by Tim Pilcher
IGNACIO NOÉ
López’s younger, fellow Argentine artist, Ignacio Noé, has taken erotica to a new level with his full-color stories. In a highly rendered style the artist works in mixed media — traditionally in acrylics — but more recently has moved to working completely digitally.
His work has subsequently appeared right across Europe in a multitude of erotic comic anthologies, including Kiss Comix in Spain (published by La Cúpula Editions), Selen magazine in Italy, and in the Dutch edition of Penthouse Comix.
His most notable erotic work is Convent of Hell, written by Solano López’s collaborator Ricardo Barreiro, in 1995. This debauched masterpiece sees a Spanish convent full of repressed sexual desires, which are unleashed when the devil is inadvertently set free and reigns down an unholy bedlam of depravity and lust. Beautifully painted, the graphic novel was originally serialized in Kiss. It was published in America by NBM’s Eurotica imprint, and they have since released many other books by the Argentine. After collaborating with Barreiro, Noé began writing as well as drawing, and his other collections of tongue-in-cheek short stories include Doctor, I’m Too Big!, Ship of Fools, and The Piano Tuner. The latter recounts the (mis) fortunes of the eponymous hero in a style reminiscent of the late 1970s British film sex comedies, Confessions of a… with their saucy humor and cheeky sexy situations, as the tuner finds himself in flagrante more times than is thought possible, making piano tuning one of the sexiest jobs ever.
Noé’s Piano Tuner returns to the conservatory and discovers an unusual instrument.
The digitally painted artwork of Ignacio Noé is simultaneously erotic and ridiculously silly, with over the top sound effects emphasising the latter.
GIOVANNA CASOTTO
One of the most popular Italian erotic artists working today is — perhaps surprisingly, in a genre dominated by male artists — a woman, Giovanna Casotto.
“I was just a housewife!” exclaimed Casotto, explaining how she got into the fumetti industry. “But when I started reading the comics my husband collected (Comic Art, Orient-Express, Frigidaire, and Glamour International), I started to get interested. Not so much for the erotic content, but by looking at the art because I have always had a passion for art. I liked to copy famous works by Rembrandt, Picasso, and so forth. I am especially interested in the naked human figure,” the artist revealed in an interview with Vincenzo Raucci. “When I saw [the infamous bondage comic] The Blonde by Franco Saudelli it was a revelation. I applied to the School of Comics in Milan with a copy of The Blonde in hand saying: ‘I want to draw like this! I want to become like him!’” Casotto studied art for three years and was also inspired by fellow Italian erotic artist, Leone Frollo.
Casotto’s photorealistic pencil studies are some of the best erotic artwork in comics today. Her clever use of limited color palette places emphasis on key aspects and intensifies the mood.
This voyeuristic strip, Una playa solitaria (A solitary beach) appeared in black and white in the Spanish erotic comic anthology Kiss Comix #163.
Casotto often used herself as the main model for her work, as seen here.
After a short stint on adventure comics for L’Intrepido, she met Italian publisher Stefano Trentini who signed her up, “But the only work available was as a background artist for football stories. I hated football!” However in 1994 the publisher launched a new erotic magazine, based on, and named after, adult movie actress, Selèn. This was Casotto’s “big break,” as she supplied stylish and sexy strips and covers for Selèn magazine. And she was in excellent company, with big names like Tanino Liberatore, Milo Manara, Stefano Natali, Luca Tarlazzi, and Stefano Mazzotti also contributing.
Being a stunning-looking woman, as well as a talented writer/artist, Casotto drew herself as the central character in these outrageous erotic tales. Unsurprisingly, this combination saw her rocket to fame in her home country.
She was invited as a guest and co-host on numerous Italian tabloid TV shows such as Maurizio Costanzo Show, Harem, Mixer, Second Evening, The Special Envoy, and many others. However, Italian television is notoriously exploitative and Casotto soon found herself as a reluctant celebrity appearing in newspapers and besieged by fans. “I feel very uncomfortable in front of the cameras, with an audience, having to respond to someone… The public expects a lot from you, and they’re not always satisfied…each show was a mini martyrdom. They constantly attacked, accusing me of creating pornography…” she revealed to Gisela Scerman—one of Casotto’s models—in an interview. “I didn’t watch television for about five years: I hate everything that comes out from that box! I have a computer at home, but I don’t even know how to turn it on, much to the frustration of my daughters! So I chose this form of communication [comics] to stay peacefully and quietly in my world…I’m not a misanthrope, but I do need to have my little space to dream…”
“The stories in my comics are not important, they’re just an excuse to draw!” explained Giovanna Casotto, “The art tells the story… Just the nuances of pencil shading give the feeling of carnality!”
Casotto’s work has been published all over Europe, and Eros Comix reprinted her strips as the Bitch In Heat series in America. In 1994 she met her artistic mentor, Saudelli, and began to pose for him, with the two starting to collaborate together both artistically and personally. Like many continental European women, Casotto draws her goddesses with unshaven armpits. “Underarm hair is as mysterious as that of the pussy. Who knows what it hides? Some sweat? Mmm…good…” joked the sassy artist.
Casotto’s exquisitely drawn comics ooze sex appeal and her often humorous short stories, which feature surprise endings, have won her both male and female fans of intelligent erotica. “The eroticism that I — and other women — enjoy is inspired by the pin-ups of the 1950s. It may appear that the woman is just a sex object, and maybe she is, but the viewer needs to be aware it is also very ironic… Moreover, the eroticism, for me, is carnality — a sense of flesh and body…senses!”
With true Italian passion, Casotto believes that her “drawing is a need to communicate, an act of love, a reason for living. My drawings are the language that communicates feelings and emotions.”
Censorship is something the drawing diva finds hard to fathom. “How can your sex drive — that is so vital to human beings’ existence — be considered pornographic or obscene? The border between eroticism and pornography varies with an individual’s own taste and decency. Who can say that this or that image is pornographic rather than erotic?…Of course, the risk is to confuse reality with fantasy, but the borders of the fantasy clearly remain on a two-dimensional sheet of paper… Meanwhile, I continue to draw comics — erotic or pornographic as they may be, it doesn’t matter! The aim is to satisfactorily act out some fantasies and share my emotions.”
Casotto has recently been moving into erotic photography, with bondage as a major theme, but hopefully she won’t stay away from her drawing board for too long. “The eroticism draws me in, in all its forms, from art to writing… everything that I am concerned with exudes eroticism…”
While most of Casotto’s work is extremely candid, there is a strong, wry sense of humor throughout her work, often with the men being the butt of the joke, or twist ending. Here, the message of safe sex is instilled as the woman puts a condom on the man.
This strip sees an artist having an illicit affair with his model. When the former dies before completing his work, Casotto manages to make an astutely amusing comment on modern art, when the model displays their bedsheets as the canvas.
A bondage study, obviously inspired by Casotto’s artistic mentor and fellow erotic comic artist, Franco Saudelli, who specializes in bondage comics like The Blonde.
GLAMOUR INTERNATIONAL
Throughout the 1980s there was one publication that galvanized Italian erotic artists: the over-sized Glamour International magazine. The huge 12in × 12in periodical featured wraparound covers by some of the biggest names in erotic comics, including Vittorio
Giardino, Guido Crepax, Franco Saudelli, Milo Manara, and Leone Frollo. But the magazine’s remit was broader than just Italian artists and lived up to its title by featuring erotic work by comic artists such as the UK’s John Bolton and the USA’s Dave Stevens, Alex Toth, Frank Frazetta, and Bill Ward. In October 1986 Stevens was the first American illustrator to provide a cover, which was, of course, based on his eternal muse, Bettie Page. Each issue explored a different theme from Brothels and Bordellos and Crimes and Gals, to the dubious Black Women and Jungle Girls, with relevant comic strips, photographs, and articles from around the world. The magazine also reprinted classic cheesecake from the 1950s underground bondage illustrations and showcased the latest work by top erotic artists.
A beautiful nude study by Jordi Bernet from Glamour International magazine.
The full cover to Glamour International 2 by Little Ego artist Vittorio Giardino.
Italian artist Tanino Libertore’s biting satire on the women’s sexually-aware magazine, Cosmopolitan, where women learn how to exploit men for their own ends.
SPANISH SCENE: SEVENTIES COMICS
After the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975, and the demise of 36 years of repressive right-wing government, Spain revelled in its newfound freedoms of expression. Dizzy with this revolutionary breath of fresh air, comic creators started to experiment with erotic storylines in spades. The comics, crude in both content and artistically, were black and white and mass-produced on cheap pulp paper with a glossy fully-painted cover.
Publishers like Ediciones Zinco and Editorial Astri had lurid covers enticing readers to discover Secretos de Mujer: Confesiones eroticas de la autora (Secrets of a Woman: Erotic Confessions of the Author); Hard International’s Mas Penes Para La Estrella (Penises for the Superstar) and Sex Azafatas (Sex Stewardesses). In many cases the artwork was little better than the US Tijuana Bibles that preceded them and, similarly, many artists didn’t sign their work, either because the publishers wouldn’t let them for fear of prosecution, or just out of shame.
One of the better drawn strips, Ulula: Ula se Hace Monja (Ula as a Nun) appeared in Hembras Peligrosas (Dangerous Females) in 1985, and told the story of Ula, a woman whose vagina becomes cursed by the devil and kills anyone who touches it. Ultimately, she becomes a nun until her faith cures her, at which point she immediately drops her religion, and her underwear, and starts fucking the nearest man, just in time for the monk who helped her to catch them in flagrante.
The story is indicative of thousands that were being published at the time, but there were also good quality titles being published, such as El Cuervo (The Crow — not to be confused with James O’Barr’s gothic fantasy), which mixed humorous short strips with heavily sex-laden gags. In the early ‘90s, Josep M. Beá (AKA Pere Calsina) created the highly sexed strips Perversíon Sexual and Sexo Loco for El Cuervo.
Another key Catalonian comic that was part of this liberated movement was the adult comedy anthology, El Jueves, launched in 1977. The weekly comic always had a political edge, but pushed the satire too far when the cartoonists Guillermo Torres and Manel Fontdevila were fined ¤3,000 ($4,438) each in November 2007 when they were found guilty of having “vilified the crown in the most gratuitous and unnecessary way,” as the judge put it. Their crime? Depicting Crown Prince Felipe and his wife Letizia having sex with the caption, “Do you realize, if you get pregnant this will be the closest thing I’ve done to work in my whole life.” It referred to the government’s announcement that it would pay Spanish couples for each new baby they had. Police seized copies of that issue of El Jueves and there was a outcry about the suppression of free speech, and a fear of returning to the repressive Franco era.
The cover to Ultra Hard #4 published by Editorial Astri.
A recent and disturbing strip by top Spanish artist, Man (aka Manolo Carot), a regular contributor to Kiss Comix.
Ulula’s cursed vagina is examined more than once in the strip, Ula se Hace Monja, from the anthology, Hembras Peligrosas.
The below-par art from El Asistente’s strip, Las Cachondas Reclutas, about two female volunteers’ sexual adventures in the army.
An unusual use for a kitchen utensil from the strip, La Nieta Viciosa, from Ultra Hard #4. Artist unknown.
SPANISH SCENE: EL VIBORA AND KISS
When the nascent Spanish underground comics movement got started, the flagship title that brought the creators together was El Vibora. Launched in 1979, the comics anthology has almost always featured a sexy, semi-clad woman on the cover. The title was the home of great Catalonian artists such as Max, whose earliest works included Peter Pank, a sexy punk version of Peter Pan.
El Vibora was at the cutting edge of the Spanish comics scene and reprinted US stars like Kevin Taylor and underground comix king Gilbert Shelton, as well as home-grown creators like Jaime Martín and the politically incorrect cartoonist Álvarez Rabo. As time went by the sexual content quota steadily increased until the majority of the magazine became devoted to sequential erotica.
El Vibora’s publishers, La Cúpula, also published Kiss Comix, possibly one of the world’s most renowned erotic comic anthologies. Kiss #1 featured erotic cartoonist Kevin Taylor’s Girl and work by Japanese mangaka, Chiyoji. Other contributors over the years have included Solano López and Noé, and Armas. In 1994, a sister publication was launched in France, which changed its name with issue 38 to La Poudre Aux Rêves (The Stuff of Dreams). Just to confuse matters even more, La Cúpula then launched French Kiss, an English language edition of the magazine, in 2005. The publisher has published practically every single erotic sequential artist, either historically or working today in their Coleccion X series of graphic novels, including Frenchman Georges Levis, the British Erich Von Götha, Spaniard Luis Tobalina and the Chilean, Ferocius.
More recently Laura Perez Vernetti-Blina (better known as just Laura) a Barcelona-born writer, designer, and illustrator has created several erotic graphic novels. Her first, Las Habitaciones Desmanteladas (The Dismantled Rooms), was a series of short stories created in different styles, which she followed up with an erotic adaptation of 1001 Arabian Nights, in 2002. Laura then teamed up with writer A. Altarriba in 2005 for Amores Locos (Crazy Loves) three stories of obsession and passion set in prehistory, Ancient Greece, and New York in the 1920s. Laura’s stark and stylized black and white erotica has also seen her work published in Japan, by Kodasha.
The cover to Kiss Comix #163 drawn by Monica and Violeta.
Tobalina’s Piketes strip from a 2005 edition of Kiss Comix.
R.E.M by Gabriel Bobillo put an erotic twist on the classic tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece, complete with a sex-starved Minotaur.
Miguel Angel Martin’s strip Anal Probe (or Girl Fuck Boy) from Eros Comix’s Dirty Stories.
The animation cel-painting style of Atilio Gambedotti and Iván Guevara’s Akeronya serial mixes traditional fantasy and superhero elements.
JORDI BERNET’S CLARA DE NOCHE
First appearing in 1992 in the pages of Spanish adult humor anthology, El Jueves, Clara de Noche (Clara of the Night) was an instant hit. The brainchild of artist Jordi Bernet, Clara was designed to be the classic “tart with a heart” — a working girl and single mother who was raising her son and dreaming of a better life. So far, so good. Realising that perhaps his writing wasn’t up to the task of such a complex character, Bernet hired Argentine comics writers Carlos Trillo and Eduardo Maicas to handle the text chores.
Visually, Bernet based his character on the notorious 1950s model Bettie Page, a source of inspiration for many comic artists. When Eros Comix first translated the series into English, the title was changed to Betty by the Hour, acknowledging the model muse.
While Bernet’s artwork looks simultaneously gorgeous (Clara) and goofy (her clients), Trillo’s scripts unfortunately leave a bad misogynistic taste in the mouth. The constant references to Clara as a “whore;” the fact that all the married men sleep with her is dealt as a joke, and the tone of most of the two
-page stories is embittered and nasty. Clara gives her son, Pablito, a kitten to keep him company while she works (she doesn’t know that he knows she’s a sex worker). But when the cat runs off to have sex with a Tom in the alley, Pablito’s response is “Sheez!! All the women around here are alike! What a bitch!” Of course, all of this could be a misunderstanding as the scripts are written in an Argentine dialect, which needs translating into Spanish, and subsequently turned into English. In his defence, Bernet said, “This is a tribute to those ladies who work in what is said to be the oldest profession in the world, and we believe that if this profession has lasted this long, something about it has to be good and useful.” An argument unlikely to wash with many feminists.
Clara has been collected into three albums in Spanish between 1993 and 1995, and the first album in English, a “best of,” was published by Big Wow Art/Auad Publishing in 2006.
This more realistic rendering of Clara was created by Jordi Bernet for his “Black Series.”
The cover to the English-language edition of Clara of the Night, published by Auad.
A typical Clara story, from the pages of El Jueves, has a bizarre twist, when a wife pays Clara to do a striptease for her TV obsessed husband to remind him what “real life” is all about. The strip continues the long-standing tradition of portraying men as goofball idiots who fall apart around sensuous women, who In turn, seem generally ambivalent about their paramours.