From the 1970s to the Present Day
Page 9
Diane DiMassa’s cover to Hothead Paisan #12 featuring the “Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist.”
A scene from DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan #12 reveals a rarely discussed female desire for hermaphrodites and transsexuals.
One of the original lesbian cartoonists to achieve great success was Roberta Gregory. This is the cover to her series, Artistic Licentiousness, which dealt with a myriad of sexual politics and mythological themes.
A page from Italian cartoonist Serena Pillai’s The Italian Cousin, about holiday a romance between a “butch” and a “femme,” from the first Juicy Mother anthology.
Diane DiMassa’s excellent logo for her comic company, Giant Ass Publishing.
ALISON BECHDEL’S DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR
Out of all the lesbian comics artists and cartoonists working today, the queen of them all is Alison Bechdel. Born 10 September, 1960, Bechdel was influenced by “gothic” cartoonists Charles Addams and Edward Gorey, MAD magazine and Norman Rockwell. “When I was 22, I picked up a copy of Gay Comix…and it was seeing [Cruse’s] work there, along with stuff by other early gay and lesbian cartoonists like Mary Wings, Jennifer Camper, and Jerry Mills, that made me realize I could draw cartoons about my own queer life.”
Duly inspired, Bechdel’s groundbreaking newspaper strip, Dykes To Watch Out For (DTWOF), first appeared in Womannews, a New York newspaper, in July, 1983. “I liked [the title’s] contradictory meanings,‘Watch out for’ as in ‘seek out,’ and ‘watch out for’ as in ‘avoid,’” explained the artist/writer. “I worry about it from time to time because it’s really kind of an unwieldy title. But not as unwieldy as Carbon-Based Beings To Watch Out For, which is really more accurate now that the characters aren’t all lesbians.”
Bechdel self-syndicated the strip in 1985, and the first collection was released in 1986. Since then the strip has become an LGBT institution in dozens of newspapers, been translated into several languages, and collected in a series of award-winning books.
In 2006, Bechdel’s graphic novel memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was published by Houghton Mifflin, spending two weeks on The New York Times’ Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Seller list. The coming-of-age tale revealed the tragic story of Bechdel’s coming out as a lesbian and her father’s own repressed homosexuality, and has been called a “rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature.”
In April, 2003 a non-profit organization was established to support LGBT comics. Prism Comics was initially set up by a small group of US comics fans and professionals who put together the annual Out in Comics, which listed LGBT creators, but only lasted three issues. The volunteers decided to create Prism to provide services such as promotion and publicity of gay comics, via conventions and their website. The organization also produces the annual Prism Comics: Your LGBT Guide to Comics, which features creators’ work, overviews of gay themes in comics, news, and features. On the advisory board sit most of the key names in LGBT comics, including Howard Cruse, Tim Fish, Andy Mangels, Lee Marrs, and Joe Phillips, among others. The group even awards a $1,000 grant each September to a comics creator who has published a work of interest to an LGBT audience.
An erudite scene of self-discovery from Alison Bechdel’s bestselling 2006 graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.
Another entrant on the LGBT scene is the infrequent Juicy Mother anthology edited by Jennifer Camper. Bechdel, Leanne Franson, Howard Cruse, Diane DiMassa, Robert Kirby, Robert Triptow, and a host of other LGBT cartoonists have all contributed to it.
So the gay comics market has gone from practically nonexistent to a thriving sub-genre, with its own recognized charity, in just over 30 years, thanks to the determined and brave creators demanding their voices be heard through their sequential art.
The cover to the first collection of Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For strips.
Two Dykes To Watch Out For strips that reveal Bechdel’s deft touch when discussing sexual subjects within a lesbian relationship, that does not descend into stereotypical male fantasies.
3
European Erotique
MILO MANARA
European erotic comics have always been far ahead of the United States and Great Britain in terms of sophistication and acceptability — particularly in Italy, where the renowned Latin lovers were one of the first countries to truly embrace and develop the erotic comic genre. At the forefront of this revolution was Milo Manara, an artist whose skill at drawing sensuous women and intensely arousing situations is unsurpassed.
Born in 1945, the Italian artist was heavily influenced by classical painters like Raphael and, as a boy, he even ran away from home to see an exhibition of work by the painter Giorgio di Chirico. He studied architecture and painting, but became intrigued by the emerging Italian underground comix, or fumetti, in the mid- to late 1960s. He made his comics debut in 1969 for Genius, a sexy noir comic book in the vein of Kriminal and Satanik. He worked for minor publications such as Jolanda, a softcore title, and the satirical magazine Telerompo, before he was hired by the boys’ anthology Il Corriere dei Ragazzi to work with writer Mino Milani.
An exquisite self-portrait of Italian erotic artist, Giovanna Casotto, in the bath.
An illustration of cornucopia, or “horn of plenty,” which also represents fertility.
Milo Manara’s erotic adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s classic novel changed the eponymous protagonist to a female in Gullivera.
An erotic scene from Manara and Hugo Pratt’s award-winning graphic novel, Indian Summer, set in early colonial America. Here, the supposedly puritanical Reverend Black shows his true colors.
A scene from Manara’s magic realist story Trip to Tulum, written by famed Italian film director, Federico Fellini. The director also guest stars in his own story, seen here in white.
A sexually “liberated” Irish prostitute reveals herself in Pratt and Manara’s Argentine historical drama, El Gaucho.
This disturbingly devilish illustration from Manara treads a fine line by not actually revealing Satan’s member.
Milo Manara’s first graphic novel as an artist and writer was HP and Giuseppe Bergman, published in 1983. “HP” is Manara’s friend, collaborator, and fellow Italian artist/writer legend, the late Hugo Pratt. Bergman had been created by Manara five years earlier (in 1978), for the French comics magazine A Suivre. The series became known for its combination of experimental narrative and explicit sex, and has been collected into six books so far.
Manara has since produced over 30 graphic novels and art books, including the four-part series II Gioco (1983, translated as Click), about a device that renders women helplessly aroused at the flick of a switch, and II Profumo dell’invisibile (1986, translated under the name Butterscotch), about the invention of a body paint that makes the wearer invisible. The Ape, serialized in the US magazine Heavy Metal in the early 1980s, retells the story of the Chinese Monkey King — with humor, arousing artwork, and political overtones.
Manara’s stories generally revolve around elegant, beautiful women caught up in unlikely and fantastical erotic scenarios, and his art style favors clean lines for women, reserving more complex drawings for monsters or other supernatural elements. Many of his comics have themes of bondage, domination, humiliation, voyeurism, the supernatural, and the sexual tension lurking beneath various aspects of Italian society. Manara’s work varies in explicitness, but the general mood is playful rather than misogynistic, and his skill in creating atmosphere as well as occasional excursions into more “mainstream” stories has helped give him an air of artistic respectability. His work has reached an American audience, largely through Heavy Metal, but curiously, Manara is less popular in Italy than in France, where he is considered one of the most important cartoonists in the world.
The Great Adventure: The Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman also written by Manara.
A raucous party onboard a ship bound to South America in the Hugo Pratt-penned graphic novel, EI Gauch
o, set in 1806.
Manara’s first book in the Borgia family saga, Blood for the Pope, written by another of his collaborators, the cultfilm director and comic writer, Alejandro Jodorowsky
The cover to the English language edition of El Gaucho, published by NBM in 1999. The book told the story of the British Invasion of Buenos Aires in surprisingly historically accurate detail.
VITTORIO GIARDINO
Just one year younger than Manara, Vittorio Giardino was a latecomer to sequential art and was already 31 when he entered the comics scene in 1978. The Italian former electrical engineer was inspired by the Belgian ligne claire school of art that Tintin creator Herge belonged to.
After creating his first comics for La Città Futura, Giardino created the character Sam Pezzo, a private investigator whose adventures appeared in comic anthologies, II Mago and Orient-Express in 1981. The following year, after three collections, he abandoned Pezzo to work on the complex 1930s espionage stories of Max Fridman, in Orient-Express and Hungarian Rhapsody.
After1986, he regularly featured in L’Espresso, and worked as an illustrator for Italian newspapers La Repubblica and L’Unità, and French magazine Je Bouquine.
Giardino’s erotic comic output may be less than his Italian peers, but is no less important. He began illustrating short stories and covers for the erotic anthology Glamour International, and started his most famous work in the English language, Little Ego, in 1984. This series of short stories continued in Comic Art and was originally an erotic homage to Winsor McCay’s beloved Little Nemo newspaper strip, with a beautiful female protagonist replacing the little boy, Nemo. Little Ego’s sexual dreams increase in frequeny until a longer, ongoing narrative develops, as she experiences every sexual fantasy, from an orgy with multiple versions of herself to bestiality with a crocodile! The strips were collected in 1989 and the book has remained in print ever since, remaining a benchmark of quality comic book erotica.
In 1986 Glamour produced a collection of Giardino’s erotic illustrations and in 1989 his collection of dangerous holiday romances, Vacanze Fatali (Fatal Holidays, translated as Deadly Dalliance in America) was released. Shortly after, he released a follow up, Dream Journeys, and then teamed up with writer Giovanni Barbieri to create the racy “soap opera” comic, Eva Miranda.
“Women fascinate me in real life, before I even start drawing, and it’s as much a pleasure to draw them as it is to know them,” Giardino explained in a 2006 interview with Libero. “I have no intention to push the erotic elements [of my comics] beyond my own clear boundaries, for one simple reason. For years I have had adolescent daughters in the house and they are convinced that the eroticism is not about the body, but rather the mind.”
Giardino’s ligne claire art style is deeply arousing and Little Ego’s dream adventures all have strongly overt Freudian metaphors.
The Italian artist’s page layouts and final panels were a direct homage to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo strip.
A new sketch that appeared in the 2006 US edition of Little Ego.
PAOLO E. SERPIERI
Serpieri, like his Italian peers, is an erotic comics artistic genius whose reputation has spread far beyond his native homeland. Born in Venice in 1944, Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri studied painting and architecture at the Fine Art Academy in Rome under Renato Guttuso. By 1966, critics were lauding his fine art paintings, but nine years later, in 1975, the artist had forgone this career in exchange for the medium he would truly excel in, comics.
He teamed up with writer Raffaele Ambrosio, and together they created a series of Westerns (a perennially popular comics genre in Italy), including L’Indiana Bianca (The White Indian); L’Uomo di Medicina (Medicine Man); and the historical L’Histoire du Far-West (The Story of the West), which were published in the magazines Lancio Story and Skorpio.
After 1980 Serpieri worked on collections like Découvrir la Bible (Discover the Bible), as well as short stories for magazines such as L’Eternauta, II Fumetto, and Orient-Express.
In 1985, Serpieri drew his most famous creation; the perfectly proportioned—and frequently naked—space siren, Druuna, in the science fiction epic Morbus Gravis. The intelligent and complex story of a plague-ridden city where humans degenerate into hideous mutations dealt with many complex themes, from sexual objectification of women, to the nature of what it means to be human. The book was an instant hit and the Italian public’s demand for more of the voluptuous vixen was insatiable.
Serpieri’s cover to the first book in his Druuna saga, 1985’s Morbus Gravis (Severe Disease).
Druuna engages in fantasy sex on a beach with a desperately needy blond man.
Druuna is ravaged by hideous mutations in Morbus Gravis.
Over the years more Druuna sagas followed including, Druuna (1987), Creatura (1990), Carnivora (1992), Mandragore (1995), Aphrodisia (1997), and Clone (2003). As the series progressed, the erotic content increased with each volume until full, uncensored penetration shots were a regular feature. Serpieri even drew himself into the strip as the moustached character, Doc.
These erotic galactic epics sold over one million issues in 12 languages and Serpieri’s fame spread in the English-speaking world, mostly thanks to translations of Druuna’s adventures in Heavy Metal magazine.
Serpieri’s intensely rendered artwork, lush, vivid colors — particularly the use of red — and fastidious depiction of the erotic anatomy of the well-endowed heroine has earned him the undisputed, and possibly slightly dubious, honorary title of the “Master of the Ass.” This led to several sketchbooks of wanton goddesses and scenes of explicit congress, such as Obsession, Druuna X, Druuna X 2, Croquis, Serpieri Sketchbook, Serpieri Sketchbook 2, and The Sweet Smell of Woman.
But when the Druuna book, The Forgotten Planet (2000) failed to deliver the erotic goods, many fans were disappointed. But Serpieri made a very clear distinction between integral erotica and out and out porn: “I absolutely did not censor The Forgotten Planet. As it turned out, this story didn’t need any erotic scenes. I do not draw erotic scenes to fill pages, they should be justified.”
The cover to the Heavy Metal edition of Mandragore, the fifth book in the Druuna series.
Druuna engages in a spot of role-play as she dresses up in “antique” underwear for her lover.
Serpieri’s exquisitely detailed cross-hatching and rich colors almost distract from the actual content of the story. Almost.
FRANCISCO SOLANO LÓPEZ
Although born in Argentina in 1928, it’s really in Europe that Francisco Solano López made his name as a comic artist. His first published work, Perico y Guillerma, was in the early 1950s for Columbia, based in Buenos Aires.
He then joined Abril Editorial, where he illustrated several series written by the legendary Hector German Oesterheld, including the science-fiction series El Eternauta. López co-founded Frontera publishers with Oesterheld, and alternated on the Ernie Pike series with Hugo Pratt, Jorge Moliterni, and José Muñoz. López also worked on many British comics, including Fleetway’s classic Kelly’s Eye series. In fact, López received so much work from Fleetway that he opened his own art studio in Buenos Aires to complete the work, employing greats like Tibor Horvath, Julio and Jorge Schiaffino, and Nestor Morales to ink his penciled pages.
In 1976, while on a business trip to Spain, Lopez’s house in Buenos Aries mysteriously burnt down and, suspecting the repressive military government, López moved his family to Madrid. Oesterheld and his daughters weren’t so lucky, and were murdered by the fascist Junta as they were marked out as dissidents.
1984 found Lopez living in Rio de Janeiro where he began to produce work for the American market, working for such publishers as Dark Horse and Fantagraphics. He teamed up with fellow Argentine writer Ricardo Barreiro in the 1990s, working for the series Las Aventuras de Lilian y Agatha (The Adventures of Lilian and Agatha), better known in English as The Young Witches — a tale of magic, power, sex, and sadism. Set in England in the last third of the 19th century,
it tells the story of the orphaned young Lilian Cunnington, sent to her aunt’s, near Coventry. Lilian’s relatives are the leaders of a coven of witches, “whose twisted rituals involve their nubile charges,” and Lilian soon develops her latent powerful psychic abilities and omnisexual potential.
The Young Witches became one of the world’s most popular, and certainly most reprinted, erotic comic series and this — along with his silent, full-color Sexy Symphony strip (produced with his son Gabriel Solano López) for Spain’s Kiss Comix — ensured that López won the Best Erotic Author award at the Barcelona Erotic Salon.
A moving scene from López’s political drama, Ana, as she recalls her dead lover.
The covers to Solano López’s issues of The Young Witches.
One of Solano’s near-silent Sex Symphony strips from Spain’s Kiss Comix.
Ana engages in sexual politics and manipulation in the Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir inspired graphic novel written by Francisco Solano Lopez’s son, Gabriel.