We’re doing another series of themed posts, this one about sex and comics. Decades ago Peter Cook did a funny routine about a coal miner who wanted to be a novelist but whose novel got turned down “because it lacked the sex element.” I’ve always loved that phrase.
I can list seven sorts of comics that involve the sex element.
1) European works that involve fancy drawing and some kind of non-sex draw, such as satirical future fantasyscapes where women in strapless gowns have television sets for heads. This is the Heavy Metal category. The result of the sex element is that everything else in the work gets skipped.
2) European works that involve fancy drawing and no sort of non-sex draw. This is the Milo Manara category. The result of the sex element is that the reader spends 20 minutes rooted to one spot at Jim Hanley’s Universe and wonders if anyone notices.
3) Self-revelatory works where the artist gets down to the inner recesses of his being and finds the usual sort of crap we keep there. I guess Crumb is the big example. The sex element in these works might or might not strike you as sexy; it doesn’t have to in order to get its job done. Whereas in the first two categories it does.
4) Works about daily life that show people having sex because that’s what people do. Alison Bechdel, Alex Robinson, Terry Laban. Robinson’s Box Office Poison has one of the most effective sex scenes in comics, but the scene is not sexy. It just gets across the experience. A problem with these works is that you can feel like the author is demonstrating a point: See how mature and adult I am?
5) Tijuana Bibles. I’ve never seen one of those. (UPDATE: But Matthew J. Brady says you can find them here.)
6) Japanese pervy stuff. The kindergarten aspect of these works is very offputting.
7) Lost Girls. Man, did that suck. For one thing, the artwork made everything look like copulating trombones. For another, Alan Moore can be very, very silly. He wanted to do intellectual pornography, which is right up there with wallpaper you can hum or toothpaste that rhymes. Also, his idea of what constitutes an idea can be awfully generous, not to say lax.
So is there any use of sex in comics (or in art) that you like?
Also, as long as you mentioned it, you should reprint your lost girls essay as part of this, maybe. It’s pretty great… (the essay I mean; not the book necessarily.)
Whoops! On closer reading I see that you are not necessarily criticizing categorically so much as categorizing critically. Tripped me up….
Yeah, it would be hypocritical of me to say I disliked pictures of hot girls. On the other hand, pictures of hot girls could disappear from comics and I wouldn’t care much.
I’ll look around for my “Lost Girls” essay. The line item here gives the gist, at least.
If you’re interested in reading some Tijuana Bibles, here’s a site with a bunch of them.
And if you’ve read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, you can combine two of your categories, with Alan Moore doing a Tijuana Bible version of 1984. Dunno if that appeals to you, but I thought it was funny.