stimulating? Sort of. Provocative? Not really.
Smutty comics: take 'em or leave 'em. The fact is that the Tijuana bibleunleashed a gush of images that continue to proliferate in the libidinalmarketplace, and offer an alternative to the pornography of violence that hasdominated it for so long. In fact, the funniest smut I saw during my extensiveresearch was a spunky little eight-page giveaway by Terry LaBan(Unsupervised Existence, Ninety-Nine Girls, Cud ). "Family Values,"featuring Murphy Brown, Bush, and the Quayles, puts the "vice" back into vicepresident and could stand wider distribution. "Sounds like I'd better teach yousome traditional family values," says Quayle. "Oh boy!" squeals the excitedBrown. "I learn lessons best when they're taught by a big prick!" I mean, do weever have to hear the words "family values" again? Reference: