The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1171: Casanova #5, July 1991

Erg.
More of the same. Casanova's so hot that he even seduces a young bride on her wedding night. These stories would be so much more enjoyable if the women were every bit as conniving and horny as the men. Then there'd be some intrigue.

That said, Ricard's a very talented artist. His men are of a realistic bent, but the women verge on a slightly more iconic style, almost as if we're seeing not a woman, but something more symbolic, interacting with Casanova. More pessimistically, we could also attribute this slight abstraction of the women to the ever-present male gaze, and its reduction of women to objects.

I try to err on the optimistic these days, but there's good arguments for both sides, I think. Is this possibly a way we can recuperate the products of the male gaze, such as this comic, in that we can choose the way we interpret the stylization of the women in the comic? Rather than reading them as reduction to object, can we instead elevate them, in a sense, to that status of the mythic hero Frye talks about, superior to others and environment? There's so much less detail on the women that they almost look as if they've been pasted on top of the drawing of the background underneath. This stylization almost seems to give them a dimensionality. It doesn't remove from the story the problems of Casanova and his apparent ability to bed any woman, iconic or not, but from a purely visual, or pictorial, point of view, we could see these as portraits of a flawed man interacting with more perfect beings.

Again, I try to err on the optimistic. But there is something to be said for the frame of mind with which we approach a text. I encourage my students to bring their own experiences to the interpretation of a text, that we really have no way of understanding a text except through the lens of our experience. So surely that means that we can, to a certain extent, decide which of our experiences we will bring to a text. Is this perhaps the idea of a resistant reading of a misogynistic erotic comic?

That's a lot more thought that I imagined this comic would engender.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1170: Casanova #1, March 1991

I have a few issues of this series, enough that I might try to track down the rest, though finding back issues of adult comics is a very tricky business. Most people are embarrassed to sell them, let alone embarrassed to buy them. But I've always thought that every genre must have something to offer us, otherwise why would it become a genre?

Casanova's a pretty good series. The art is impeccable. Everyone is just beautiful. It's lovely to have the colour cover, as well, as Ricard's colours are masterfully handled. (I'm assuming it's Ricard, as he's credited with the cover illustration, and there's no listed colourist. Whoever it was did a wonderful job!) There is the usual problem I find with European imports of this era: the women are generally pretty vapid. Granted, in this issue, they're every bit as voracious for sex as Casanova himself, but really they're there to be tallied as conquests for the men in the series.

One strange, or off-putting at least, thing is the ending of the issue. I think this story must originally have been published in a single volume, rather than as a two-issue story. And I think this because the story simply cuts off, midway through a conversation. In past when I've lectured about reading collections of serially-published comics, I've noted that every 22 pages or so, there's a climactic moment. It can feel repetitive unless you're aware of the periodical publication schedule of the original comics. This is kind of the reverse of that, in that there's no climactic moment (though there are a few throughout the issue ;D) at the end of the comic, no hook to draw us back next time. What I have found out, though, is that the series was published every 2 weeks, so at least there wasn't that much of a wait for the second half.

Speaking of, I don't have it. The second half, that is, of this story. We'll be doing another single issue of the series tomorrow, and I do have some complete storylines, but I'll save those for another time. And you never know..I might find the rest of this by some strange happenstance this weekend. That would be neat.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1168: Arthur Sex #3, July 1991

We're going to do some adult comics over the next few days. The more salacious of the covers will, of course, be behind a jump.

But not this one!

I think the weirdest thing about this comic is that there is no credit for the writing or art anywhere in the issue. The closest we get is the original publisher, Editorial Astri, S.A., a Spanish publisher. All the reprint credits are there, but nothing for the original creator(s).

That aside, I was strangely reminded of Spenser's The Faerie Queene when reading this. I think there must have been a bit of the erotic swirling around in old Edmund's head as he was writing his great English epic. Even from a purely knightly point of view, the tale of one chivalrous gent meeting another and the two rescuing a helpless damsel together would fit exceedingly well into Spenser's extended meditation on Arthurian myth and chivalry.

Of course, the two knights engage in some less-armoured adventures with the lady as well, and they all seem to have a lot of fun...well, until the "Unicorn" (actually a centaur with a remarkably large phallus) shows ups an woos the lady with his...um...wiles(?).

Pretty harmless stuff, really - it'd be nice if the ladies showed a bit more agency, but that's sadly the state of many erotic comics from this period. It's not that the women are explicitly looked down upon, but they just don't seem to contribute anything (aside from their bodies) to the forward momentum of the narrative.

Which, as I write it, sounds a lot like patriarchal sexist culture, really.

More to come...