The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1294: True Stories of Adult Film Stars - Taylor Wane, April 1995

No time to blog today. Family stuff.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1293: True Stories of Adult Film Stars - Serenity, March 1995

Sorry. Tonight was an eat burritos and binge Outlander kind of night.

I'll say a bit about this tomorrow.

(Okay, just a bit. The second story is illustrated by Mike Wolfer. He really is very good at illustrating these kinds of tales. Tails?)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1292: True Stories of Adult Film Stars - Kimberly Kupps, February 1995

This comic fell a bit flat for me, which is a purposefully used euphemism given the endowments of Ms. Kupps, the subject of today's biography. Even the fantasy sequence, guest-starring Nightingale, Carnal's own superhero based on adult film star Bonnie Michaels, didn't really do much. Nightingale has turned up before, in the Demi the Demoness comic I read earlier this year. She seems to function like an erotic version of the Sandman, helping people through the dreams they have, often of the wet variety.

So we'll read one more of these tomorrow, and then I'll take a break. I'm finding them fascinating, but as with anything, too much becomes too much.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1291: True Stories of Adult Film Stars - Rebecca Bardoux, December 1994

Two things struck me about today's comic. The first, in the biography, is Ms. Bardoux's dysfunctional family life and her aimlessness in her early adult life and careers. According to Wikipedia, Ms. Bardoux entered the adult industry at 29, which leaves a decade between that and high school in which she tries to fit into the adult world. Though this is similar to the previous stories, of the weird girls who just didn't fit in, it's the first time the comics have so explicitly dealt with that young adulthood. Going into porn at 19 and going into porn at 29 are two very different things, with two very different perspectives. And I think we see this in the tone achieved in the biographical story.

The second thing  that struck me is that this comic is quite sex positive and queer positive for the era in which it was published. It's actually coming out at the same time as some other queer positive comics from Vertigo. In this issue, in the fantasy section, there's two moments of gay sex happening. And one of them is really just right there in the middle of a fairly large picture, clear as day. I will confess I was shocked to see it, and now I'm curious to see if it's due to Rebecca Bardoux's hand in the comic, or due to Daerick Gross's being the artist. I know he did some other work for Carnal Comics. I'll just have to wait to see if he's in any of the other's I've got.

So, some pretty sex positive messages, really throughout all of the comics, which, if nothing else can be made of these strange bio-comics, is a great thing. So many times adult comics are not solely sex comics, but violence ones as well. And I'm not talking about Michael Manning-style BDSM comics. I mean stuff like Faust or Razor, or the Vamperotica line. Perhaps that's why I'm enjoying these comics so much. Every story is sex positive, is written by someone who feels that sex is a valid and affirming vocation to which to devote one's time and energy. I can get behind that.

Sorry. ;P

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1290: True Stories of Adult Film Stars - Blondage, December 1994

There's one part of the adult entertainment industry in the late 80s and early 90s of which I was totally unaware, and that's the part where the stars actually toured doing shows at strip clubs across the United States. Today's comic is the story of a duo, Janine and Julia Ann whose start in the adult film business came through a touring partnership. As I noted the other day, I do a bit of research, if I can, into the life and work of the featured stars for each issue. It's that little grain of salt with which I'm taking the stories. Things didn't go well for Janine, sadly, though both women have been active in the industry as recently as 2004. There's something to be said for doing what you love, perhaps?

Unfortunately, the story kind of fell flat for me, especially considering the caliber of the previous couple. But I'm wondering if perhaps this is the sort of comic that appealed to the people who were actually involved, as fans, with the industry at the time. If you were a fan of the duo "Blondage," if you knew who both were from their films, perhaps a comic detailing the genesis of their partnership would be interesting. For myself, not so much.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1289: True Stories of Adult Film Stars - Alicia Rio, October 1994

Given the treatment by the administration of the United States of Mexican people in the country, this cover actually says quite a lot, even if it is 24 years old. Ms. Rio is very vocally-proud of her heritage, going so far as the base the second story in the comic on the old idea that the Mayan civilization was actually contacted by advanced alien civilizations. It's cool to see some of the beliefs and deities of that culture transformed into science fiction counterparts by someone who cherishes the heritage, rather than someone looking to mine it for ideas.

The first story is much like all of the other stories so far. The porn industry in the 80s, rather than a cesspool of drugs and disease as we are led to believe, is being shown as a place that women who didn't fit a particular mold could go to express themselves. I wonder if any of the featured stars have any other biographical material available. I'd love to compare the content of these stories with more in depth content. There's obviously things being left out of these stories.

I have to say, these are very entertaining comics. Today's second feature is really nicely done by Mike Wolfer, whose work I know from Warren Ellis's Strange Kiss series. Though the lead biographical stories are very similar, the quality of art is quite good throughout the comic. We're getting everything from the underground-inspired (Larry Nadolsky), the slicker, more mainstream (the aforementioned Wolfer), and then some art that I"m going to say is quite indicative of adult comics, though I'd have to think a bit before saying how that is. The cool thing about this art is that the artist, Fauve, is a woman, and is the artist most associated with the Carnal Comics line. She still does work under another name (Holly Golightly, I think), but you don't see much to do with this series on her site.

A pity, I think. The more I read, the more important I think these comics are. More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1288: True Stories of Adult Film Stars - Aja, October 1994

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...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1287: True Stories of Adult Film Stars - Tyffany Million, September 1994

It's rare that I have an adult comic up here for review that I don't have to hide behind a break. Well, really, I don't have to hide any of them behind a break. I've always found the societal propensity to be embarrassed of sex but completely accepting of violence mystifying. And the trouble is that in accepting violence and in linking sex to shame, we link sex to violence.

So we're going to go from Canadian underground science fiction to porn star biographies. Strangely, this is not that big a leap, as both grow from the undergrounds of the 60s and 70s. Biographical, and autobiographical, comics are a big deal in the world of literary graphic novels. Many of the most lauded GNs are biographies - Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, or Art Spiegelman's Maus, for example. We tend to give biography, rightly or not, a certain benefit of the doubt. It is a testimony in many ways, and testimonies carry with them the air of the sacred.

But what about testimonies from decidedly less-than-sacred (at least by traditional standards) lives? What about the stories of porn actresses? Well, it turns out that, in the mid to late 90s, Re-Visionary Press did just this, and produced autobiographical works on over 40 popular porn actresses. And I say "autobiographical" because each comic was co-written by the stars themselves.

The comics are, generally, middling. They're not making any artistic leaps, nor are the stories anything that we haven't really heard before. I've not read all of them by any stretch, but the common theme seems to be one of not fitting in in their small town lives and finding themselves in the world of adult entertainment. I'm sure that the stories have been sanitized, sometimes to a great extent. There is virtually no mention of any violence, sexual or otherwise, in any of the issues I've read thus far, and this, sadly, seems extremely unrealistic to me. That said, there do seem to be some very real moments in the stories, very often of friendships with other actresses, and, at least a few times, of discovering a facet of their affectional orientation that they hadn't had the chance to explore previously. Though ostensibly inspired by an industry that exploits women, the stories of the relationships between women in this industry are quite nice. And, often, very queer, which is something I'm always on the lookout for.

Today's issue is, I think, the first in the series. The whole issue is biographical, an in depth story of Ms. Millions' path to her place of fame in the industry. I'll admit, I remember her from some of the old video tape porn I may or may not have rented as a younger man. She had a very ferocious attitude. I worried sometimes for her male companions. Having read the comic, however, I see things a bit differently. Ms. Millions, according to her bio, sees her work as an artistic performance - not necessarily one that resembles real life, but one that, perhaps, comments on it? I could very well be reading too much into pornography, but is it really so odd to think that someone could see sex as a medium of artistic expression? I like to think of all sex as, in some ways, an artistic work performed by 1 or more people.

We're going to do a week or so of these comics I think. As far as I know, this issue is the only one that is fully biographical. The majority of the series also include a fantasy story, also co-written by the stars themselves. When I teach biography to my students I ask them to think about who produced it, why they did, when they did, all of those contextual questions that key us into the fact that a biography is not truth. Nor is an autobiography - it, like history, is still a single perspective on a series of events, specifically the events of someone's life. I know that we can't really trust a biographical comic like this, any more than we can trust any biography. But I also think that they're stories that, potentially, haven't been told anywhere else, about performers who, despite the shame associated with their trade, have probably touched more of us, more intimately, than most other media stars.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1169: Carnal Comics #1, August 1995

Another cover that doesn't need covering...but only just.

The cover of today's comic is definitely designed to draw in readers - who doesn't want to see hot girl on demon girl action. There's also a four-breasted cat-goddess who gets in on the fun.

But the more interesting part of this comic is the first story, written by adult film star Tracey Adams herself, and offering a short autobiographical sketch of her life and her time in the adult film industry. I can't think of many other times that I've seen this kind of tale being told - perhaps from an outside perspective, but rarely from an inside one. I'm not familiar with her work (or if I am, I don't specifically remember her), but her attitude toward the industry is interesting, given the era within which she was performing (primarily the Eighties and early Nineties):

"I was always conscious of how women were treated. I stayed away from anything forced or degrading...We were really having sex, all of us, not just the guys. Power and intimidation should have nothing to do with sex."

I've checked on the GCD to see if any of Re-Visionary's other adult comics contain testimonials like this one - I think they're pretty important documents, really. They also demonstrate the utility of comics as ways of telling very personal stories. Of course, we've seen this in the figures of people like Art Spiegleman and Marjane Satrapi, but there's definitely space in the bio/autobio comics world for many different stories, not just those of people surviving adversity, but also of people surviving and thriving in an industry that is not known for its thoughtful nature.

I quite liked this comic. It was kind sex, an interesting biography, and a cool little dream sequence sex story.

More to come...(a phrase that means so much more while we're looking at adult comics!)