The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 195: Super Taboo #12, October 1996 (Eros Comix Hentai Week Day 2)

Continuing our journey into the darker crevices of my collection. Actually, scratch that. There's really no reason I should keep these in the dark. They're expressions of particular human emotions, just like any other story. It's just our Puritanical cultural mores that keep us from admitting that, by and large, we're a horny bunch.

 

So this comic gets to that extreme of porn that a lot of people find uncomfortable: incest. Yes, it's a bit odd and off-putting. It's a genre of the erotic that I just don't get, but that's not to say that fantasies like those portrayed in the Super Taboo series don't work for some people. It reminds me of an interesting thing Alan Moore once said in conjunction with Lost Girls and the controversy over some of the erotic depictions within that work. He said that they were pictures of things that went through the mind, and if we're going to criminalize or stigmatize people for what goes on in their heads, we're a short step away from an Orwellian nightmare. It's when the drive to bring the fantasy to reality becomes overwhelming and destructive that things become worrisome. But if what happens in your head stays in your head, what's the problem?

(That's probably a longer conversation to have than I want to here, so let's leave it there.)

The first story in this issue, with the awfully-translated title "Riddle Me, Diddle Me," is actually kind of cute, once you get past the sibling relationship of the two characters. A question game leads to various kinds of sexual congress, leaving both satisfied and relaxed. There's very little shame in the outcome of the couplings, which is an interesting facet to the stories of incest that seem to be quite prolific in hentai porn. A lot is said in critical literature about the incest taboo and its place in the proliferation of culture. What, I wonder, would such critics who deal with it have to say about these stories?

The second story actually presents us with something kind of forward thinking for a 20 year old comic. A brother returns home having changed genders, now a buxom young lady who also happens to have a prodigious penis. Sibling sexual shenanigans ensue when her surprised sister answers the door. But the very fact that a North American publisher was publishing transsexual erotica in the late nineties is pretty cool, incestual intimations aside.

Super Taboo, and its sequel Super Taboo Extreme are my least favourite of the Mangerotica comics I'm reviewing this week, but they're prevalent in the line, so I'll be looking at some more incest stories later in the week. I did warn that this was going to be an odd week, didn't I?

See you tomorrow.