by Tim Pilcher
“Storytelling with pictures and dialog really appealed to me because it brought together my two chief interests — theater and erotic scenarios…However, I remain predominantly an illustrator because I am unable to use artistic shorthand to swiftly produce the graphic effects I want.”
An unabashed and highly visible member of the BDSM (Bondage, Disciple, SadoMasochism) community, Russell has incorporated her experiences into her comics, “How else would I be able to picture all these activities? All of it is done from my memories and imagination, but the main characters in Summer Holiday and Sophisticated Ladies do tend to resemble my younger, more innocent self. I don’t seem to be able to help that. Having been rather an exhibitionist in my younger days and enjoyed treading the boards, it is obvious that I would give myself the best roles in my own scenarios!”
A photo-realistic illustration by Lynn Paula Russell rendered in color pencil for Fessée magazine.
The cover to the French erotic magazine, Sex Bulles #55, which was a Russell special with the story, Vacances d’été. Note on the cover the hidden phallic symbols and erotic imagery, and that the artist was using her previous pen name, Paula Meadows.
A page from Sophisticated Ladies, Russell’s 1920s fantasy in which the artist placed herself as the central protagonist, seen here in the last three panels.
A ménage a tois from Vacances d’été, drawn in pen and ink, a rarely used medium by Russell.
An extreme S&M fantasy illustration. Note the phallic pattern on the floor, which holds the composition together.
Lynn Paula Russell works in multiple media, including colored pencils and water colors, but “my favourite technique is pencil and ink…To do color work using pencils would not be practical for strip cartoons, so I have always stuck to black and white, which I really like. Now that computer programs exist that can facilitate this kind of art I might start to use color in the future.”
Russell’s work has covered paintings inspired by erotic classics like The Story of O and the Kama Sutra, as well as the two graphic novels, Sabina 1 and 2. The latter recounts the sexual adventures of Sabina, a high-class courtesan who goes from the “rough trade” of London’s most sordid slums to the crème de la crème of British society. “Sabina, aka Sabine, is the creation of [the anonymous] French writer [“A.P.”] and she is much more glamorous and predatory than I could ever be,” said the artist, whose work is published by The Erotic Print Society in the UK.
By Russell’s own admission, she found the initial transition to sequential art a laborious act of love. “I suppose it took me about a fortnight to finish my monthly contribution of five or six pages, but sometimes longer. One can start to work into a favorite drawing, adding details and tones. Sometimes it is difficult to stop!”
Russell’s artistic influences draw from wide and varied sources “In the erotic genre I admire Serpieri for the sheer power of his drawing and Loic Dubigeon for the way he handles tone.” Her admiration for her friend and creative mentor, Erich von Götha, is for his “flowing movement and drama, the way he handles group scenes with such consummate ease or focuses on the intensity of a descending whip!” Other influences include fellow Europeans Alex Varenne, Milo Manara, and Georges Pichard. But Russell remains pragmatic: “Mainly I just do my own thing and try to achieve realism, feeling, and animation. Without emotional feeling, erotic art becomes static and dead. Sex is a dance that must be choreographed and lit like a piece of theater.”
The color–penciled — with pen and ink — cover to Sabina (2006) drawn by Lynn Paula Russell
An exquisitely rendered spanking illustration from Fessée magazine, created in color pencils by Meadows.
A lesbian tryst between Sabina and her friend, Mandy. Like most erotic graphic novels, Sabine has few, if any, serious repercussions from all the promiscuity.
A page from Meadows’ Sabina, showing the eponymous heroine as a carefree, sexual libertine.
ALAN MOORE, MELINDA GEBBIE, AND LOST GIRLS
Alan Moore is one of Britain’s, if not the world’s, pre-eminent comic scribes. Having revolutionized the superhero genre with his and Dave Gibbons’ opus, Watchmen, Moore turned his attentions to erotic—or as he’d prefer to call them, pornographic — comics.
The starting point — revealed Moore to the Preston Speculative Fiction Group in a talk in 1993 — was the question: “Is there a way of doing pornography that is sexually arousing, is not offensive politically, aesthetically, or in all those other ways, that can speak to women as well as men, that can have characters, meaning, and a story the same way as ordinary literature?”
Moore wrestled with these huge themes, but it “didn’t really come together until I met with Melinda Gebbie, a long time underground Californian artist.”
San Francisco-born Gebbie discovered the comics in 1973 when she met writer/artist Lee Marrs at a publishers’ fair. Formerly a fine artist, Gebbie contributed her first strip to Wimmen’s Comix #4, the seminal all-women anthology published by Last Gasp. She then contributed to numerous anthologies, including Tits & Clits, Wet Satin, and Anarchy, and in 1977 she wrote and drew her solo title, Fresca Zizis.
In 1984 Gebbie moved to England to work on the animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ anti-war graphic novel When the Wind Blows, while continuing to create strips for UK anthologies like Strip AIDS and Heartbreak Hotel. It was through her involvement with these publications that she got to know Alan Moore.
Possibly one of the most important erotic comics of the last 20 years, the plot of Lost Girls evolves around three women, Wendy Darling, from Peter Pan; Dorothy Gale, from the Wizard of Oz; and Alice Fairchild, from Alice in Wonderland. All three meet in a hotel in Austria in 1913, on the cusp of World War I. Each one relates their sexual history via the erotic decoding of the classic stories.
Highly explicit, and beautifully drawn in pastels, the first six chapters of Lost Girls were initially published between 1991 and 1992 in the anthology Taboo starting in #5. Kitchen Sink Press’ Tundra imprint later reprinted the Taboo chapters as two separate volumes, and a 10-issue series was planned. But Moore and Gebbie felt it was better to complete the project first before starting to republish it. Eventually, Top Shelf launched the trilogy at the July 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. The three volumes were gathered into one slipcase edition and named after quotes from each classic book—Volume1: Older Children (Alice in Wonderland); Volume 2: Neverlands (Peter Pan); Volume 3: The Great And Terrible (The Wizard of Oz). The opus wasn’t available in the UK until January 2008 because of issues with the copyright owners of Peter Pan, Great Ormond Street Hospital. Their copyright expired then, freeing Top Shelf to release it in the UK.
While working on the project, Moore and Gebbie became romantically involved and announced their engagement in 2005. “I’d recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography project together,” joked the hirsute writer. “I think they’ll find it works wonders.” They eventually married in May 2007.
Melinda Gebbie’s 1979 self-portrait alongside fellow underground comix artist, S. Clay Wilson. In the background are her interpretations of his comic strips.
A few of Gebbie’s pages from Lost Girls Book Two, Chapter 12: Shaking and Waking, that pay homage to late 19th Century erotic painter Alphonse Mucha.
The cover to Lost Girls Book One drawn by Melinda Gebbie.
Lost Girls was a commercial success, selling over 35,000 copies in first year, despite a $75 price tag—as well as a critical one. Novelist Michael Faber, in the UK’s Guardian newspaper called Lost Girls “a humane and seductive defence of the inviolable right to dream, ”or as Brian Eno called it, an “Epoch-making — or at least ‘epoch-shaking’ — piece of work.”
However, the book did come under criticism for potentially portraying child pornography—as the story recounts the sexual awaking of the three young, potentially underage, women—and many retailers stated that they wouldn’t stock the book for fear of possib
le prosecution. In the United States, child pornography requires the involvement of a child in its production to be deemed obscene, which the book obviously did not include. The legality of the book in other countries—where some forbid any images of nude children in a sexual context, regardless of how they were produced—caused French publisher Delcourt to temporarily suspend their French edition.
Gebbie was no stranger to controversy as she was briefly involved in an obscenity trial when Knockabout comics were prosecuted by The UK’s HM Customs and Excise for importing Fresca Zizis (“fresh cocks” in Italian). According to Gebbie, “The judge made me stand up in court and defend my work. There was objection to some of the autobiographical things in my stuff. I said, ‘These things happened to me, and I wrote about them…so if you’re going to find them obscene, you have to find the people whom I’m writing about obscene. I’m just writing about my life; I’m not trying to titillate anybody…’ His verdict was that all the comics should be confiscated and burned. They burned all 400 copies of my comic and made them illegal in England to possess.”
Moore has defended their work as a direct backlash against the “cold, dead-eyed” pornography that is mass-produced by the adult magazine and film industry. “A work of pornography generally leads to isolation, selfish lust, and unbearable loneliness. Once the object of the pornography has been achieved, then you can writhe in the sordid and degraded kind of loneliness of your abject existence. That’s not the kind of feeling that I prefer to associate with sex,” explained the Northampton writer.
“And yet, I think an awful lot of the millions of people who make use of pornography across the world must be regularly plunged into that very unpleasant kind of selfish space. There’s no need for that. If pornography could be an aesthetic experience, an intellectual experience, and still be sexy, then it could be an incredibly useful tool that could heal a lot of people in areas where they have problems that they don’t even know how to talk about or define. If pornography was used correctly, it could give a kind of forum for discussing sexual ideas.”
Gebbie’s erotic interpretation of The Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice in Wonderland. This fantastical orgy appeared in Book 2 of Lost Girls.
Alan Moore’s clever script reinterpreted classic children’s literature and examined the sexual subtexts, in this case Peter Pan, with Wendy, being disturbed by a perverted “Captain Hook.”
Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz, recounts her early sexual awakenings in Kansas, in the allegorical tale of The Straw Man in Book 2.
4
Tits and Tentacles: The Japanese Experience
CONFUSED CENSORSHIP AND PENAL CODES
When it comes to illustrated erotica, Japan has always stood out from the global crowd. Ever since the earliest erotic shunga prints of the 18th and 19th Centuries — a pornographic subgenre of the better known ukiyo-e (floating world) prints — Japanese culture has readily embraced extremely graphic sexual depictions. Shunga artists like Yanagawa Shigenobu and Miyagawa Isshô painted various couples, Geishas, and homosexual Samurai and their Kabuki “kagema” boyfriends in flagrante, and everyone from housewives and Samurai collected the ubiquitous graphic sex shunga.
This openness and acceptance has always sat uneasily with a more puritanical west, which prefers its sex behind closed doors and in brown paper bags. Because of this difference in approaches a lot of misnomers about Japanese culture have sprung up, particularly in relation to its sexual mores.
In the 1920s, a modernized, decadent Japanese society was captured by Saseo Ono, who drew erotic cartoons of the new, sexually liberated “flapper” girls. His images were regarded as ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsensical) art, a precursor to modern manga (comics).
Groundbreaking creators like Go Nagai —who would later invent the giant robot/mecha genre with Mazinger Z—launched his Harenchi Gakuen (Shameless School) strip in the boy’s comic, Shonen Jump in 1968. It featured extensive nudity, drinking, and mah jong games in a kid’s comic. Naturally the PTAs across Japan were up in arms, but it was the beginning of the modern erotic manga that would explode in the mid-1970s.
Over the years, Japanese manga developed and gradually drifted into clearly defined markets, generally broken down into five main categories: shonen (boys), shojo (girls), redisu or redikomi (ladies), seijin (adult erotica) and seinen (young men, which actually refers to 14–40-year-olds). Typically, these comics got separated down into almost infinite subdivisions, with seijin split into futanari (transexual), lolicon (Lolita complex), and many others. Despite the vast variety of weekly, monthly, and quarterly manga, these anthologies are ephemera, read quickly and thrown away. Japanese readers tend to keep the collected works of their favorite strips from the weeklies. These bunkobon (400-page collections) and tankõbon (200 page) are smaller and easier to store than their brick-sized progenitors.
Japan’s sexual laws have always been a matter of contention both inside and outside the country. The age of consent is a surprisingly young 13, as specified by the Japanese Penal Code Articles 176 and 177, but positively, there are no sodomy laws, so homosexuality was never made illegal. However, most prefectures have ordinances that prohibit “immoral sexual acts with minors,” an ambiguous phrase at the best of times. It is unclear if the translated term “minors” refers to children under 18 or to those who have not reached maturity—over 20, in Japanese law. Unbelievably, child pornography wasn’t outlawed until 1999, after intense public lobbying. Probably the most important legal statute, in relation to erotic manga, is Article 175 of the vaguely worded Japanese Penal Code. This prevents the depiction of explicit sexual intercourse and adult genitalia in comics. Thus, no clear shots of penises, vaginas, or public hair are allowed to be depicted. It was this last point that prevents many shunga from being publicly displayed in galleries and would cause much consternation in the future.
Mangaka Junko Mizuno’s Tattoo Sisters. The artist and writer has been hugely successful in the West with her simultaneously sensuous and sinister modern adaptations of fairy tales. “When I work on my art, I usually don’t think anything and just draw what comes to my mind naturally…I want people to enjoy my art however they want.”
Lust #8 By Tenjiku Ronin. A repressed co-ed discovers that her mother “entertains” her clients, by engaging in an orgy of anonymous men. “Your body is covered with proof of their admiration, mother,” notes her daughter.
A mammary intercourse sequence on a seemingly underage girl — to Western eyes — highlights the legal difficulties erotic manga has had in the English-speaking world.
This reprint of Chiyoji’s Miss 130 appeared in the Spanish anthology, Kiss Comix, highlighting the prolific global distribution of erotic manga. Note how the man is drawn with his eyes concealed, as not to distract the reader from the woman, a common practise in male-orientated heterosexual hentai.
Japanese penal codes demand that all adult genitalia are whitened out. However, the symbolic snake and shape of the censored area leaves nothing to the imagination in 1979’s Yujio Mugen (Mugen the Courtesan) by Masami Fukushima and Koichi Saito.
HENTAI
The 1970s saw an explosion of erotic manga, and creators like Takashi Ishii became cult heroes. “My work wasn’t porn,” said the artist-turned-film-director in 1994. “It was about male-female relationships and communication… To depict this I had to use sex, because sex is a mirror of modern relations.”
These relations soon picked up the moniker “hentai.” In the West the term has become synonymous with overtly sexual manga and anime, but it actually has several meanings in Japan, including “metamorphosis” or “abnormality,” but mostly it has the stronger negative implication, “sexually perverted” and explicit manga is more usually referred to as jū hachi kin (“prohibited for sale to persons under 18”). Ecchi manga — more akin to cheesecake pin-up art — also began appearing. Hentai anime and manga allow elements of sexual fantasy to be represented in ways that would be physically impossible or social
ly unacceptable in photography or live action film. As various specialized fetish comics developed, ludicrously exaggerated “Engrish” titles like Women Live for Sacrificial Ripe Love! and Perverted Flight of Love drew readers in. At their height, it was estimated that there were approximately 70-100 erotic manga titles available on the newsstand every month.
As in the West, manga has always had to deal with its detractors and issues with censorship, however lax that may appear to Western standards. Unfortunately, as publishers tried to circumnavigate Penal Code 175 they ended up causing more problems than they solved. Just because it was against the law to represent genitalia didn’t stop creators from drawing them and publishers were forced to conceal the offending organs. Apocryphal tales of schoolgirls earning pocket money during their vacations by working for publishers, whiting out offending penises, vaginas, and pubic hair, soon appeared, making the whole censorship issue appear pointless. As time went by, publishers came up with increasingly inventive ways of covering sex organs, by using representational visuals, such as egg plants and rockets, and pixelation techniques. But these soon reduced in size to become a tiny black bar across a penis or a vague blurring of artwork to the point that it was just paying lip service to the law.
