Don’t hide your candle under a bushel, Mr. Frazetta. (NSFW)

Posted on November 9, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

“The internet is a toilet.” …..Plumb away!

Background: There’s a hugely anticipated Frazetta auction due in early December 2015. Some nudie art could not be included in the printed catalog (and online) on the advice of the auction company and its lawyers. The chattering classes were rife with rumors and speculation. What could possibly be so disgusting that it could be auctioned but not included in the printed catalog? Surely nothing as pathetic as cunnilingus, female ejaculation, or facials. So perhaps bestiality or necrophilia? Don’t those horrible Europeans also sell Crepax doggy art? What’s wrong with that? As it turns out, it was nothing quite so gross, just a “simple” case of white slavery (+/- rape).

I wanted to preserve these on HU since the site is periodically interested in such things. I mean both Frazetta and the obvious.(The below is NSFW, if you hadn’t figured that out already.)

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The “For Sale” signs were added by Roy Lichtenstein and Edward Ruscha in 1998.

Here’s the description from the blog that first published these images (link is temporary):

“Frank has always had a strong interest, a fetish of sorts, in black sexual stereotypes. Why would he spend so much time extolling the virtue of black sexuality if he disliked blacks? Makes no sense. What is his intent? The joy and delight inherent in sex. One must see the totality of these stories to appreciate fully their intent and idiosyncratic approach. He has other erotic art dealing with just whites, no blacks. A superficial and prosaic understanding is really worthless in appreciating this material.”

I don’t think this statement needs to be dismantled in any sustained fashion except to say that if you think Thomas Jefferson must have liked blacks because he had sex with Sally Hemings, then this art is for you.

My first thought when I saw these newly revealed images was why people needed to see them to realize that Frazetta had real problems with Africans (and perhaps blacks in general). The white slavery/inter-racial trope is a small corner of the porn world and usually presented in the spirit of fun and games; a fetish which Frazetta would no doubt have approved and appreciated. These new images, on the other hand, bring to mind Robert Crumb’s “When the Niggers take over America,” a work which has been interpreted with diminishing amounts of charity in recent years.

The illustration below, for example, is widely considered one of Frazetta’s greatest pen and ink works.

There is nothing subtle about the content here which makes its wide acceptance altogether more distasteful. The Frazetta “porn” is a shameful business which we can all collectively shake ours heads at but the same worldview was ladled out generously in much of his oeuvre.

The Tarzan of the comics (let’s forget about Burroughs for the moment) was, of course, deeply invested in white supremacy and purity; with the great apes afforded an even greater status than the Africans who appeared in them periodically. Hal Foster certainly couldn’t escape the siren (and, yes, racist) call at the core of the Tarzan narrative when he famously drew the character in the newspapers back in the 30s.

His acolytes like Frazetta could be seen trafficking in similar imagery in the pages of Thun’da towards the latter half of the 20th century. Russ Heath in the story, “Yellow Heat,” is yet another famous exemplar of this trend in adventure and horror comics. If there is any desire to heap praise on the laughable civil rights comics of the EC line, then one can look no further than these comics for their counter examples.

The standard defense for these images is that Africans “really” were that way—in that they really sharpened their teeth and really ate people. And, yes, were generally crowd surfed by white people (metaphorically speaking of course). Presumably, the images on display in Frazetta’s porn stash will be diagnosed as an acute insight into black sexuality or at the very least a liberating moment of self-revelation and self-parody; a plumbing of the very depths of the human soul. On this last point, at least, I think we can all find some space for agreement.

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Update: In comments, Frazetta’s images above have been compared to the tradition of Asian erotic temple art of which the most famous example must be the reliefs at Khajuraho. I guess there are worse ways to insult the Indians.

Sequential Splortch

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I wrote this some years back for a sex toy website. I don’t think they ever published it…so I thought I’d finally run it here.
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“You think they [comic books] are mostly about floppy-eared bunnies, attractive little mice and chipmunks? Go take a look.”
—cover flap of Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent

Erotic comics first surfaced in the dim dawn of pre-history among cave-dwelling ungulate-fetishists who, in animistic rituals, drew upon the stone walls choice mammoths with whom they wished to have congress. Some time thereafter, in the early 1800s, the Japanese developed…SHUNGA! Which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Perhaps the most famous shunga illustration is Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which, coincidentally, also features a rape-by-mammoth. Ha ha. No, of course it doesn’t. It actually features a rape-by-octopi.

Lascivious, decadent Europeans, inspired by such hot-and-heavy Japanese print-making, erected sophisticated fantastic visions of their own. Here, for example, turn-of-the-century Brit Aubrey Beardsley makes a subtle phallic reference.

Can We Get More Animation Down There, Please?

If you studied the pictures above very closely, you probably need to stop and take a deep breath. If you examined them somewhat more cursorily, you probably noticed that they’re not actually comics — just influential genital progenitors, as it were. Comics as we know them coalesced as a form in the early 1900s. At first, of course, they were mostly aimed at kids, so sexual content tended to be muted. Winsor McCay drew the occasional picture of a woman in bed with a warthog, but that was about as racy as it got.

No form can escape filth forever, though. By the 1920s, cutesy childhood icons were frolicking like hardened whores across the pages of crude 4″ x 6″ pamphlets known as Tijuana Bibles. Violating propriety and copyright with equal vigor, these eight-page narratives featured such familiar faces as Popeye, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and the eternally underage Little Orphan Annie demonstrating the use of heretofore unillustrated appendages.

Tijuana Bibles were most popular during the Great Depression, when most people were too poor to afford orgasms. During the late 50s, though, men’s magazines began to publish real photographic evidence that anatomy existed, stimulating the poor Tijuana Bibles right out of existence.

Balling with Gags

Luckily, the girly mags were a fickle bunch; photos may have been their true love, but they inevitably had a passel of mistresses on the side. These included gag cartoons. From Eldon Didini to Jack Cole (of Plastic Man fame) to Dan DeCarlo (of Archie fame), some of the biggest names in comicdom set their work atop clever captions like “The job is yours, Miss Bigelow, providing you fit just as well on my partner’s lap!” and “Two aphrodisiacs please!” Not that anyone was looking at the captions, exactly.

The pinnacle of men’s magazine cartooning is generally considered to be Little Annie Fanny, a strip cartoon which ran sporadically in Playboy from 1962 to 1988. Written by Mad-magazine alum Harvey Kurtzman and lavishly painted by Will Elder the titular character (in various senses) was an empty-headed naif who kept stumbling into preposterous situations, upon pop cultural tropes ripe for satire, and out of her clothes. Mostly that last one.

Under Where?

Men’s magazine illustrations were aimed at a broad, mainstream audience, and so were fairly tame by earlier illustrational standards; visible penises were a no no, much less octopus rape. With the late sixties underground comix movement, though, more idiosyncratic perversions became available from a head-shop near you. S. Clay Wilson’s raunchy fornicating bikers, satyrs, and pirates led the way, but even more influential was R. Crumb, whose comics indulged his fetish for large, powerful women and their hindquarters.

In Europe, one of the most influential underground cartoonists was Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. His well-endowed, pumped-up, and frequently pumping leather-clad, uniform-sporting men were hugely popular through the 60s and 70s, and remain widely recognized and (ahem) utilized today. Laaksonen was even an important influence on the visual style of the Village People. Eat your heart out, Jack Kirby.

The undergrounds opened the way for independent comics in general, and for more sexual and personal material in particular. At the extreme is Johnny Ryan, whose supremely and surreally filthy comics have at various points featured disembodied invisible anuses, severed butt-cracks, quarts of Dracula piss, and sex with midget Hitler. Much more literal is David Heatley’s “My Sexual History” which, like the title says, is a chronicle of every sexual encounter the author has ever had. Other autobio creators, from Jeff Brown, to Julie Doucet, to (my favorite) Ariel Schrag, have also chronicled their sexual lives in detail that veers between the arousing and the more-information-than-I-really-want-to-know-thanks.

One of the most acclaimed independent adult titles is Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s 80s series, Omaha the Cat Dancer, a sexually explicit soap-opera with funny animals (the title character is actually a feline…more or less.) Equally idiosyncratic is Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s 2006 Lost Girls, which features Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Alice from Alice in Wonderland musing on matters philosophical while engaging in a marathon of sexual trysts.

Porn actually played a vital part in the survival of one of the most respected independent comics publishers. Fantagraphics — whose catalog includes Dan Clowes and Los Bros Hernandez — was poised to go out of business in the early 90s. It was saved in part by the launch of its adult-oriented Eros line. It’s kind of funny to think that there would be no Chris Ware as we know him without concupiscence and gushing bodily fluids (though that’s true for all of us, I suppose.)

Foreign Trollops

Influential European comics with sexual themes began to appear in the early 1960s. Guido Crepax’s character Valentina started her erotic run in the Italian comics magazine Linus in 1963; Crepax would go on to work on graphic adaptations of porn classics like Histoire d’O and Justine.

Another Italian, Milo Manera, is perhaps Crepax’s most famous heir. Both artists have had work appear in Heavy Metal, an American offshoot of the early 70s French magazine Métal Hurlant. Heavy Metal’s Europulp-fantasy-smut remains a touchstone in American comics, from Frank Thorne’s Lann to Michael Manning’s ongoing fetish, gender-bending, humidly romantic, paranoid cyberpunk opus In A Metal Web.

The real top in recent foreign-on-American porn, though, has been Japan. Manga, or Japanese comic books have penetrated…er…pushed their way into…um…stickily saturated? Anyway, they’re very popular in America, and porn manga is no exception. For those who want to be taken seriously by your local otaku, Japanese porn is usually referred to as hentai. Hentai can refer to any number of fetishes, some of which (giant breasts) are fairly mainstream, others of which (girls-with-penises, tentacle rape, or sex with underage-appearing girls, known as lolicon) are less so.

From a western perspective the most unusual hentai genre,is probably yaoi. Yaoi depicts homosexual relationships between beautiful men, but it is created by and marketed mostly to women. In contrast to gay porn for gay men, yaoi tends to feature complex characters and intricate relationships — it is, in other words, a romance with lots of gay sex added. Pundits often like to claim that girls like yaoi because identifying with boys is more distant and somehow safer. Probably the real appeal is more straightforward (ahem) — if you like to look at pictures of hot guys having sex, surely two is better than one? In any case, yaoi has proved quite popular with het- (and not-so-het) female readers in the U.S. Among the most popular titles featuring boy-romance are Maki Murikami’s Gravitation and Sanami Matoh’s Fake. More consistently explicit fare includes Youka Nitta’s Embracing Love and Fumi Yoshinaga’s Gerard and Jacques.

In the Future, There Will Be Only Virtual Sex

Paper publishing is currently in the middle of a death-spiral, and porn comics have certainly taken a hit as well. Yes, a wide array continue to be available for all tastes, from furry-friendly-fare like Richard Moore’s Short Strokes to trans fetish fare like Roberto Baldazzini’s Bayba: The 110 BJ’s and Christian Zanier’s Banana Games to always-popular vampire erotica like Frans Mensink’s Kristina Queen of Vampires . But it seems likely that in the near future most explicitly pornographic comics will be online — like current Indian semi-sensation Savita Bhabi series. Dirty drawings never die…they just digitize.

Gluey Tart: Porn Cozies for Everyone!

Posted on August 15, 2012 by kinukitty

So, I was reading an article the other day (yes, I sometimes read things that aren’t yaoi manga or fan fiction) (OK, it was Marie Claire, but bear with me; there are larger truths afoot), and it turns out that – get ready for it – women are reading porn on their Kindles! (And Nooks and whatever. You’re always a Kindle to me.)

Said article immediately dove for feminist cred by talking about our foremamas reading Jane Eyre under a cover because women aren’t supposed to have active fantasy lives and so on, and then it surfaced with the obligatory statement that the important thing about the Fifty Shades of Grey-porn-for-female-lady-person-led renaissance is that this porn is safe because it’s by women, for women. Like knitted craft projects.

I’m not entirely cynical about this, mind you. Many of us realized immediately that, like the Internet, the Kindle was made for porn. On the bus, if we so desire. Well, porn and romance. There are multiple points of intersection, as it were, between the two, and Fifty Shades of Grey is obviously not the first by-women-for-women piece of romantic porn to grace the screens of our nation’s e-readers. As soon as the Kindle floodgates were opened, a new industry was born – adapting romantic fan fiction (sometimes literally, sometime figuratively) into novellas to sell for sometimes as little as 99 cents on Kindle. And apparently this anonymous experience has cranked up demand and normalized the genre to the point that those bitches on the view are chatting about it on morning television. To which the proper response is “Huzzah!”

I am a huge fan of porn. It eases the discomfort of modern life, taking its place with naptime as another of nature’s soft nurses. Or something. And with apologies to Shakespeare, of course. The thing about porn is that it has to be broken down into much smaller cross sections than most genre lit. I like mysteries, for instance, and there are certain kinds of mysteries I like better than others, but if Christopher Bookmyre or Ian Rankin aren’t available, I can also amuse myself with James Patterson or Dean Koontz or even something starring a cat. If I’m into, say, gay romantic shape-shifting dominance and submission cowboys (which I’m not, by the way – that was just an example. Shape-shifting isn’t my cup of wereleopard), I’m not going to be able to make due with, say, het water sports. And vice versa, surely.

Fortunately, the Kindle romantic porn industry ensures I’ll never have to face such a dilemma, because whatever your kink, they’ve got you covered. There are scores of novels that never would have gotten printed because their appeal isn’t broad enough; offering digital versions, though, is apparently cost effective. Fan fiction writers such as E.L. James (who initially wrote Fifty Shades of Gray as Twilight fan fiction) can shift from writing for free on sometimes-obscure websites, change the names of the characters, and sell short stories, novellas, and full-length books online. (This was happening before e-books, with websites like Loose Id selling PDFs, but that was still not exactly mainstream.) I unapologetically love fan fiction, and I am excited for E.L. James; turning fan fiction into legit publishing can only be a good thing.

You say America’s housewives don’t have access to the filthy perversion of their choice? Let them read e-books!

Now, I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, and I’m not going to – but not because it probably sucks. It just isn’t my kind of porn. I don’t care if it’s reasonably well-written or if the prose is so tedious as to suck out your very soul through one of those tiny little straws you use to stir your coffee. Because my mother, who is as likely to embrace porn as she is to come out as a MTF transsexual alien Siamese cat, bought Fifty Shades of Grey at Wal-Mart. She hasn’t had time to read it yet because she’s not done with that heart-warming series by Jan Karon about the small-town priest, so in the meantime, she lent it to my aunt, who did read it, despite being a church-going Southern Baptist and, as such, even less porn-adjacent than my mother. (My aunt’s critique was pretty damning, though: “It wasn’t that dirty.”)

But never mind that. This is a giant step forward for all mankind! Let us all download porn onto our Kindles and celebrate.

Black Leather Corset of Dune

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared quite a while ago in the Chicago Reader.
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Porn is the genre fiction that dare not speak its name. When you think of genre, you tend to think of sci-fi, detective, horror, western, romance, or the like. Porn doesn’t make the list — instead, its set off in a box by itself, for special censure or (less often) praise. Yet, when you look closely, porn doesn’t really seem all that anomalous. Like other genre art, it’s broadly popular, has its own predictable tropes, and appeals primarily (though not exclusively) to one gender. Porn isn’t an absolute evil ruining our children, nor is it a liberating force releasing the power of our repressed sexuality. It’s just another marketing niche.

This isn’t meant as a sneer. On the contrary, once you stop thinking about porn as moral outrage or anthropological curiosity and start thinking of it as just another pulp genre, it’s a lot easier to see its virtues and, for that matter, to put its vices in context. Like other great genre narratives — Agatha Christie’s novels, say, or John Carpenter’s movies — good porn fulfills the most obvious expectations in surprising ways while veering vertiginously between extreme technical competence and grungy amateurism. Most of all, porn, like pulp, is studiously uninterested in good taste, which means that the best examples have an energy and an imagination hard to duplicate in more sedate forms.

There’s certainly nothing sedate about Patrick Conlon and Michael Manning’s Tranceptor comic book series. The titular (in various ways) Tranceptors are a kind of female dominatrix priesthood who ride through a post-apocalyptic landscape in carriages pulled by buxom leather-clad fetish horse-girls and/or well-hung leather-clad fetish horse boys. Our heroine (called simply Tranceptor) has inventively intimate encounters with her horse-girls (chains, water, lather, various attachments), with another Tranceptor named Ravanna, and with Hyu, the cute station sub-groom who looks decidedly underage. Most spectacularly, the Tranceptor is raped by Ravanna’s pal, a disgusting mutant-lizard thing named Sslthsss. (There is no apparent lasting physical or psychological damage — the Tranceptors are a tough bunch.)

This is all trashy, stylish good fun. Conlon’s a tattoo artist, and he and Manning have that testosterone swagger down cold — the first Tranceptor volume, for example, opens with a tour de force of faux noir, sensual solid black shadows and stark whites washing over piles of fetish gear and a voluptuously writhing sleeping female form, complete with obligatory ass shots and nipple eruptions. The cynically exploitative surface flash is certainly part of the charm — but it isn’t the only thing going on, either.

Like all pulp, porn tends to cross-pollinate with other genres. The sci-fi/sex fertilization has been particularly intense. *Heavy Metal* is an obvious touchstone, but a big part of the avant-garde sf movement from the seventies on has involved explicit erotica. Writers like Samuel R. Delaney and John Varley lovingly fetishize gender transformation and interspecies intercourse — and include a fair bit of explicit sex. One paradigmatic example, Piers Anthony’s semi-masterpiece “The Barn,” features an alternate universe where some human beings are deliberately brain-damaged and then placed in barns where they are bred and milked like cattle. Our dimension-hopping protagonist gets to offer his services as stud as the story boldly explores the realm where “controversial and brave” slides right into “surreptitious stroke material.”

What’s especially enjoyable about Tranceptor is that, while it is in many ways heir to this tradition, it is much more comfortable with its pulp status than its highbrow predecessors. Delaney uses his forays into porn in a contradictory (but hardly unique) effort to cement his bona fides as a highbrow artist. Piers Anthony is a bit more confused — but it is certainly clear that he is conflicted about his status as pornographer. That’s not all to the bad — the intense anxiety of “The Barn” is part of what gives it its squicky charge. But there is also something to be said for being on top of your shit. Conlon and Manning’s perversion isn’t so much fraught as it is enthusiastically delectable. Probably the best image in the comic is a panel of Sslthsss, arms and legs wrapped around a structural beam, head resting on his hands, as he watches his mistress below him suck off one of her horse boys. The lizard-thing looks like a happy cat, thoroughly entertained. And to complete the picture, he’s got one of the station men named Raika tied up and dangling from his tail, and his outsized member is dripping cum on the poor guy’s head.

In high-brow sf — or for that matter, in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s historical/porn/literary hybrid comic *Lost Girls* — this sort of perversity tends to serve as a labored allegory of freedom, mutability, or desire. It’s the pulpy goodness about which the highbrow wax nostalgically literary — as when Moore, for example, laboriously leads his characters into a roomful of costumes in order to drive home the joys of role-playing. In *Tranceptor*, on the other hand, the perversion is weighted, not by exegesis, but by pulp tropes. For example the Tranceptors are treated like typical mysterious sci-fi matriarch — say one of the Bene Gesserit from *Dune*. In this context, when the seated Ravanna reaches into Raika’s pants and casually pulls out his penis, it comes across as both funny and weirdly transgressive — especially since Sslthsss is holding his arms so he can’t escape. Over the following two-page hand-job, Conlon and Manning use a range of hysterically intricate motion lines to show her finger motions, while all the time she natters on like a typical scheming villainess.

The last panel of the sequence, in which we are looking down at Ravanna from Raika’s viewpoint as she looks up at him — is a blend of dominant and submissive fantasies bound up with genre clichés into one supremely sexy package.

In Michael Manning’s Spidergarden series, moments like this are woven together in a seamless whole, creating a world in which gender, sexuality, and identity flow and break down in a humid orgy of paranoia and soap-opera romance. Tranceptor hasn’t yet quite reached those heights, though their are hints that it might. Most promising is the series obsessive doubling. The second issue is split between the scenes with the Tranceptor (so bright they almost seem washed out) and those with Ravanna (very dark, with half-toned greys against solid black backgrounds and the shadowy Sslthsss lurking in the background.) The dark/light binary is mirrored and extended by others; there are two identical horse girls, two identical horse boys, two Tranceptors, two young men taken from the station (Raika by Ravanna, Hyu by the Tranceptor.) Where all this is leading isn’t exactly clear at this point in the series. But good vs. evil and blatantly contrasting nemeses are tried and true genre devices — and a genre device is, really, just another name for a particular cathexes of possibility and desire. In this sense, porn isn’t just a genre: it’s the genre. No wonder Conlon and Manning are able to make such perfect pulp out of it.

Your Grandpa’s Porn

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Since we’re kind of having a porn week on HU (Michael Arthur’s article on yaoi here, my article on Jenna Jameson here, I thought I’d end up with this review I first published on Splice Today.
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When I ordered the DVD American Nudie Classics, I had somehow thought it would be a documentary about classic (if that’s the word I want) pornography from the early days of American cinema. Or, failing that, I figured it would include a handful of porn reels along with some sort of contextual information. After all, I figured, anyone buying this is doing so out of historical interest, right?

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