by Tim Pilcher
Ray, in his Baron von Götha persona, developed the concept of “Sextopia”—“a place inside our heads” where “things always work out… Here, women like to screw men quite promiscuously, and men treat women rather well in addition to bonking them.” It is this world that Ray continues to explore in his comic strips.
Ray’s work is on a par with other great European erotic artists such as Milo Manara and Magnus, and his crisp, clear lines and lightness of touch with paint and brush have ensured a long and loyal following. Ironically, von Götha’s work is better known in Continental Europe and America than in his home country of Great Britain, where most of his work remained unpublished until the Erotic Print Society released several of his books in April 2007. Götha’s work is currently enjoying a minor revival, having been exhibited in Paris, Bologna, and at the Mondo Bizzarro Gallery in Rome, Italy, where his art is fêted, and highly collectable among erotic comic connoisseurs.
An exquistely painted cover to von Götha’s self-published 1980s magazine, Torrid, circa 1982.
Another von Götha cover to Torrid. The artist/publisher only produced 16 issues and no longer owns either the original art or copies of the magazine.
A scene from Twenty 2, the sequel to Götha’s graphic novel Twenty. “My work will never appear in the Tate Modern, I’m quite convinced,” joked the artist on his own website.
Von Götha’s cover art for the English-language version of The Troubles of Janice #1 clearly reveals the story’s central BDSM theme.
GUIDO CREPAX
Guido Crepax is probably best regarded as the capo di tutti capos of Italian—if not European—erotic comics, a healthy lineage that exists today in the form of greats like Milo Manara. Crepax was born in Milan on July 15, 1933 and studied architecture at the city’s University, though without any real intention of becoming an architect. “As soon as I started the course, I wanted to quit,” he said, and he worked as a graphic artist and illustrator while studying.
After graduating in 1958, he realized his true calling was in the world of sequential storytelling, and he made his comics debut in 1965 when he joined a new comics anthology magazine, Linus. He created the fantasy/ superhero comic strip Neutron, which featured a reporter called Valentina. This seemingly innocuous figure would become Crepax’s fictional muse and also his magnum opus. He drew her adventures over the next 31 years, eventually retiring her in 1996. Unusually for comics, Crepax aged her appearance over the years, as he was frustrated by the lack of realism in a medium where everyone was perennially young.
With her trademark short, black, bobbed hair, Valentina was visually based on the silent film star Louise Brooks, whom the artist admired greatly. Valentina’s adventures filled an impressive 25 volumes, including Lanterna Magica (Magic Lantern) in 1977 and Valentina Pirata (Valentina, Pirate) in 1980, the first in full color. Her adventures were a mixture of surreal spy adventures, fantasy, and science fiction. In later adventures her stories became more sexploitational as—like Jane and many other female heroines—she found herself in more and more compromising situations.
With her black, bobbed hair, Crepax’s depiction of “O” from The Story of O is very similar to his most famous creation, Valentina.
Crepax’s frameless montage from Justine contrasts the sensual beauty of the woman with the ape-like crudeness of the man.
But it was Crepax’s recurring themes of victimized girls, sadomasochism, submission, and domination that were his most controversial. After Valentina, he created other female heroines, such as Bianca in the series La Casa Matta (1969), Anita in Anita, Una Storia Possibile (1972), and Belinda in 1983. In 1978, Crepax adapted Marayat Rollet-Andriane’s infamous erotic novel, Emmanuelle, about a young woman’s sexual explorations.
He also adapted numerous classic S&M stories, including the Marquis De Sade’s Justine (1979), Pauline Réage’s The Story of O (1975), and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1984). In them, willing female and male slaves are seemingly both brutalized and transformed by the experience.
Crepax drew slender, delicate, almost fragile girls, who had a will of iron. While most of his art was created using pen nibs dipped in ink, his fluid strokes gave the appearance of brush marks. It was his trademark elongated women and unusual page layouts that marked Crepax out from other artists. His comics feel more cinematic than most, often including pages without dialogue that simply feature a series of closeups of body parts, and more importantly facial expressions, all engaged in erotic bliss.
Crepax died on July 31, 2003 at the age of 70, shortly after completing his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He left behind a body of work that continues to influence artists from across the world—particularly America, Spain, and his native Italy.
A page from Crepax’s adaptation of DeSade’s Justine, which portrays the tragic life story of a young woman in pre-revolutionary France.
The Story of O recounts the tale of a Parisian fashion photographer who gives herself to an élite group of men in the ultimate act of female submission—a popular fantasy and an area in which Crepax’s art excels.
FRANCO SAUDELLI
Franco Saudelli was born in Lazio, Italy, but moved to Rome to study. His comic book debut, in the mid-1970s, was a collaboration with fellow artists such as Massimo Rotundo and Rodolfo Torti—using the group pseudonym Tortelli—on the erotic comics series Rudy X, for Playmen magazine. Saudelli also worked with Ugolino Cossu, and all the artists were part of an emerging generation of Italian creators that included Roberto Baldazzini. This new wave was inspired by predecessors like Magnus and Crepax and ultimately became part of the establishment in the 1990s, working for Italy’s biggest comics publisher, Bonelli, on popular, non-erotic titles like Dylan Dog and Martin Mystere.
In 1977, Saudelli drew Western stories for the magazine Lanciostory and his work started to appear in several mainstream Italian and French publications, including Orient-Express, Libération, and Charlie Mensuel. In the 1980s, Saudelli started creating short comic strips for erotic magazine anthologies such as Comic Art, Glamour, and Diva.
Saudelli’s fascination with bondage developed early on and became a central theme throughout much of his work. His masterfully rendered mistresses and damsels in distress featured in titles like Tied and Gagged Nurse and Pedicured Sexy Lesbians. He would often work from photographs of bound models, and among them was his future wife Giovanna Casotto, who herself went on to become a respected erotic comic artist.
A page from the story Bondage Palace, with Matilda at the mercy of La Bionda (The Blonde), circa 1989.
Matilda apppeared in her own spinoff comic in 1991, in which the artist used a single yellow color to great effect.
The cover to the Spanish edition of the first collection, The Blonde: Double Blow, reveals Saudelli’s skill with full-color work.
Saudelli’s most famous creation, La Bionda (The Blonde), saw a clinically insane but statuesque and beautiful female thief getting into numerous scrapes that generally involved the entire, mostly female, cast being hog-tied at some point. The tone is extremely tongue-in-cheek, but Saudelli’s elegant, clear line style tempers the ridiculousness of the scripts, making the stories silly, yet sensuous. Another theme of the great Italian creator is foot fetishism; he cleverly focuses on the feet for panels, and even whole pages, while the rest of the off-panel action is decoded through the dialogue and position of the feet.
Saudelli and another classic bondage/ erotic fumetti (the Italian word for comics) artist, Roberto Baldazzini, teamed up to produce BIZARRERIES: Bondage Feet Wrestling Fetish—an anthology that featured their strips, illustrations, and bondage photography. “Everything began with an interview Franco Saudelli gave to me a couple of years ago,” Baldazzini revealed. “We soon found out we agreed on many topics and had so much in common: the pleasure to create our own artwork out of photographic images; the love for such authors as Willie, Stanton, Batters, Eneg, and pin-up models like Bettie Page; the nostalgia we felt for maga
zines like Bizarre and Exotique; our attraction for bondage and fetishism, the figures of the dominatrix and the submissive women, fighting girls; and the desire to create new female characters.”
Saudelli’s respect for the early pioneers of bondage comics was highlighted when he called one of his early strips Dedicated to John Willie and Irving Klaw. Saudelli continues to produce beautiful art and has also begun publishing more of his highly specialized ropework photography.
Another of The Blonde’s victims, Amita Berg, is a homage to the actress, Anita Ekberg. This was drawn in pencil.
Saudelli’s full-color painted cover for the Spanish anthology of Totem El Comix from 1990.
Two pages from the 24-page comic L’Apatica Matilda La Dieta Di Veronica (Lazy Matilda and Veronica’s Diet), which was given away with Nova Express #15 in Italy in 1991.
DEMENTIA
Tom Sutton (aka Sean Todd) was born on April 15, 1937 and raised in North Adams, Massachusetts. Sutton was influenced by newspaper strips and E.C.’s line of 1950s horror comics, but his career was perhaps predetermined when he began drawing nudie schoolyard art for paying classmates.
Like so many of his cartooning contemporaries, Sutton joined the U.S. armed forces, enlisting in the Air Force. While stationed at the Itami base in northern Japan he created his first professional comics work—the Caniff-inspired adventure strip F.E.A.F. Dragon—for the base’s magazine. This led to Sutton getting his dream job on the military’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, working in Tokyo on the Johnny Craig comic strip inspired by the artist of the same name. But Sutton later dismissed the strip as being “all stupid. It was a kind of cheap version of [Frank Robbins’] Johnny Hazard…”
When Sutton came back to the U.S. he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on a scholarship, worked as a freelance commercial artist, and was one of the first artists to draw the perennially popular sexy vampire goth chick, Vampirella, for Jim Warren’s magazines. He also worked for Marvel Comics, but when he moved to San Francisco, he discovered Robert Crumb and the rest of the underground comix movement and was impressed by the creative freedom that he was unable to exert in the work he was doing.
But it wasn’t until he reached his fifties, in the early 1990s, that he finally felt that he could liberate himself in the way Crumb, S. Clay Wilson and the underground comix artists had done 30 years earlier. Under the pseudonym “Dementia,” Sutton created a whole slew of extreme bondage comics for Fantagraphics’ Eros Comix.
Sutton’s extreme hardcore comix included Bizarre Bondage, Bondage Slaves, Outrage!, Jailbait, and Extreme!! Much of the material is repetitive and shocking, featuring women bound, gagged, and suspended from various piercings (nose, nipple, or genital). Monsterotic features various fettered victims being abused by a series of monsters and creatures, harking back to 1950s comics and reflecting the Japanese subgenre of “tentacle sex” manga.
Unlike much of John Willie and Eric Stanton’s work, which has a certain naïve charm, Sutton’s work has an unpleasant, misogynistic tone, with most of the bound ladies genuinely looking distressed. This is, of course, tailored to a specific market and is almost certainly Sutton’s Dementia persona purging his soul—the artist even covered taboo fetishes such as coprophilia, in Savage Sewer Sluts.
But Sutton also wore his great sense of humor and knowledge of comics history on his sleeve when he harked back to his childhood and created a number of sexy E.C. Comics parodies: Bustline Combat (Frontline Combat); The Vault of Whores (Vault of Horror); The Crypt of Cum (Crypt of Terror); and the title that could easily sum up his entire erotic comic oeuvre—Weird Sex (Weird Science).
A rare image of a slave enjoying herself “bouncing cum” in Outrage! #2 (2001).
Sutton’s Savage Sewer Sluts uses all the trappings of superhero comics—from the excessive cartoon violence to the over-the-top sound effects—all intimating that no one is actually getting hurt.
The cover to Savage Sewer Sluts, a feast of wrestling, coprophilia, and super-heroic slugfest parodies.
MICHAEL MANNING
Michael Manning is a relative newcomer to comics, starting out after Dementia’s titles had begun being published. The L.A.-based artist’s work is an intriguing blend of space opera, court intrigue, and manners-and-hardcore BDSM.
Born in Queens, NYC and raised in Massachusetts, Manning discovered erotica at an early age. “Twelve years old. The exquisite shock of seeing my first Japanese erotic print,” he wrote in the notes to his graphic novel The Spider Garden. “All whirling lines and exaggerated ecstasy, brutal and sensuous.” This experience stayed with him, with his first exposure to the classical ukiyo-e prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Unagawa Kuniyoshi, and modern manga artists such as Yukito Kishiro and Hiroyuki Utatane, leading him to call one of his early works Shunga (1989). Other influences on his work can be seen in Japanese animation, fairytale book illustration, the work of Guido Crepax and Eric Gill, and the Symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite art movements.
Manning studied film and animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. A true renaissance man, he began self-publishing his black-and-white erotic comix in 1987, while working as an animator and director of short films, commercials, and music videos.
In 1991 he moved to the West Coast and focused on comix and erotic illustration full-time. Manning continued to self-publish and produced work for San Francisco’s S&M/sexzine community while creating artwork and costume designs for multimedia performances at local music venues and fetish events.
His series The Spider Garden consists of four graphic novels to date: The Spider Garden (1995), Hydrophidian (1996), In A Metal Web (2003), and In A Metal Web II (2003). Set in a futuristic, matriarchal world of warring clans ruled by The Scarlet Empress, the action centers on the Spider Garden, a palace-fortress ruled by the Sacred Androgyne, Shaalis, who is a hermaphrodite. The story follows the political and sexual intrigues in a gender-bending, polysexual, and hedonistic future society. Manning liberally borrows from all things Japanese, from social mores to their mythical spirits, the Tengu. His themes notably depict varied “taboo” subjects such as zoophilia and the extreme techno-bondage that is reminiscent of Japanese hentai manga.
Manning has a global following, and has exhibited his work in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Milan. In 2002, mural-sized reproductions of panels from his In A Metal Web graphic novel were featured as part of a special installation at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center For the Arts exhibition, Fantastic! Comics and the Art of Illusion.
Manning has also collaborated with erotic comix artist and tattooist Patrick Conlon on the graphic novel Tranceptor (1998)—the story of a dominatrix’s adventures in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and the sequel to Iron Gauge.
Manning’s complex universe, The Spider Garden, is enriched by his sophisticated style, clearly influenced by artwork from the Far East.
This flashback page was drawn with minimal spot blacks, giving the reader a visual clue that the story is set in the past. While extremely graphic, there is also a highly charged eroticism in the art.
4
Under-the-Counter and Underground
SIXTIES COMIX
Despite the surprising abundance of hardcore and fetish comics between the 1930s and 1950s, their existence and availability was still distinctly secretive, known only to a few, select connoisseurs. It took another decade—and a new generation of artists and writers—to bring erotic comics out of the closet for good.
It was the ’60s that finally saw the lid blown off erotic comics, and unleashed them onto an unsuspecting public. But where did these strange new titles come from—and, more importantly, who was creating them?
The roots of underground comics lay in a multitude of sources. Obviously there was the influence of the infamous Tijuana Bibles that many of the creators had surreptitiously discovered as kids. But another influence was the E.C. Comics line from the ’50s, that had wrought exactly what Dr. Fredric Wertham had feared
, and warped a whole generation of comics creators! The E.C. stories were a combination of lurid “true crime” tales, horror stories, and weird science fiction, and—while tame by today’s standards—they caused concerned parents to organize mass comic book burnings, encouraged by Wertham’s campaign to ban these salacious sequential stories. These, and humor titles like MAD and Help! set up by E.C. artist/writer/editor Harvey Kurtzman, were the true cultural kin of the underground movement.
The underground comic creators took these influences and ramped up the content in a deliberate backlash against their parents’ generational values. The ’60s were all about rebellion and experimentation; experimentation with drugs and “free love,” and rebellion against restrictive social conventions and repressive political systems. So, it’s unsurprising that all these elements would feature heavily in the underground comix, with “the X suggesting X-rated or an adult readership,” according to Texan underground cartoonist Jack Jackson.
The cover to Tales from the Leather Nun, expertly painted by the late Dave Sheridan.
Don Lomax’s comix magazine Copperhead tapped into the ’60s fascination with sex cults and satanism.
Bill Griffith’s parodies of 1950s romance comics brought whimsical naïvety up to date for a more sexually aware audience.
Classic underground artist Richard Corben was renowned for his huge muscular men and big-breasted female characters. This is Meet Face to Face from Fever Dreams.