Regardless of how you might feel about the content of adult comics, you have to admit that that is a beautiful cover.
Beginning with today's issue, the True Stories series co-features a fantastic adventure also written by the featured star. Aja's plays on all the old jungle girl tropes, and that cover is a classic example of the sort of early paperback art that exemplifies the genre.
The stories themselves don't really live up to the cover. As I noted in yesterday's post, most of the stories are middling at best. That said, today's story actually touches on how the decision to become an adult film actress affected Aja's marriage, and she doesn't paint the industry as always fun and sunshine. This kind of verisimilitude tends to lend an air of authenticity to biography, I find. The jungle girl story is silly and full of sex, but I really do think this is one of those cases in which the cover makes promises that the content can't keep.
Can you tell I love that cover?
But there's something else. In reading these comics, I've of course looked up some of the work of the featured performers. What I found when I looked up Aja was that she died in 2006 at the age of 43. That's all it says on the Wikipedia page, and on the obituary. This got me thinking a bit more about the importance of these comics. Sex workers continue to be a much-maligned demographic in our culture, as they were at the time that Aja was performing. Carnal Comics here offers a voice to that maligned demographic, a chance to tell their story. I am curious as to how sanitized these stories have been made. I read another of the publisher's comics last night that featured the story of star Savannah, who died at 23 quite tragically. And there was some dark stuff in that story, touching on the perils of drug abuse in the porn industry. There's a very strong girl power vibe coming from these stories that clashes quite jarringly with the way in which the porn industry has been painted in mainstream media, as a den of drugs, drink, and abuse. But then there's stories like this one. As usual, I'm sure the truth lies somewhere between.
More to come...
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