Sex In the Comics: Sex and Violence

Here's more from a book called Sex in the Comics from 1985 that I got remaindered somewhere. There's little enough text that I may as well retype it in its entirety. The book exists mainly for the images, many of which are blown up much larger than they were originally. Most of the chapters are much dirtier than this one, which mostly covers mainstream comic strips. A big problem with the book (among several) is that many of the examples that were originally in color are not reprinted in color here. Hopefully the hyperlinks that lead you to examples which are will make up for that.

The previous two chapters were posted here and here. Here's the third one written by historian Maurice Horn:

Sex and violence have gone hand in hand since the dawn of mankind. The caveman, it is reported, were not averse to using a little violence in order to get a little sex from the cave women. The bible is full of episodes linking sex with violence, and vice versa, from Judith vamping Holofrenes out of his head to Salome peeling off to get John the Baptist's. Examples drawn from literature and history are so numerous that it would be possible to fill an entire book with them. In fact, so interlocked are sex and violence that they are usually pronounced in the same breath by fire-and-brimstone evangelicals and overzealous PTA mothers: sex and violence, even in sex 'n' violence (sex, it should be noted, always gets top billing—perhaps because it is a shorter word).

In the comics sex and violence—or rather eroticism and adventure, their classier relatives—made their appearance as funnies started moving away from mere humor to action and thrills. Comic-strip artists and their readers seemed to discover with some astonishment that couples could spend time in pursuit other than bickering or hurling at each other—such as going around the world in a plane, fighting for justice or putting down mad potentates. The call of adventure, the thrill of danger, the smell of victory are a heady brew, and they make they blood of hero and heroine alike course faster. Action, especially violent action, is an aphrodisiac. This was all the more striking in the early comic pages, where the comics tried to avoid giving even a hint of sex. But the images of a male and a female in close intimacy, facing some unspeakable peril, spoke for themselves.

In the beginning the world of comic-strip adventure was a world of unquestioned male supremacy. The hero was there to rescue his girl, seldom the other way around. In fact, the fierce exclusiveness of heterosexual bonding was one of the most common motivations for the action. The Phantom was forever saving Diana Palmer (sometimes willy-nilly) from the clutches of rivals. Mandrake eternally getting Narda out of the predicaments she always fell into, and Prince Valiant perennially vying for the favors of Aleta. Only much later did the all-powerful male hero find a female counterpart in the comic pages.

In the jungle, where issues and people alike are stripped down to the bare essentials, the theme emerged with crystal clarity: ”Me Tarzan, you Jane” was a concise, if ungrammatical, statement of the situation. And Jane had to wait, half-naked and helpless, subjected to the whips of sadistic jailers and the whims of jealousy-crazed warrior-queens, until the Lord of the Jungle saw fit to come to her rescue. Similarly, the white African queens and high priestesses Tarzan kept encountering were there to be subjugated, whether through manly force or virile charm, by the male hero.

The situation was not too different in The Phantom. In the very first episode the obscenely fat and libidinous Kabai Singh, chieftan of the dreaded Singh Brotherhood, imforms Diana (clad in a flimsy and revealing outfit) that she is to become one of his harem girls. To teach her a lesson in obedience, he has her suspended over a shark basin, but the Phantom intervenes in the nick of time (natch). Diana spends the remainder of the story in her slave-girl costume, her charms advantageously exposed, as she and her hero gamely face (often in tight embrace) Kabai's minions, finally making their escape from the Singh hideaway. This opening tale set the tone for many of the adventures to follow.

Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates wove adult themes into its narratives more often than any other strip of the Depression era. His major female characters as much as male—Pat Ryan, the Dragon Lady, Burma, later Terry himself—displayed an earthy, healthy sexual quality that ran as an undercurrent through their adventures. The love-hate relationship between Pat and the Dragon Lady is significant in this respect: they were thrown in the countless perils together, sometimes as allies, often as foes, and their intimacy acted as an aphrodisiac, even though they might return to an antagonistic relationship afterwards.

Nowhere were sex and violence as intertwined as in Terry. The sexual situations constantly shifted with the ebb and flow of the action: the couples in this strip were always forming, dissolving, and re-forming in endless combinations. Sexual triangles abounded (Caniff's characters were seldom models of fidelity): Dragon Lady/Pat/Burma. Pat/Burma/Terry, April Kane/Terry/Dragon Lady, and all the permutations allowed by the vital flow of the narrative. There were all physically attractive characters, and with the ever-present threat of danger hanging over them, the attraction was heightened and quite naturally strongest between those who happened to be closest together at any given moment.

The same adult outlook carried over to Caniff's Steve Canyon, at least until the hero unfortunately got married (heroes never marry, as Hercules and Samson learned to their sorrow). In addition, the violence took on explicitly sexual overtones: in one adventure a voluptuous blonde is exposed (in more ways than one) to the threat of being branded with a red-hot iron. Scenes of sexual torture and bondage occur often in this long-lasting strip, almost as a matter of course.

The concept of male dominance in the field of adventure took its knock with Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. As Juanita Coulson described her in The Comic Book Book, Sheena would swing through the pages of Tarzan-style, her long, blonde hair flying an fur bikini plastered to her 42-22-34 figure. I'm sure it brought the drooling male male readers back for more.” Sheena had a male companion named Bob constantly in tow, and she was always busy saving him. But I suspect that she got her thrills more from tussling with strong-bodied male antagonists than from mooning with her cardboard lover.

The jungle-queen theme was later expanded and made even more explicit in the Mexican comic book ,Roratonga. The beautiful title character is described as a green-eyed, light-skinned mulatta who holds sway over her male counterparts in an unmistakably sexual fashion.

The threat of danger or violence acting as a prelude or a fillip to sexual activity emerges more clearly in Modesty Blaise, in which the heroine and her faithful male assistant, Willie Garvin, obviously enjoy a relationship made even more intimate by the requirements of action and suspense. Here are the male and female roles, while still firmly delineated (most of the heavy violence is left to Willie), come closer to a position of parity (indeed, it is Willie who occupies the subordinate role).

Modesty is British and even in the heat of action tends to preserve a modicum of quality for which she is named. The Italian heroines are not so reserved in their proclivities and activities. Bearing evocative names—Jungla, Jacula, Angelia, Lucifera—and scant costumes (if clothed at all), they freely mix the games of sex with those of violence in close encounters of any kind.

When the first detective of the comics, Dick Tracy, arrived on the scene in 1931, suspenseful, violent, often brutal action arrived with him. The focus of the violence has often been Tracy's girlfriend (and later wife) Tess Trueheart, and this has given an obvious sexual undertone to the goings-on. It was to avenge the murder of Tess's father that Tracy joined the force, and it was because of Tess that he went through some of his most harrowing ordeals. Tess has been the frequent object of violence on the part of sadistic criminals trying to take revenge on her mate or to trap him. Violence, often prompted by strong sexual motivations, has been visited upon many of the strip's other female characters as well.

Sexual jealousy also proved a strong motive in Secret Agent X-9, especially during the short time that Dashiell Hammett was writing the strip and Alex Raymond drawing it. Two-timing, two-faced dames were a staple, as were the acts of violence they either committed or provoked—they were not above trying to seduce him or scratching out the eyes of their rivals. Later, when Raymond went on to create Rip Kirby, this theme acquired a more polished, committed, upper-class tone in the form of crime passionel committed by the rich and famous. Meanwhile, Austin Briggs, who inherited X-9, continued the tradition with his gallery of alluring Mata Haris and slinky femmes fatales who would resort to any amount of physical violence when enticement failed to achieve their ends.

The tradition was further carried on, often tongue-in-cheek, in Will Eisner's The Spirit. A multitude of homicidal sirens were always crossing the Spirit's path, from the much married (and often widowed) Silk Satin to the sultry P'Gell, and our hero never tired of tussling with them. Later on the Spirit became kind of an emcee or umpire—he enjoyed the sex while others indulged in the violence. Along with his creator the Spirit had grown older, and wiser in the ways of the world.

Latter-day gumshoes became even more outspoken in their attitude toward the twin (and fatal) attractions of violence of violence and sex. In the Mike Hammer strip Mickey Spillane, who wrote the scripts himself, hardly toned in his hero's “bash 'em or bed 'em” method of detection, to the despair of his syndicate editor, Jerry Iger. Despite its success the strip was continued because of his outcries from critics during the squeamish fifties. Later, during the more liberated seventies, Wallace Wood brought out Cannon, a private-eye strip even more openly brutal and explicitly erotic than Hammer, nobody batted an eye.

In the late forties and early fifties the comic-book industry developed its own end o sex-explicit police titles. These often featured overendowed female sleuths, such as Phantom Lady and the Black Cat (a master of karate), who were then thrown into dangerous and revealing situations. Along with the horror comics, these crime comic books aroused the particular ire of the censors, who liked to point to the exaggerated anatomy of the female protagonists (“headlights”) and a pernicious influence on young readers.

For sheer imprudence, however, nobody can rival the Italian comic strip writers and artists. For instance, Diabolik, created by the sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani, has been featuring the bloody exploits of a master criminal for over twenty years. All through that period Diabolik and his beautiful companion in crime, Eva Kant, have been mixing sex and gore in almost equal amounts. The success of Diabolik has given rise to a host of imitators—Kriminal,Fantax, Demoniak, Sadik (sic)—each more sexually violent and more violently sexual than the last. In this domain, it should be noted, the Mexicans run the Italians as a close second with such superheated features as Fantomas,Arrabalera, and Sirenia.

The violent trend in American comics were exacerbated by the coming of World War II. The saying “All's fair in love and war” was soon transformed into “Anything goes” in the wartime comics. It was then that Dick Tracy featured a particularly sadistic episode, ”The Case of the Brow”, in which espionage, mayhem, torture and sexual bondage were all mixed up together and served hot. In Terry, Burma and the Dragon Lady both used their feminine wiles to lure the hated Japanese into deadly traps, while Captain Easy and Barney Baxter were kept busy saving innocent blonde American nurses from rape, torture, and death at the hands of their buck-toothed Japanese captors. In the European theater of war, secret agent Vic Jordan used beautiful resistance fighters as bait for sadistic SS guards and Gestapo henchmen.

The epitome of the war syndrome in comics was perhaps Black Fury (later Miss Fury). Miss Fury was in civilian life beautiful socialite Marla Drake, who donned a block leotard to fight for Justice and the American Way. Her adventures, already tough from the outset, became literally hard-boiled with the onslaught of the war. There were no holds barred in the heroine's battle against Nazi agents and their American accomplices. Females battling each other tooth and claw were staples, as were men savagely beating up on women, and the use of whips, branding irons, and other implements of torture.

The comic books particularly warmed to the theme as they discovered they could depict any amount of sex and gore as long as they kept the proceedings patriotic. This was a time when a costumed hero with the no-nonsense name Spy Smasher could beat the Dark Angel, an enemy villainess, into submission without too many questions asked. Nor was anyone perturbed by depictions of savage beatings or torture inflicted on helpless female prisoners or hostages by grinning Japs or monocled Nazis in such patriotic comic books as Captain America,Minute Man, and the aptly named Military Comics.

Many of the comic-book warriors were aviators, which gave them wide latitude to roam at will from one theater of war to another. Among them were the Blackhawks,Captain Wings, Captain Midnight and many others of the same ilk. They all featured incredibly violent action and displayed incredible amounts of female flesh. They also offered scenes of the heroes locked in deadly physical combat with women adversaries. The best example is perhaps Airboy, who fought a string of battles, aerial and otherwise, with the ruthless German female air ace Valkyrie and her squadrons of sexy Air Maidens. Aside from being an unconscious (and quite effective) Wagnerian pastiche, the Airboy comic books contained unbridled tableaux of sadistic violence (women being mercilessly whipped, Valkyrie slowly torturing Airboy, etc.).

All this went on without a murmur from the self-appointed guardians of morality. As Pauline Kael wrote in a later review of the 1945 movie Confidential Agent, “Those unfamiliar with the melodramas of the forties may be shocked at the brutalities that sneaked by under cover of the anti-Fascist theme.” Which goes to show that the violence in these comic books was a phenomenon of the time more than a flaw inherent in the medium, as later detractors would try to prove. More recent conflicts, such as Korea and Vietnam, did not arouse the same popular fervor, and thus did not provoke a corresponding level of violence in the comics of the periods, Steve Canyon to the contrary. After 1945, war—except World War II, which was still being fought in some comic books as late as the seventies—seems to have lost most of its sex appeal.

In the comics women have most often appeared (in men's eyes) as threats or victims—either terrifying Medusas or willing Justines. This is a world that is still divided into “good girls” and “bad women”, just as it is still largely divided into “bad guys” and “heroes”. Yet in the comics the division is mot so rigid that it doesn't allow some movement from one sphere to the other. One of the clichés of the medium, as of all popular literature and movies, is that of the “bad woman” not only reforming but protecting the hero at the cost of her own life. This theme is particularly evident in many of the crime strips (Secret Agent X-9, Red Barry, Cannon, etc.) The woman's earlier hostility towards the incorruptible hero thus stands revealed as the measure of her sexual frustration.

Of course, the more hard-boiled dames harbor to no such qualms. They do not hesitate to play out their characters in full by trying to do in the hated male (The “Hell hath no fury...” syndrome) in a variety of ways, always in vain, as it turns out. Examples of this kind of behavior (deplorable or admirable, depending on the viewpoint) abound in comic strips as well as in comic books. It can be found in The Phantom, in Inspector Wade, in Daredevil, even in Batman, sometimes taken to extremes, as in those not infrequent cases where the villainess tried to take the hero's life along with her own. That's what may be called vengeance with a vengeance.

Examples of openly sexual violence, as distinct from sexually motivated acts of revenge, were rare in the early comics (except during World War II, when they masqueraded as acts of patriotism, as we have seen). The situation has changed drastically over the past two decades: not only have literary works of sadism been adapted into comics form Sade's Justine and Juliette, among others, but sexual cruelty has emerged as one of the major “adult” themes of the medium.

In our culture rape is considered to be the primary symbol of sexual violence, which may be why the comics long shied away from its depiction, or even its mention (fear of words is the puritan's obsession, as Sartre observed). Graphic intimations of rape were not uncommon in such strips as Rip Kirby, Smilin' Jack, Mandrake, and others: One scene in Skyroads, for instance, shows a repulsive, hunchbacked dwarf dragging a young woman away by her long blonde hair. But the act itself never consummated, or even initiated: the hero always managed to get there in time and save the beauty from the clutches of the beast. Only recently has rape (even homosexual rape) been depicted in graphic terms.

The question of sex and violence in the comics has always been a touchy one. This was the issue that prompted Dr. Frederic Wertham's attack on the medium in Seduction of the Innocent and caused the long period of ostracism and censorship that followed. Ever since those dark times in the fifties, comics fans have lived in fear of another anticomics crusade, and they have watched with apprehension (as well as furtive enjoyment) the rise of nudity, sexuality, violence, and other formerly taboo subjects in the comics. Their fears seem to be largely unfounded. The comics have only belatedly caught up with the trend apparent in other media, notably television. Times have changed, and the comics have changed with them, gradually becoming a more mature medium, in readership as well as in concerns. There is no way the clock can now be turned back. A lot of the illustrations have no accompanying text, which wasn't the selling point of the book anyway.

Sex in the Comics: Sex and the Single Girl

More from the book Sex In the Comics, a book from 1985. I posted the previous chapter here.

The pictures dominate the text, and since there's very little of it, unlike other comics reference books I've posted, it short enough to include the entire text of the chapter. Sometimes there are things mentioned in the text that aren't in the illustrations and vice-versa. This is the second chapter called Sex and the Single Girl, and here's the text by author Maurice Horn:

Young attractive girls were seldom part of the raucous world of the early funnies, or they played secondary roles or were relegated to the background. After World War I, however, American women in the comics started to assert themselves—as they did in the real world—and a host of lovely young things burst upon the comics pages. They were smart, seductive, stylish, and unmarried.

These alluring newcomers,for all their apparent diversity, were in fact derived from the same model, which Colton Waugh dubbed “the French doll” characterized by “bulging brow, high forehead, short, up-tilted nose, and enormous eyes”. They formed a rhythmic parade of alliterations: Tillie the Toiler, Syncopating Sue, Flapper Fanny, Dumb Dora, Winnie Winkle, Merely Margie, Polly and Her Pals, Boots and Her Buddies. Going to parties, dancing, flirting, and husband hunting were the primary occupations of even those comic strip girls who were supposed to work (though never very hard).

Despite the general permissiveness around then, there was never any hint of their indulging in what comes naturally. “Sexiness, yes, sexuality, no” might have been the motto of the cartoonists (Cliff Sterrett, Martin Branner, Russ Westover, et. al.) who drew their adventures.

Even John Held Jr.'s Margy was a lot tamer than his female characters who cavorted through the covers of Vanity Fair and Life. In a word, the girls of the comics were teases, designed to attract the male reader's eye but not likely to satisfy his prurient interest.

Some heroines of the pre-World War II era were more than mere decorations, however. Jane Arden was a newspaper reporter. Connie was a private investigator and space explorer. Flyin' Jenny was, as the name implied, a pilot and barnstormer, and Debbie Dean was described as a “career girl”. Independend, earnest—sometimes to the point of priggishness—and proud, they found more glamour in their respective professions than in men (in retrospect they can be seen as early forerunners of the women's movement). If these strips were to be believed, single women were a bunch of polymorphous perverse creatures eho found gratification in anything but sex.

Across the Atlantic the British in the same period held a very different view of womanhood. English newspapers had always had their share of spicy girl strips, with such titles as Spotlight on Sally and Our Dumb Blonde, and Norman Pett's Jane's Journal, The Diary of a Bright Young Thing, seemed to be another of them when they first appeared. It proved much more inventive as well as much more humorous than the other features of its kind. The imaginative ways in which Jane, a pretty and buxom blonde, managed to shed her clothes, usually in full view of an appreciative male audience, were a tribute to the leering ingenuity of the artist. There always remained something very British about Jane despite the naughtiness, an unabashed naturalness that probably discouraged censure (though there was quite a bit of grumbling among the bluenoses).

Jane repaid her debt to the nation during World War II when she entertained the boys in uniform. And entertain them she did: whether parachuting into a tree with a skirt raised high and blouse open wide or reviewing troops in nothing but gartered stockings and high heels, she kept the morale of the average Tommy high—and his blood running. Withal she was quite innocent in her ways, All was fair in love and war, she seemed to say, and if she was able to give the boys an additional reason to fight, then it was her patriotic duty to do so, as George Perry, in The Penguin Book of Comics, reported tongue-in-cheek, “One day Jane appeared completely nude and within a week one British division had pushed the enemy back six miles and another had launched a major attack.”

While Jane was more than ready to bare her body, she wasn't quite ready to put it to enjoyable use, at least not in public. The times weren't ripe. A couple of decades would pass before a British comics heroine displayed obvious sexuality in the newspaper pages. She was Modesty Blaise, agent of the Intelligence Service, judo expert, and English womanhood's answer to themale chauvinist James Bond. She would more than once be locked in mortal hand-to-hand combat with male opponents, and the implicitly sexual nature of these encounters was often underlined in drawings picturing Modesty and her adversaries in close embrace. Yet, with all the opportunities for physical intimacy (and not just in combat), she has remained resolutely monogamous over the years. Her relationship with her male assistant, Willie Garvin, who draws a respectable pose and calls her “Princess”, is discreetly handled but not platonic. Despite intimations of a shady past, Modesty cannot abide sexual promiscuity, as is often the case with other heroines of the same era.

Modesty was a herald of a new era—the sixties, the decade of the much-publicized sexual revolution. Liberated females, eager to shed their inhibitions along with their clothes, sprouted in comics all around the world. France was in the vanguard of this comic-strip revolution with such frolicosome confections as Barbarella (of which more in a later chapter)and two creations by Guy Peallart, Jodelle and Pravda. The only thing this trio had in common was an unjaundiced view of sex as great fun, as they playfully executed their own imaginative variations on one of the most overworked slogans of the decade, “Make love, not war.”

In Jodelle, Peallart made liberal use of the Pop Art imagery that was all the rage at the time. Campbell's tomato soup cans, Coke bottles, and Marilyn Monroe photoprints sprinkled the strip's landscape, which was supposed to represent ancient Rome brought up to date. In the middle of all that madness the redheaded Jodelle, a spy for the emperor, circulated with cool aplomb. She dispensed her luscious body with equal relish to pubescent pageboys and overweight senators, not to mention a lesbian chief spy and a couple sadistic prison guards. The whole thing reached a new high in licentiousness—and became, accordingly, a commercial hit—but its campy tone and dated references make it something of a period piece today.

Jodelle was modeled after French pop singer Sylvie Vartan; Peallart's next heroine, Pravda, bore a close resemblance to another singer, Françoise Hardy. Unlike Jodelle, Pravda was not an ingratiating creature. She was the head of a biker gang, a tough broad with no heart of gold, prone to the initiative when a man appealed to her. There was an unpleasantness about Pravda, and even her sexual frolics looked labored rather than enjoyable—certainly a cardinal sin for a strip of this time.

In New York the trendy Evergreen Review, eager to cash in on the craze, came out with The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, about a socialite brunette who goes through all the kinky ordeals obligatory in a sixties “girl strip”: rape, flagellation, branding, degradation, fellatio, bestiality and so on ad nauseam. In the last panel it turns out to have been an erotic dream (or fantasy)—a trick ending probably meant to circumvent possible censorship (there was none).

Even prim Australia got into the act, Brigette was a California-type blonde teenager always getting mixed up with the wrong crowd, and more than willing to go in for some heavy petting with attractive males—though not all the way. In spite of this throwback to a more innocent era, the moral authorities were incensed, and the Brigette newspaper strip,despite its popularity with readers, only lasted for a few years.

Entertaining though they were, all these strips pale when compared to Guido Crepax's Valentina, which debuted in the mid-1960s. It is not an exaggeration to say that Valentina is the most significant heroine in European comics. Her vibrant, if neurotic, personality completely dominates the goings-on of the strip. A sexy, sophisticated brunette with a Louise Brooks hairdo, small, firm breasts, and a hauntingly beautiful face, she debuted as a young and alluring photographer attracted to Phil Rembrandt, an enigmatic American criminologist and art critic. Her long affair with Rembrandt produced a son named Mattia, but she stubbornly chose to remain unmarried.

In addition to her very active sex life, not only with Rembrandt, but also with a number of casual lovers along the way, Valentina enjoys a vivid fantasy life. A woman of catholic tastes and wide culture, she realizes her fantasies in encounters with famous personages from myth and history, and with characters out of Joyce, Proust, Melville, Ingmar Bergman, and comic strip lore. If her experiences have a definite sadomasochistic tinge, it is due as much to the ambiguous longings of the lady as to the proclivities of the artist: Valentina is a genuinely modern heroine: her knowledge of, and complicity with, the world of fact only increase her sense of alienation, while her insights into the realm of imagination only enhance her feelings of frustration. Boredom, estrangement, guilt and helplessness are the dark underside—perhaps the penalty—of an outwardly happy, brilliant, and successful existence.

Women are at the very core of Crepax's vision—not only Valentina, but many other stunning beauties with active libidos and romantic names like Bianca, Belinda, Marina. Unlike the big-boobed peasant types so favored by American cartoonists, Crepax's women are small-chested, long-limbed creatures with delicate, patrician faces; their sensuality resides in quivering lips and vulnerable eyes. Crepax draws the kind of women a civilized man would like to know and not just to bed. The artist's fascination with women, fashioned of ambivalence, is paralleled by his adult view of sex as a conflict whose attending ills—jealousy, deception, cruelty, frustration, and violence—are incapable of cure.

Another skimpily-clad heroine was Vampirella, a denizen of the dying planet Drakulon, where blood was the staff of life. On the good old planet Earth, where that staple could only be detracted from humans, the black-tressed vampiress began experiencing qualms of conscience about having to take a man's life in order to preserve her own. She solved the problem by preying on villains whom she enticed into her waiting arms, the better to lull them for the vampire's bite. Truly the kiss of death (the image of the praying mantis immediately comes to mind). To complicate the Freudian theme even further, the man Vampirella fell in love with turned out to be none other than Adam Van Helsing, a descendant of Dracula's foe, and himself a mean vampire hunter. The relationship between Vampirella and Adam, the lover and the love object, was loaded with psychosexual ironies: who was the hunter now, and who was the prey? Love and death commingled, as in any good erotic tale.

Vampirella's artists have been many, But the Spaniard José “Pepé” Gonzalez is usually considered the definitive one. Soon after he left the feature in the seventies he created the short-lived Herma. Herma was a barbarian woman from the Ice Age, miraculously preserved in a block of ice and brought back to life by a scientific expedition. A frizzy-haired blonde with a voluptuous figure, she displayed a premoral attitude toward sex as something to be enjoyed with whatever partner (of either sex) happened to be at hand. Because of the shallowness of the characterization, and despite generous displays of the heroine's body in ingenious poses, the strip soon became tedious and didn't last long—proving once more that art, if not in life, there has to be more to sex than merely sex.

The sexually liberated female has now become a mainstay in comics in virtually every form of the medium—except American newspaper strips, which still cling to the “old lady in Dubuque” mentality. Consider for instance, Cathy, drawn and written by a woman, Cathy Guisewite. The heroine is a career girl apparently on her way up, but her love life is a disaster area, and no wonder. Even her steady boyfriend, a slob named Irving, is not allowed more than a goodnight kiss, and when he drops in for an overnight stay, Cathy can be seen making up the sofa for him. The strip contains much talk about sex, some of it quite funny, but no action. In short, it is a more with-it version of Tillie the Toiler.

The important point, however, is that Cathy and Tillie are no longer the only role models. In many “girl comics” the pleasure principle seems to have won the day (or night) over the reality principle. The diversity is in itself enlightening, as it reflects the various, often confused views of premarital sex in society at large, swinging back and forth between good-natured permissiveness and thinly disguised conservatism.