by Tim Pilcher
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S FRENCH COMICS, THE TYPE MEN LIKE
National Lampoon magazine has a surprisingly long history, dating right back to February 1876 when Harvard University created the humor magazine Harvard Lampoon. Almost a century later, this satirical publication went on to sire three Harvard Lampoon alumni, Robert Hoffman, Henry Beard, and Douglas Kenney. When these three decided to launch their own similar magazine in 1970, they enlisted the financial backing of Matty Simmons (co-founder of The Diner’s Club and Weight Watchers Magazine). The quartet secured the rights from Harvard Lampoon to use the name and the first issue of National Lampoon was launched in April, 1970. Sex and comics were always at the heart of the magazine, with the first cover featuring a lascivious-looking leather-clad lady and a bizarre cartoon duck with the title “Sexy Cover Issue.”
National Lampoon, or ‘Poon as it was affectionately known, always knew its roots were in comic books and the August, 1971 edition had a painting of the court-martialed Vietnam War murderer William Calley parodying MAD magazine’s mascot Alfred E. Neuman, with the catchphrase, “What, My Lai?,” instead of Alfred’s “What, Me Worry?”
By 1974 the magazine was selling over a million copies per issue, as many as MAD and Playboy. The ever-astute Simmons bought out the other three founders that same year for $7.5 million, but many felt this was the beginning of the end of the magazine’s “Golden Age.”
1974 also saw the magazine take another cue from MAD by beginning regular reprints of its material in a series of collections. National Lampoon Comics, a collection of the best comic strips from the first four years, included gems such as Third World Thrills by P. J. O’rourke, Dean Latimer, and Gray Morrow, and Weerd Tayls by Michel Choquette, Sean Kelly, Joe Orlando, and Frank Springer. Springer was no stranger to humorous and erotic comics, having previously drawn Phoebe Zeit-Geist for the Evergreen Review, which was written by fellow National Lampoon contributor Michael O’Donoghue. The writer shone at National Lampoon, creating classic comic strips like Tarzan of the Cows — in which a baby Lord Greystoke survives a plane crash and is raised by heifers in rural Wisconsin — before heading off to work on Saturday Night Live.
In 1975 ‘Poon released The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies, which had all new material and was edited by Sean Kelly, and in 1977 the National Lampoon Presents French Comics (the Kind Men Like). Regardless of its poor title, the collection was one of the first to bring European comic erotica to a wider American audience and was one of the foundation stones from which Heavy Metal magazine would be built and launched that same year.
Every issue of ‘Poon had a different theme, but the ones that occurred more often than any other were sex and comics. The October, 1976 issue was a “Funny Pages” special with a Superman parody cover. The October, 1978 issue was drawn by Shary Flenniken and the 1984 February “comics special” cover was drawn by fellow female cartoonist Trina Robbins. Many other important cartoonists and illustrators appeared in the magazine’s pages and on covers, including Neal Adams, Vaughn Bodé, Edward Gorey, Jeff Jones, Gahan Wilson, and Frank Frazetta.
National Lampoon ultimately spawned many movies, live shows, radio shows, and merchandise, but as these flourished the magazine waned to one edition a year due to underfunding and a lack of new creative talent. Eventually National Lampoon magazine ceased publishing with the November 1998 issue, but it lives on as a multimedia company.
Cover to National Lampoon’s 1975 very Large Book of Comical Funnies.
A panel from ‘Poon’s “lost” E.C. Comics which featured the work of Walt Simonson, Bernie Wrightson, Russ Heath, Howard Chaykin, and many others.
This underground comix self-parody by S. Clay Wilson and Spain was called Sap Cosmix (Zap Comix) and appeared in the very Large Book of Comical Funnies.
This cover to National Lampoon’s Comics featured luminaries such as Jeff Jones, Vaughn Bodé, and Gahan Wilson.
HEAVY METAL
In France in the early 1970s many artists were pushing the boundaries of the comic medium, directing it away from the children’s traditional humor and adventure stories toward more experimental, darker, and adult material. 1974 saw several creators, including Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Philippe Druillet, Jean Giraud (aka Moebius), and Bernard Farkas founding a new publishing house, Les Humanoïdes Associés. Their cutting-edge adult science fiction/fantasy anthology was Métal Hurlant (literally, Screaming Metal), published in December 1974.
Around mid-1975, the National Lampoon magazine’s team of Editor Tony Hendra and Publisher Leonard Mogel came across some comics which had been bought on a European holiday. Métal Hurlant was one of the titles that took this route into the National Lampoon offices. Leonard Mogel liked the style of this magazine so much that he licensed an American version and renamed it Heavy Metal.
The first issue of Heavy Metal was released in April 1977 and featured mostly translated reprints from the European edition by greats such as Enki Bilal, Jean Giraud, Phillippe Druillet, Milo Manara, Philippe Caza, and the ultra-violent, uber-cool RanXerox, by Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore’s. Heavy Metal’s blend of dark fantasy/science fiction and erotica was a hit from the start, selling around 144,000 copies per issue. Slowly the magazine swelled its proportion of material from American creators, such as underground comix star Richard Corben’s epic fantasy Den. This lushly painted saga featured full frontal nudity of both sexes, with massively mammaried women and hugely endowed muscle men making out together, like Conan on Viagra.
Heroes by Daniel Torres appeared in the July 1990 issue of Heavy Metal. It featured a phallic shaped superhero, Super Power, who has two “testicle” sidekicks and is eventually “neutered” by the supervillainess when she captures him in a giant condom. Freud would have been proud.
Dave Doorman’s cover to the January 1994 issue of Heavy Metal.
Heavy Metal’s May 1992 edition cover was painted by fantasy artist supremo, Julie Bell.
Alfonso Azpiri’s distinctive sexy space epic, Lorna, appeared in numerous issues of Heavy Metal including this one from July 1990.
The cover to the steamy Brazilian jungle drama, Eva Medusa, written by Antonio Segura and drawn by erotic comic artist Ana Mirallés. The book was published by Heavy Metal/Tundra in English in 1993.
The founding editors of Heavy Metal were Sean Kelly and Valerie Marchant with ex-DC Comics employee John Workman as art director and designer. But by 1979, Leonard Mogel had replaced Kelly and Marchant with Ted White, a highly regarded sci-fi editor who revitalized Amazing Stories and Fantastic between 1968 and 1978. White and Workman revamped Heavy Metal, incorporating more strips by American artists and adding regular columns: Lou Stathis on rock music, Jay Kinney on underground comics, Steve Brown reviewed sci-fi novels, and Bhob Stewart wrote about fantasy films and animation. White’s tenure was limited to a year, with Julie Simmons-Lynch taking over as editor in 1980.
The following year saw a feature-length animated movie released, entitled, of course, Heavy Metal. Produced by Ivan Reitman — with voices by John Candy, Eugene Levy, and others — the film adapted many of the magazine’s strips. Made on a budget of around $9.3 million, the film garnered more than $20 million in the cinema. Thanks to the movie’s success the magazine’s circulation peaked at 234,000 in September, 1982.
In 1986, Heavy Metal dropped back to a quarterly schedule, and then went bi-monthly in 1989. After a good 12-and-a-half-year run, Heavy Metal’s parent, Métal Hurlant, was unfortunately discontinued in July, 1987, its American offspring outliving it.
Simmons-Lynch remained the editor until 1992 when Kevin Eastman acquired the magazine and became both publisher and editor.
An erotic moment in Eva Medusa, when a young girl’s sexual jealously and voodoo powers bring doom upon a plantation household. The book was originally part of a highly charged trilogy first published by Glénat in France in 1991.
Luis Royo’s cover to Heavy Metal from January 1995. The Spanish artist also contributed to National Lampoon magazine
and has a huge fan following for his erotic fantasy paintings. Note the phallic nature of the weapon the woman is holding.
Kevin Eastman, co-creator of the slow-burning but eventually huge Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, acquired Heavy Metal for $500,000. “Heavy Metal was a really big influence,” said Eastman in a Newsarama interview in 2007. “I bought the first issue off the newsstands in 1977, around the time I was getting bored with superhero comics and those kinda things. Heavy Metal showed me that there was this whole other world of comic book storytelling besides guys running around in tights.”
Eastman brought an even more old school “rock and roll” feel to the magazine, full of denim, big bikers, bigger boobs, and — of course — heavy “rawk.” The erotic element of the mag was increased with more blatantly salacious stories inside than previously published. Heavy Metal’s erotic content has surprisingly not gotten it into as much hot water as other similar comic publications. Possibly its magazine format has saved it from the association that it was a comic book, and therefore aimed at kids. However, two issues of Heavy Metal did feel the wrath of Canadian customs when the Spring 1988 edition had several pages torn out because of various Druuna illustrations by Paolo Serpieri, and the November 1997 issue had one page torn out from The Gypsy by Smolderen with art by Enrico Marini.
Eastman produced a second Heavy Metal animated feature, Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.2, with a slightly increased budget of $15 million. The straight-to-video 2000 release was based on Eastman and artist Simon Bisley’s The Melting Pot graphic novel. The central female protagonist was based on glamour model and B-movie actress, Julie Strain, who also happened to be Eastman’s wife. The former Penthouse Pet also voiced the character in the movie. But the film failed to achieve the same crossover success of its predecessor.
This Heavy Metal strip by Simon Bisley highlights the increased erotic elements in the magazine since 1991. Note in the second page, first panel, the artist’s self-portrait as a puppet, making a wry comment about working for his friend and publisher, Kevin Eastman, co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Fantasy artist Alex Horley’s sexy sci-fi cop cover to a 2003 edition of Heavy Metal.
In July 2002, the French Métal Hurlant was resurrected by publishers Les Humanoïdes Associés, for a brief 14-issue run before disappearing again in December 2004.
The US edition of Heavy Metal continues to produce quality sci-fi erotica, but its audience has waned somewhat over the decades and it currently sells a modest 60,000 copies per issue.
CHERRY POPTART
Larry Welz was a cartoonist who rode the underground comix wave in the late 1960s, creating his violent and sexually explicit superhero satire strip, Captain Guts, in 1969. In 1984 Welz created a one-off parody comic called Cherry Poptart. “It was a good idea that I had, but I didn’t really have all of the stuff to pull it off,” the Fresno-born cartoonist explained on his website. “[I lacked] the right kind of jokes and plots just popping out of my head at regular intervals, the ability to just dash off a proportionally and anatomically correct drawing of a cute sexy naked girl without having to erase it about 50 times and start over.” But Welz persisted and it eventually came together.
The strip was a parody of the Archie comics and was drawn in a deliberately similar style. Welz’s premise was to take the Dan De Carlo-drawn concepts of Riverdale’s permanent adolescents and update them for a contemporary readership (something Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder had previously done in their Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy strip in 1962’s Help!). Whereas Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead et. al. would perennially date and hang out at the soda pop stand in a perpetually naive 1950s middle-Americana fantasy, Cherry and her gang would drink booze, take drugs, and — most importantly — fuck, like real teenagers. Needless to say Cherry raised the ire of Archie Comics and Welz has been a constant target of controversy dealing with battles over freedom of expression, a potential Kellogg’s lawsuit in 1986 demanding the title change to just Cherry to avoid confusion over their Pop-Tarts trademark, as if an erotic comic and a breakfast snack are easily mistaken for each other.
Upbeat, naughty, and a little anarchistic, the blonde, sexy, bisexual Cherry is not a passive victim, but is the archetypal sexy “girl next door.” The series is, if only on the surface, all about sex, but at the core is the perennial question, what if sex was always fun, guilt-free, and unaccompanied by fear and violence? Cherry is intended as a light-hearted comic, and it exists in a fantasy world where sex has no serious emotional consequences, there is no disease, and nobody ever gets pregnant.
Cherry is eternally horny, as is every character in the series, including her mother, Pepper — a divorced MILF (Mom I’d Like to Fuck) — who often engages in threesomes with Cherry and a boyfriend. Other characters include Johnny Fuckerfaster, Ellie Dee, and the BDSM-loving Lola Palooza (Veronica to Cherry’s Betty).
But Cherry was always more than just a “fuck book,” and it relied heavily on satire and parody, attacking everything from hypocritical morals of politicians and evangelists to parodies of Michael Jackson, The Wizard of Oz, Friday the 13th movies, Rambo, and Indiana Jones. Cherry has appeared in several free speech/censorship awareness campaigns and in support of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. One comic shop in Florida was busted when it sold the Cherry Anthology #1 to an undercover police officer. While the charges were later dropped, this sort of harassment has been the bane of Welz’s career, but as Cherry herself says, “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke! Tee hee!”
Larry Welz’s Cherry covers always made a joke of social taboos whether it was Satanism or the apocryphal story of sex with gerbils.
Cherry Poptart’s explicit encounter with “The King” who may, or may not, actually be Elvis, in a Ghostbusters parody.
OMAHA THE CAT DANCER
Reed Waller created this sexy anthropomorphic “funny animal” series way back in 1978 when he first drew the strip, The Adventures of Omaha in the anthology Vootie. The character returned in Bizarre Sex 9 and 10 (in 1981 and 1982, respectively) and finally got her own series, Omaha the Cat Dancer, in 1984. It was first published by SteelDragon Press, before moving to Kitchen Sink Press with issue 3. Kate Worley, Waller’s then-girlfriend, started writing the series with issue 2 — helping Waller through his writer’s block. The story was a sexually explicit soap, with all the twists, turns, and nuances of a melodrama, and Worley’s writing was praised for its confident sex-positive feminist stance. Omaha, the lead character, enjoys her job as a stripper and finds it empowering, rather than degrading, after leaving her sexist office job. She falls in love with Chuck Tabey, but both are pursued by Chuck’s mentally ill millionaire father, and former lover of Omaha’s.
In 1988, Worley was badly hurt in a car accident and took two years to recover, which slowed the book’s frequency. The series created significant controversy with several obscenity charges laid at its door, and both Waller and Worley became active campaigners for cartoonists’ First Amendment rights. The Toronto police raided a comic book store, and ludicrously claimed that Omaha, an anthropomorphic comic, depicted bestiality. However, the more progressive New Zealand Indecent Publications Tribunal ruled in 1990 that the series was not indecent as it portrayed sexuality in the context of ongoing emotional relationships in a mature and realistic way.
Finally, in early 2004, Waller and Worley managed to reconcile their differences and began working on the final story arc to bring a satisfactory conclusion to Omaha. Sadly, Worley wasn’t as lucky as her ex-husband and she died on 6 June 2004. Since then Vance and Waller have continued to collaborate on Omaha, using Worley’s notes, and the series is being serialized in NBM’s erotic comic magazine Sizzle.
But tragedy continued to plague the title, when — two years after Worley’s crash — Waller contracted colon cancer. Things looked grim until a two-part fund-raising comic, Images of Omaha, managed to pay for the artist’s medical bills and he made a full recovery. But things were going badly in Waller and Worley’s marriag
e. They divorced, and the comic ceased publication in 1995. The animosity between the two prevented any more strips for almost a decade. Worley remarried James Vance, a fellow comic scribe and Waller did several personal projects. But cancer stalked the creative pair once more, this time with Worley contracting lung cancer in 2001.
Omaha and her lover, Chuck, have a passionate embrace at her workplace. Their dialogue is naturalistic, loving, and a refreshing change from the often silted “porn speak” of modern sex movies.
NBM’s Amerotica edition of The Complete Omaha the Cat Dancer Volume 6. Beautifully painted by Reed Waller, it pays homage to Japan’s erotic shunga prints.
MELODY
While autobiographical comics were not new — with both Justin Green’s 1972 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and Robert Crumb’s sexual confessions — Sylvie Rancourt and Jacques Boivin’s series Melody was a departure in terms of the story’s ongoing nature. The comic recounted Rancourt’s life as an exotic dancer in Canada. Having worked in the Montreal strip clubs for five years she created her comic book alter ego, Melody, in 1985.
She soon teamed up with fellow French-Canadian artist Boivin and they produced a one-off comic, Mélody à Ses Debuts. In 1988 the Québécois duo went on to produce an ongoing series — Melody: The True Story of a Nude Dancer — for one of the original US underground comix publishers, Kitchen Sink. Its initial 10-issue run sold an impressive 120,000 copies in total, and the first four issues were collected into a graphic novel, The Orgies of Abitibi. Interestingly, Melody’s success ran parallel to that of Omaha the Cat Dancer, also published by Kitchen Sink, in 1986—a deliberate ploy by the publisher to have the two titles compete well together.
