Cartoon themes: maids

Punch February 4, 1920

Al Stine
Playboy, March 1954

John Groth
Esquire, January 1934

Bill Ward
Fun House, February 1979

Bill Wenzel
Fun House, February 1980

Adam, November 1959

Bo Brown
Army Navy Fun Parade, April 1953

Reamer Keller
Charley Jones' Laugh Book, June 1954

Bob Barnes
Hello Buddies, June 1952

Hello Buddies, May 1955

Georges Pichard
Nugget, February 1956

Herb Green
Playboy, January 1967

This Is It #22

Sex in the Comics: Sex Around the World, 2 of 4

Here were the captions underneath these pictures in part of the the final chapter of Sex in the Comics. See previous Saturdays for other installments of the book. Yeah, I know the text of the comics are in 'funny talk' but the computer has translation programs if you don't know the languages and are desperate to read them.

Guy Peellaert, Pravda. Pravda was the tough female leader of a motorcycle gang—she displayed a brawling attitude towards sex and no heart of gold.

Jacques Lob and Georges Pichard, Ulysse. Ulysses meets the siren Calypso in this updated and (very) updated adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.

Georges Pichard, Paulette. Another in a long line of victimized French heroines, Paulette showed more spunk than most. Here she finds solace (and more) from a soul sister.

Phillipe Druillet, Wuzz. In an odd twist on the Faustian legend an old wizard, rejected by women because of his age and his ugliness, creates his own.

Jacques Tardi, Bascuale à Charlot (“Charlot's Rocker”—a slang word for guillotine). A hunted murderer seeks a few moments' escape with a hooker, only to be pursued by his fate in the guise of a drooling, dwarfish old man in a black suit and a bowler hat.

Setbon and Coutelis, Plage-Man. Plage-Man (“Beach-Man”) is a justice fighter who has taken it upon himself to keep law and order (not to mention morality) on French beaches—clearly a job for a superhero. Here he cools down an amorous couple.

Guiseppe Montanari, Goldrake, Goldrake (affectionately called “Goldy” by his many female admirers) is a secret agent in the mold of James Bond, who likes to mix pleasure with business.

Nicolino Dal Principe, Teodora. Theodora is famous in history for rising from courtesan to emperor of Rome. This series of comic books is an entirely uncanonical account of her adventures.

Guido Crepax, La Casa Matta (“The Mad House”). Crepax is indisputably the greatest poet of sexual ecstasy that the comics have ever produced. This is one of his more lyrical variations on this theme.

Luciano Secchi and Paolo Pifferio, Fouché, un Uomo nella Rivoluzione. In this curious hronicle of the French Revolution the authors imply that the protagonists, monarchies and revolutionaries alike, were motivated by sex more than by power or justice. Here Marie-Antoinette bestows her favors on The Duke of Lauzun, a cousin of her royal husband, the much cuckolded Louis XVI.

<"http://www.thrillingdetective.com/pezzo.html">Vittorio Giardino, Sam Pezzo. Giardino is the Italian artist closest to Crepax in spirit and tone. Here he proves that a couple needs not be naked to convey sexual rapture.

Vittorio Giardino, Little Ego. Giardino is also the author of this uncensored (and delightful) pastiche of McCay's Little Nemo. Is nothing sacred?

Ray Collins (a pseudonym), Jezabel Vuole Marire (“Jezabel Wants to Die”). A brazen hussy makes a play for her cousin's boyfriend—but is rebuffed.

Paolo Ghelardini and Piercarlo Macchi, Portafortuna (“Good Luck Charm”). Eros and Thanatos: after meeting a handsome stranger, a young girl dreams of her first night of love only to have a rendezvous with death.

Milo Manara, Click! In this ribald tale worthy of ""Boccacio, a frustrated scientist manages to place a brain implant designed to trigger sexual frenzy in the beauty who spurned him—with predictable results.

Enric Sió, Mara, Sió has been the pioneer of sexual experimentation in Spanish comics. Here, in a ""Bunuel-like tableau, he contrasts the free interplay of a young couple discovering love within the constricting ritual of the Church.

Sex In the Comics: Far-Out Sex

This is the final chapter to the book Sex in the Comics from 1985. Like I said before, the text is as big as possible (which is why I'm able to retype it in its entirety). The previous chapters, which I've also posted each Saturday, are probably linked to in the 'Linkwithin' blurbs at the bottom.

Here is the text by author Maurice Horn. I don't know how to feel about gay sex being implied as a perversion, though I guess if I were writing this book and had to compartmentalize different aspects of sex in the comics, and it was the 1980s, I might end up doing the same thing. Here is the last chapter of this book though.

For quite some time, but more particularly during the last two decades, the comics have been venturing far afield into the vagaries of sexual behavior, with cartoonists wading bravely into the murky waters of what are commonly called “deviations and perversions”. Many general encyclopedias still define “perverted sex” as any sexual act whose purpose is not procreation. That covers a lot of territory. It is not our intention in this chapter to catalogue each and every so-called deviation—a task better left to psychologists and sociologists—but to inquire as to the images, both positive and negative, that the comics have projected out of, and onto, this area of human behavior.

Of all the sexual minorities that deviate from the “straight” model of heterosexuality, homosexuals are, by sheer weight of numbers, the most visible. In an article in In Touch, Jerry Mills asserts, “Until recently, gay characters hardly ever appeared” in the comics. That assessment isn't strictly accurate. Homosexuals of both genders did appear in the comic pages as early as the twenties, although they were never characterized explicitly. If they were men, they were usually characterized as fussy and mincing, like the type who kept disrupting the trysts of Rosie and her beau, to the annoyance of both, or the openly “swishy” character who almost openly propositioned Moon Mullins with an offer of a job as a bodyguard, only to be given short shrift by the outraged Moon. Other blatantly effeminate characters also cropped up from time to time in such strips as Secret Agent X-9, Mandrake, and Dick Tracy (a pronounced lisp and gestures were among the telltale signs).

These were, however, only fleeting creations. Terry and the Pirates, on the other hand, featured supporting characters who exhibited unmistakable supporting characters who exhibited unmistakably homosexual (or ambiguously bisexual) proclivities. The corpulent, effeminate, Papa Pyson was a brigand chief who liked to be wheeled around his mobile chair by a muscular “aide de camp” and was tended to in his sybaritic pursuits by young limp-wristed minions. He strictly forbade his troops to have any intercourse with the corps of female prostitutes the Dragon Lady was keeping nearby as auxiliaries, and cringed and cringed at the very thought of close physical contact with a woman. An even more straightforward example was provided by Sanjak, a mysterious Double agent who turned out to be a woman by the name of Madame Sud, with more than professional designs on Terry's heartthrob April Kane. (That adventure took place in 1939 in what was then known as French Indochina—perhaps the first example of American involvement in Vietnam.) Later during the course of the war, Sanjak turned up again as Captain Midi, a dashing French air force captain but actually a spy for the Japanese in drag, and again her interest in April proved her undoing—a clear if double perverse case of cherchez la femme.

In the long history of the comics George Herriman stands apart in his mischievous delineation of Krazy Kat as a creature of indeterminate gender (Krazy Kat once described him/herself as both a bachelor and a spinster—wryly adding that this situation would last “until I get wedded”). Krazy Kat notwithstanding, it has been a slow march to toleration, if not acceptance, From Carl Barks' homophobic remarks in Donald Duck, where a sissified character asks museum guard Donald for “the lace and tatting collection” to Garry Trudeau's matter-of-fact understanding in Doonesbury, in which Joanie Caucus discovers that her old flame Andy is gay. In between came tales of sex change (in Weird Science and Camelot 3000) and attempted homosexual rape (in The Incredible Hulk) and even a story about the reunion of Captain America with his long-lost boyhood pal who grew up to become gay (Cap, of course, grew up to become a superhero, but that's another story). Finally, let's not forget S. Clay Wilson's notorious (and hilarious) Ruby the Dyke.

Until recently homosexuals in the comics were secondary or satirized characters. However, with the growth of the gay liberation movement and the proliferation of publications since the seventies, overtly homosexual characters have become full-fledged protagonists, often in their own comic features. Unfortunately more often than not these features are afflicted with a pornographic outlook that would make the readers of Hustler blush: the wealth of genitals on display is matched only by the poverty of the storyline. Even the strips that are more stylistically restrained are just as raunchy thematically, with an overabundance of salacious lines and off-color jokes. A character in Castro, for instance (the strip is named for the gay district of San Francisco, not the jolly Fidel of Cuba), exclaims after a visual inspection of his friends backside, “Honey, if I dropped dead now, I'd want to come right back as yer bicycle seat, an' roll around in heaven all day.”

The homosexual audience is apparently large enough to support at least one gay underground comic book. Gay Heart Throbs made its bow in the mid-seventies, lasted a few issues and was superseded by Gay Comix in 1980. Howard Cruse, an established cartoonist with Playboy, the National Lampoon and other publications, is the editor, and he has been able to attract a good number of talented cartoonists to his magazine, Rand Holmes and Burton Clarke have drawn covers, and his regular contributors include Robert Triptow (whose one-pager, Castroids, is also about the Castro district) and Dutch cartoonist Theo Bogart. The distaff side is well represented by Lee Marrs, who specializes in tales of tongue-in-cheek domination, Roberta Gregory, the editor of the first lesbian comic, Dynamite Damsels, and Mary Wings, former editor of the self-explanatory Dyke Shorts. The best thing about the magazine, however, is Cruse himself: his autobiographical Billy Goes Out is a quite poignant “coming out of the closet” story.

There have been a number of great stories about homosexual love (many of them by straight cartoonists) in Europe, notably in France and Holland, but no gay comic book has yet appeared there. Not so in Japan, where a magazine called Juné specializes in homosexual stories (mostly drawn by women artists!) and enjoys tremendous popular success with teenage readers of both sexes. In his excellent study of Japanese comics, Manga! Manga!, Frederick Schodt describes a typical issue of the 150-page magazine: “pin-up color photographs of androgynous foreign rock stars and scantily clad teenage boys, with poems; eleven comic stories and short strips about young gay men; a short, illustrated prose story of gay interracial love in prewar Japan” along with “drawings by readers of young boys embracing; reviews of amateur comic magazines devoted to the 'beautiful boy'; confessions of gay love, purportedly written by readers”, etc.

If homosexuality has been the most prevalent sexual deviation in real life, sadomasochism has been the most frequently depicted sexual perversion in the comics. As a matter of fact, in the forties and the fifties, there was an entire category of comic books that specialized in picturing women in provocative and often submissive poses for the delectation of adolescent male readers. The drawings, especially those on the covers, constituted the main attraction, with plot and characterization most often very skimpy indeed—a fact that did not unduly disturb aficionados of the genre (who, after they grew up, took to referring to that brand of illustration as “good girl art”, a term that has angered feminists to no end). The trend even spilled over into mainstream comics of the time, with newspaper strips like Steve Canyon, Rip Kirby, and Dick Tracy occasionally delving into sadism and bondage.

There were quite a few publishers of sadomasochistic comics, but Fox Publications and ME Comics were generally acknowledged as leaders of the form. In title after gaudy title (Phantom Lady,Cave Girl, Jungle Lil, Thunda, etc.) they offered women in all kinds of deranged positions—bound and gagged, tied to racks, threatened with whips and branding irons, molested by freaks and degenerates—all drawn in exquisite detail by such masters as Bob Powell, Matt Baker, and Frank Frazetta. These beauties never failed to display an over-abundance of charms; in fact, the artists pushed breast fetishism to such ludicrous extremes that it had an undesirable side effect of attracting the special ire of Dr. Wertham. “One of the stock mental aphrodisiacs is to draw girls' breasts in such a way that they are sexually exciting”, he fulminated in Seduction of the Innocent. “Whenever possible they protrude and obtrude”.

After the Comics Code came into effect, the theme of breast fetishism and bondage found their outlet in scores of semiunderground publications catering to an impressively large clientele. In these unbridled tales of illustrated erotic fantasy all the women were big-busted and scantily clad, or else they went around in leather outfits and highly-laced boots. They generally operated in a world devoid of men (an intriguing psychological quirk), with the “bad girls” (usually older) submitting the “good girls” to a fiendish array of ordeals, degradations, and tortures. No overtly sexual act was ever performed, a fact that inclined the authorities towards indulgence, and the genre accordingly flourished into the sixties,when the appearance of more sexually explicit comic stories soon took away from their raison d'être. Most of these publications were artistically god-awful and nauseating in their repetitiveness, but two achieve cult status due to their better-than-average storylines and outstanding artwork. One, Sweet Gwendoline, is the tale of a nubile innocent victimized by a succession of sadistic females, drawn first by John Scott Coutts (under the pseudonym John Willie), and later Eric Stanton; the other Princess Elaine, by Eneg (Gene Bilbrew), depicts the erotic adventures of a cruel blonde dominatrix.

The most fertile ground for sadomasochistic comics proved to be Europe, where the genre found its maestro assoluto in the person of Guido Crepax. Working almost exclusively in black and white, Crepax is best known for the beautiful loving depiction of young women victimized in the course of disturbing sadomasochistic adventures. La Casa Matta(“The Mad House”, later reworked as Bianca), in which a nubile schoolgirl daydreams and fantasizes her way into a cruel, erotic universe where her schoolmates, teachers and relatives become her lovers and/or tormentors, in classic Crepax fare. So is Anita, an alarming tale of sexual obsession eventually leading to self-immolation.

These predilections made Crepax the perfect choice as illustrator of two of the most celebrated models of modern erotic literature, Pauline Réage's Story of O and Emmanuelle Arsan's Emmanuelle. It should be noted that Crepax's treatment is much more faithful to the originals than their watered-down screen adaptations, Story of O in particular—described by novelist André Pieyre de Mandiargues as “the tragic flowering of a woman in the abdication of her freedom, in willful slavery, in humiliation, in the prostitution imposed upon her by her masters, in torture, and even the death which, after she has suffered every other ignominy, she requests and they agree to”—found in Crepax its ideal interpreter.

After these two resounding successes it was probably inevitable that the artist would go on to illustrate the works of the man who gave sadism its name, the Marquis de Sade himself. Crepax's Justine, based on Sade's quintessential novel of innocent womanhood tormented, abused and debased, is somewhat of a disappointment, however. This may be due to the fact that the phantasms conjured by the “divine marquis” are in the last analysis too abstract, too cerebral to be adequately expressed in graphic terms; conversely, it may be because the philosophical outpourings of the author, whose prose was respectfully preserved, tend to overshadow the artist's illustrations.

Crepax's Valentina also veers away from the straight storytelling towards straight fantasy making, half oneiric and half hallucinatory, with an overpoweringly sadomasochistic current. In the course of her wanderings Valentina travels through space and time in a universe untrammeled by rules or rationality, where she meets in turn rampaging Mongols, brutal concentration camp guards, libidinous space aliens, vicious Amazon queens and every imaginable figure of fact and legend (Bluebeard and Archimedes, Lenin and Morgan le Fey, among others). Against a splendid baroque background reeking of sensuality and decadence, Valentina is usually the victim of the most barbarous treatments: raped, whipped, quartered, impaled and branded, she always emerges Phoenix-like from her ordeals, unmarked and apparently untouched.

Of all the villains, male and female, human and animal, who constantly plague the heroine, none is so prominent or colorful as Baba Yaga, inspired by a legendary witch in Russian folklore. As depicted by Crepax, Baba Yaga is a desiccated lesbian crone who favors turn-of-the-century fashions and tries to lure Valentina away from her lover. She dons various guises to this end and in particular replays the role of the bad witch in updated versions of fairy tales such as Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. In these allegories Crepax seems to be telling us that sadomasochistic fantasy is the modern equivalent of the fairy tales of old.

Crepax notwishstanding, it tis perhaps fitting that the most outré of all sadomasochistic comic heroes should have been conceived by a Frenchman. With Marie-Gabrielle de Sainte-Eutrope, George Pichard crowned his already notorious career py pulling out all the stops in a horrendous tale of a buxom,dark-haired beauty subjected to every conceivable form of torture and torment—in full color and minute detail. Perhaps a takeoff on one of Sade's most famous anthology pieces—wherein Justine and her companions are victimized by an order of monks—Pichard has Marie-Gabrielle and her cellmates tormented by nuns who kept piously reciting the catalogue of tortures visited upon by Christian saints and martyrs, while meting out the most barbarous treatment to their helpless charges. The author then produced a sequel, Marie-Gabrielle en Orient, in which he set out to demonstrate that when it comes to torture inflicted on women, all men are brothers under the skin.

Not surprisingly, comics depicting the sexual fantasies of women are relatively rare in this male-dominated medium. There are exceptions, however, French cartoonist Marcelé has authored a number of comics showing strong, beautiful and cruel women bringing cowering, flabby middle-aged men to heel. In the United States, in 1972, Chin Lyvely and Joyce Farmer started an all-woman comic with the provocative title Tits and Clits. “It was a great success,” the co-founders later mused, “either because the subject matter was unusual and (some say) revolting, or because many people were willing to pay 50 cents for a magazine with the title of Tits and Clits.”

The focus of Tits and Clits was on female sexuality, as, to a certain degree, was that of Wimmen's Comics, which also appeared in 1972. Their subject matter, however, proved tame in comparison with that of Wet Satin, which openly proclaimed itself to be about “women's erotic fantasies,” many of which turned the table on male sexual ethos with a vengeance.

In recent years the motto of the comics might well have been “Anything goes” as far as erotic expression is concerned, with some themes seemingly straight out of Krafft-Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis. In fact, cartoonists have proved themselves so thorough in the graphic depiction of every quirk and singularity of human sexual behavior that an enterprising publisher has come out with an Encyclopedia of Sex entirely illustrated with examples culled from comic strips. It would be impossible to go through a checklist of every perversion known to man and see how it found its illustration in the comics, but let us note that whole stories have been built around themes of transvestism (Nazario's Anarcoma, which takes place on the outer fringes of post-Franco Barcelona), pedophilia (Dick Matena's Alice, a less than innocent reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's tale), incest, (Enric de Sió's sensual Cuestion de Fé, the allegorical Age of Cohabitation by Dôsei Jidai) and necrophilia (Richard Corben's Lame Lem's Love).

Since comics to a certain extent are still beholden to the “funny animal” tradition, the sight of such creatures as Howard the Duck, Cerebus the Aardvark, or the White Ape commingling freely with women is hardly noticed in the context of perversion. Robert Crumb provided an ironic twist on the theme in Whiteman, wherein the protagonist forsook his nagging wife and his middle-class life to pursue his hairy lover, the animallike Yeti, into the wilds. But Whiteman can also be placed squarely—if that's the word—in the great comic strip tradition of A. Mutt, Jiggs, Barney Google and other harassed husbands (see chapter 1). From Mutt and Jeff to Crumb and back, the subject has literally come full circle.

Satirical Sex

Here's another chapter, like previous Saturdays, I've taken from Sex In the Comics, a book from 1985 I found remaindered a few years ago. More about the book is mentioned in previous installments that can be found in the archives, and as usual, I don't agree with all the text by Maurice Horn.

TRIGGER WARNING: This section may contain information about sexual assault and/or violence which may be triggering to survivors.

I think that's what I'm supposed to do. I don't think any laws should be passed. It's just something an author should do out of courtesy. I don't understand how mentioning a trigger doesn't set off a trigger itself. I'm mainly posting this for the pictures anyway. Here's this chapter of the book for you to enjoy 98% of.

To comic artists nothing is sacred, not even the sacred—or the taboo. It was inevitable, sooner or later, that sex would come in for the same kind of treatment that had already laid waste (in the funny pages, at any rate) such sacrosanct American ideas such as the family, he natural goodness of mankind and the work ethic. This brand of humor is part of the American tradition, going back to minstrel shows and burlesque, of viewing sex as a primarily laughable human proclivity. It evokes the world of the dirty joke, the double entendre, the innuendo, the leering pun and all the other bawdy routines associated with what Preston Sturges (no slouch himself when it comes to sexual satire) liked to call “subject A”

Among newspaper artists Al Capp is probably the best representative of this long-standing though hardly hallowed tradition. In Li'l Abner he stood sex on its head, picturing most of his female characters as oversexed and eagerly in pursuit of the unwilling, harassed men—a common male fantasy, it should be noted. To embody his basic premise, Capp created a handsome, uninterested hillbilly (first Li'l Abner himself, later his kid brother Tiny) warily fending off hordes of sex-hungry females, of whom Daisy Mae was the most persistent, Li'l Abner's philosophy of life was expressed early in this piece of doggerel: “Oh—ah'm glad ah is a bacheluh!/ Ah'm young'n'spry an' free!/Hain't nevah getting' married!/ No gal kin bother me!”

To test his ideals Li'l Abner was put through temptations not unworthy of St. Anthony. When a smoldering high-society dame, the wonderfully named Appassionata von Climax, tried to seduce the hero by wining and dining him and showering him with gifts, Li'l Abner's response was to ask for more and more food, and to take longer and longer naps on increasingly sumptuous beds.

In one adventure Li'l Abner journeyed down to the misnamed republic of El Passionato, where the male citizens were so indolent that our hero looked like a sex bomb in comparison. Accordingly all the luscious Latin beauties were soon swooning over the “foreener”. In desperation Li'l Abner made himself dictator and forced all the men to breathe the dread “Goombo”, which turned them into raving sex maniacs, which in turn prompted them to lose interest in Abner.

In another episode Tiny's love-light, the amply endowed Marcia Perkins could not kiss because her lips gave off 451 degrees of electromagnetic heat, enough to fry any boy's brain. The solution was to have her kiss Li'l Abner whose lips registered 451 degrees below zero, thus canceling her temperature out. In a fitting conclusion Tiny broke with Marcia on the grounds that she kissed another man.

The apex of all this tomfoolery was of course reached every year on Sadie Hawkins Day. That fateful day any girl able to catch one of the fast-fleeing males got to marry him. And that, in Al's mad-Capp world, was as fiendish a fate as could be devised.

Later Capp simply reversed the premise in Long Sam, which was drawn by Bob Lubbers. Sam was an incredibly endowed, naïve hillbilly girl who became the innocent object of every leering, panting male around. The theme was too familiar, however, too close to the sexual situation prevailing in real life, and most of the fantasy was lost.

Milton Caniff, who had honed his sexual wit on Terry and the Pirates, proved a master of innuendo in Male Call. His heroine, Miss Lace, an appetizing brunette, flirted outrageously with every soldier, sailor, and airboy she met, and they in turn were forever drooling over her. This simple theme, seemingly so trite in normal life, proved irresistible to readers of Stars and Stripes, the military paper for which the feature was created. Caniff was cunning enough to know that to a sex-starved buck private out in the field, the mere sight of a girl was fantasy enough.

Caniff's gag technique was almost always the same. In the first panels of the strip he would set up a basic situation that often as not hinted at sex, intercourse or worse, only to deflate it in the last panel. Thus Lace would finally give in to a soldier's insistent entreaties, but after he removed his uniform we'd learn she just agreed to sew a button back on. Or she would closely clasp a soldier in her arms, but only so he could demonstrate a judo grip to her. In one strip Lace woke up with a sleeping form in bed next to her and an officer's jacket spread out over a nearby chair; the bedmate turned out to be a WAC. The implications proved to be too much for the straightlaced editors of Stars and Stripes, who censored the offending strip. These World War II strips still retain enough charm that collections of them have been regularly reprinted over the years.

At the same time that the sexual humor cautiously surfaced in newspaper strips, a host of anonymous cartoonists were spoofing sexual themes much more explicitly in a variety of black-and-white comic books, “the kind men like”, as their promoters advertised with a leer. Dubbed “eight-pagers” or ”Tijuana Bibles” (though most of them were actually produced in Cuba), they were four-by-six inch booklets that lost no time in telling their story, which always dealt with the sexual activities of either public figures (most often movie stars, gangsters, and politicians) or comic strip characters.

The first type, eight-pagers about public figures, seems to have been the earliest. They flourished during the depths of the Great Depression and, reflecting their times, often mixed sly social commentary with unabashed sexual satire. One of these early eight-pagers (titled “A Hasty Exit”, and typical of many) depicts notorious outlaw John Dillinger engaged in sexual activity with two girls when the law, in the person of one Captain Tracy, pounces upon him. Dillinger thereupon invites the cop to share in the fun in exchange for his freedom. A general frolic ensues after Tracy phones headquarters to tell them that the fugitive has escaped over the border. The subversive message was carried further in several other booklets that showed gangsters taking the rich (and usually bankers' and politicians' wives whom they had first seduced) to give to the poor (for instance, some out-of-work shopgirl or secretary they'd picked up on a park bench).

Whatever their merit, the public-figure satires were greatly outnumbered by the comic-strip parodies. Every prominent comic character was fair game for the cartoonists of the eight-pagers—not only such supposedly virile late heroines as Jane Arden and Little Orphan Annie, and even week little wimps like Mac of Tillie the Toiler and Pete the Tramp. All the readers' fantasies about the private lives of their favorite funny-page heroes came through in these little booklets. Thus we find Popeye making it with Olive Oyl, Dick Tracy shooting Junior in the head for interrupting his coitus with Tess, and Clark Kent/Superman finally bedding Lois Lane—who promptly sends him away in disgust (the oversexed superhero was a cliché even then).

As a matter of fact, the comic parodies came out so fast and in such profusion that the best-known characters soon found themselves “played out” and minor characters of obscure strips or protagonists of obscure strips had to be pressed into service. In one of the comic booklets Walter Hoban's Needlenose Noonan, a cop, answers a call only to find help only to find a sex-hungry mountain woman waiting for him in the buff. Losing no time in preliminaries, she proceeds to undress the hapless Noonan and use every last part of his body—including the one that earned him his nickname—to satisfy her cravings.

By the end of the forties the eight-pagers had become tired and repetitive, every character and every situation had been milked to the fullest, and there were few sexual variations left to explore. The booklets finally petered out in the fifties (when cheap and heavily censored versions were advertised through the mails, in contrast to the real items, which were generally sold under the counter). When the more permissive era of the sixties opened up new fields for the graphic depiction of sex, they sinply became objects of curiosity and even nostalgia.

It is easy now to snicker at the crudeness and single-mindedness of the “dirty comics”, but as Bill Blackbeard (writing under the transparent pseudonym “William Teach”) says, “Of course, sex depicted in the old comic booklets was crude and forced, just as slapstick could be forced in the legitimate strips...But this excess is largely the result of the equally crude and forced repression of the most minimally frank handling of sex in the general comic strip.”

The eight-pagers, with their raunchy humor and unfettered une of established cartoon characters, found modern-day more sophisticated counterparts in the “underground comix.” Cartoonist Dan O'Neill achieved perhaps the ultimate in sexual parody by having Mickey Mouse and his beloved Minnie perform a well-publicized sex act. The Disney people were not amused and promptly sued for lèse-majesté (the actual charge was copyright infringement), a case they eventually won.

Another undergrounder, Gilbert Shelton, satirized Superman with no repercussions in his Wonder Wart-Hog comic strip. In his civilian identity—Philbert Desanex was a meek, much put-upon reporter—an obvious dig at Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent—but when he donned his costume, the “Hog of Steel” did not confine his exploits to the destruction of evildoers. His prowess also extended to the sexual field, where he liked to make use of every part of his anatomy, including the celebrated snout.

In the early days of his career Richard Corben (under the pseudonym “Gore”) also enjoyed doing sexual satires, but his always had a sharp edge to them. In ”Dumb Story” earthmen bring so-called morality and civilization to a guilt-free and sexually contented race of extraterrestrials whom they destroy. ”Horrible Harvey's House” concerns a porno star jaded with the blandishments of sex. After acting in yet another skin flick, she is raped in her sleep by a horrible creature who awakens in her stirring he thought she had forgotten. She eventually abandons her director boyfriend to pair up with her newfound love. In both tales the undertone of bitterness at human weakness and human folly is unmistakable and can not easily be dismissed.

The concept of sex itself got a working over in Denis Kitchen's Ingrid the Bitch. This five-year-old nymphet disdained the usual comic-book heroes including the inevitable Superman) in favor of her faithful and no less libidinous canine companion. Pooch.

With Young Lust (an obvious takeoff on Young Love), an underground comic edited sporadically over the years, Bill Griffith and Jay Kinney set out to parody an entire genre, that of romance comics—an easy target, admittedly. Their Method was to take the concept to its most outré limits (and beyond). Two examples should suffice. In ”Plug Un-Plug” by Griffith, the lead character fantasizes his love life, which includes a hilarious would-be rescue of Jayne Mansfield from a shipwreck. In “Under the Covers” Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides mix the clichés of romance stories with the conventions of the spy-thriller genre in a tale of the love between the two CIA agents, one of whom turns out to be a KGB mole.

The undergrounders, like their eight-pager predecessors, also like to produce well-known-politicians (usually their perceived enemies on the right) in kinky situations, showing them as basically beastly, dishonest and hypocritical Richard Nixon particularly came in for the heaviest share of the underground cartoonists, who never tired of portraying him as “Pricky Dick”, “Creepy Dick”, and worse.

As the widely acknowledged “pope” of the underground, Robert Crumb has been at the forefront of the sexual revolution in comics. Even his early Fritz the Cat strips displayed a playful understanding of sex: under his animal guise his character behaved pretty much like a normal sex-driven human, playing out his role of cat-about-town with the expected bravado. In one episode the sly fellow dazzled his date with the high-flown rhetoric about the meaning of life while imperceptibly but surely leading her into bed. In another story he managed to turn a sex orgy in a bathtub into a transcendental group encounter.

Crumb had a keen ear for the cant that pervaded much of the sexual revolution of the sixties, as well as a sharp eye for its more egregious lunacies. He was very much in time with his time but could also revert with a wink to the practices of an earlier, more repressed era, using a blackout technique that stopped just short of the depiction of the sex act. At one point, for instance, Fritz elaborately undresses a demure kitten in order to pick fleas off her body.

Later, moving from funny animals to funny humans, Crumb liked to depict children of nature innocently engaging in sex and unashamedly enjoying its pleasure. One such was Angelfood McSpade, an African Amazon of gargantuan sexual appetites, who would willingly submit herself to any male she chanced to encounter. Ironically, Angelfood, introduced to Western civilization, promptly had her hair and skin bleached, turning herself into one more version of the average middle-class housewife, to the disgust of her male partners. Another unabashed hero of the same ilk was Dicknose (Crumb's names for his characters were nothing if not descriptive), who somehow managed to get his proboscis into the most compromising spots. Crumb's earth children were contrasted with Whiteman, a typically repressed product of Western Hypocrisy, greed, and power lust.

Some of Crumb's comic book badinage was so inhibited as to bring prosecution down upon the artist's head. Joe Brancatelli wrote in World Encyclopedia of Comics “Crumb's work was shockingly explicit for the late 1960's. Each and every story centered around lovemaking, or kinky variations of it.” In mock contrition Crumb would self-deprecatingly sign his more ribald pages “R.Scum” or “Crumbum” or “El Crummo”, which of course only called attention to the outrageousness.

Crumb and his wife, cartoonist Aline Kominsky (whom he'd earlier depicted as “Honeybunch”) have been of late publishing comic book diaries, If anything, Crumb's confessions prove that he has steadfastly remained true to himself. They are remarkably candid, as well as excruciatingly funny, in the depiction of more aspects of conjugal life. As one critic put it, Crumb “can make even married sex look like fun”.

At a casual glance, the world of the underground cartoonists does not seem too far removed from the raunchy preserves of the eight-pagers. The difference lies in the artistic integrity the undergrounders brought to their work, however limited the artistic talent of some of them. Indeed, Crumb enjoyed the rare distinction of having his comix ruled works of art by a court of law, which acquitted him of obscenity charges on precisely those grounds.

Wally Wood, whose works include the now famous poster of Snow White sexually molested by the Seven Dwarves, has also made a not inconsiderable contribution to the farcical treatment of “Subject A”, much in the manner of a Sturges or a Blake Edwards. His stylish exercises in this vein extend all the way from his wild comic strip parodies in Mad magazine to such seventies frolics as The Pipsqueak Papers (a charming skit about a tiny homunculus tricking the standoffish nymph he pursues into lovemaking) and his wholly uncanonical treatment of Alice in Wonderland. In these slight tales Wood has proved he can be a master of the quiet wit as well as frenzied satire.

Wood's longest-running feature was Sally Forth, a comic strip he did in the late 60s and early 70s for the servicemen's publication Overseas Weekly (not to be confused with the Sally Forth strip currently in American newspapers). Sally Forth shows just how far the army has come since the days of Male Call (“The New Army wants to join You,” indeed). While there is still no full frontal nudity and explicit lovemaking is only hinted at, much high-spirited manhandling goes on in the strip, and implicitly sexual situations abound. In particular the tug-of-war on the steps of the Pentagon pitting the nude Sally and her equally naked cohorts against U.S. Soldiers in full-dress uniforms (shades of battle between the Amazons and the Acheans!) is certainly more than a little suggestive. Wood's flexible drawing style is particularly suited to representing action hovering midway between tongue-in-cheek fantasy and straight narrative.

It fell to another Mad alumnus, Harvey Kurtzman, to achieve in Playboy magazine what is probably the most widely known of all the good old-fashioned comic-page parodies. Little Annie Fanny. As the title suggests, is an obvious takeoff on the old Little Orphan Annie newspaper strip. The title character is a ridiculously well-endowed blonde ingenue whose obliviousness to men's lewd advances constitutes the main theme of the feature. The supporting cast includes Annie's well-heeled protecter Sugardaddy Bigbucks (modeled on Daddy Warbucks, of course), her peppy girlfriend Wanda Homefree, and Solly Brass (a Phil Silvers clone), her scheming, loudmouthed, press agent.

So far Annie Fanny has managed to retain her innocence amid all the shenanigans, though Wanda has come in for her share of fun (mostly offstage). The bawdy humor, for all its outrageousness, seems a bit forced at times. However, Kurtzman makes up for it in some pointed social and political satire, at the expense of such targets as industrial tycoons, power-mad generals, right-wing politicos, TV network executives and the NAS space program. The artwork is for the most part contributed by Will Elder, yet another Mad graduate, whose lush style and creamy colors are well suited to this erotic version of Candide.

The success of Annie Fanny in Playboy prompted other men's magazines to follow suit, Pretty soon they were all carrying comic strips of varying quality. The best of these was undoubtedly Oh, Wicked Wanda, which British artist Ron Embleton created for Penthouse on scripts by Frederic Mullally. Wanda was a voluptuous brunette whose charms were very much in view most of the time. There was none of the coyness exhibited in Annie Fanny; Wanda went the rounds like someone who knew the score. She never lost her cool, even when thrown in a dungeon by a jealous rival or on the verge of being executed as a spy by shifty Eastern European types.

Wanda's adventures were humorous rather than satirical, filled with peril and sexual shenanigans. Nudity was freely depicted, and there was no dearth of explicit sexual situations. Withal the strip was roguishly charming rather than scabrous. Mullaly's tongue-in-cheek writing certainly helped, but the major credit belongs to Embleton, whose elegant brushwork endowed Wanda not only with allure but with more than a touch of class as well. Embleton now draws another strip for Penthouse, Sweet Chastity (on texts by Bob Guccione himself), about Baron von Frankenstein's creation of the “perfect woman” and her epochal struggle with the baron's power-crazed daughter, the aptly named Electra.

Though they have been extremely prolific in other types of sex comics, Europeans have seldom achieved a truly satirical treatment of the subject. One notable exception is Georges Pichard, who imparts a good dose of humor to even his most outrageous narratives, His first essay in the genre was Blanche Epiphanie, a parody of turn-of-the-century dime novels, in which the much-undressed heroine was much on the verge of being raped by the libidinous banker Adolphus, only to be saved in the nick of time by a masked avenger.. This was followed by Paulette, about a wealthy and comely heiress who went through all sorts of harrowing ordeals (of which rape was the least objectionable).

Pichard sounded much the same theme in Caroline Choléra—with an interesting twist, however:Caroline experienced the whole gamut of kinky sex out of sheer feminine curiosity. When she judged that enough was enough, she would turn on her aggressors with a vengeance. In one episode, for instance, she was captured by “birdmen”, who subjected her to a thorough inspection to determine what species of bird she was. From the brown circular spot on her rump they concluded she must be a Canadian goose. Upon hearing herself be called a goose, Caroline, who up to then had endured all other indignities with a casual air, jumped to her feet I a rage, sending her tormentors scurrying for cover.

Thus have today's cartoonists killed two birds with one stone, by bringing sex into the comics without taking comedy out of sex.