Tim Pilcher - Erotic Comics Volume 2: .

A hentai-inspired Wongoboy painting by British artist Jason Atomic.

EROTIC COMICS

A GRAPHIC HISTORY

VOLUME 2

FROM THE 1970s TO THE PRESENT DAY

Tim pilcher

Foreword By Alan Moore

First published in the United Kingdom in 2008 by

ILEX

210 High Street

Lewes

East Sussex BN7 2NS

www.ilex-press.com

Copyright 2008 The Ilex Press Limited

This book was conceived by:

ILEX

Cambridge

England

Publisher: Alastair Campbell

Creative Director: Peter Bridgewater

Managing Editor: Chris Gatcum

Senior Editor: Adam Juniper

Art Director: Julie Weir

Designer: Jonathan Raimes

Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including sthese words being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-907579-69-1

ePub ISBN 978-1-908150-20-2

Mobi ISBN 978-1-78157-148-4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form, or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage-and-retrieval systems without the prior permission of the publisher.

Printed and bound in Thailand

For more information on this title please visit:
www.web-linked.com/erc2uk

In memory of Steve Whitaker, Will Elder, and Dave Stevens.

A Vaughn Bod original reworked by his son Mark for SF Surfboards.

Pornographyfrom the Greek prn or harlot, plus graphos, to draw or to writeis an impulse as old as mankind. We encountered it during our cultural infancy, crouched in our caves with a Willendorf Venus for company, and it was there during our individual childhoods, scrawled in hurried ballpoint on lavatory walls or buried in poorly delivered and confusing dirty jokes at playtime. Even then, behind the bike sheds, we were made aware that even if we didnt really understand them, these were narratives best not repeated to our parents. These were routines that could get us into trouble, although what variety of trouble wasnt made entirely clear. Perhaps it boiled down to What if your mother heard you tell that story? What if she found that dog-eared copy of The Carpetbaggers that always falls open at the lesbian scene? What if she came across the dirty picture that you did? Essentially, What if somebody like your mother, someone decent, knew that you had sexual thoughts and a developing sexual identity? What then?

And so we moderate our language and reserve our bawdiness for those of our own age and gender whom we know to be as secretly depraved as we. We take on a selective furtiveness and, with it, a whole plethora of ideas and assumptions: we assume that there exists a class of people, decent people who include our parents, clergymen, and teachers in their number, who have never entertained a lewd idea in their whole lives. We furthermore assume that we ourselves number among the indecent, debased minority that is prone to such notions, and that wed be best advised to keep them to ourselves, not realizing that this is exactly the same thing that everybody else is doing. We therefore needlessly incorporate degrees of shame into our sexual makeup, both as individuals and societies, which we may find hard to shake off, even when we know better.

The history of the churchs or states attempts to either stamp out or control erotic impulses in art is documented elsewhere and is probably best summarized by pointing out that such attempts have evidently not worked, or have worked only imperfectly: pornography is now more widespread and more prevalent than ever, and yet it is still most often both created and enjoyed in guilty anonymity. Effectively, we have been given an increased range of material to feel bad about, the worst of both worlds. Even so, it seems clear that the long war of attrition waged against pornography is no more winnable than is a war on terror, drugs, or any other such abstraction. The debate on whether there should be pornography or not is made irrelevant by the plain fact of its continuing existence. Legislation proving useless, this is no longer a legislative argument. We might be better off in moving the discussion onto ethical and aesthetic grounds, accepting that pornography exists and simply asking if its any good or not, either in terms of execution or as seen from a socio-political perspective.

It strikes me that the comic medium, with its long history of involvement with erotica, has a particular advantage over other media when it comes to a successful visual depiction of the sex act: like the carefully posed nudes in a Victorian tableaux vivant theatrical extravaganza, figures in a comic panel are not moving. All of the inelegantand indeed sometimes comicalcontortions of the act itself can be excised, can be imagined happening somewhere between the panels, leaving only the most perfectly constructed images and moments for consideration. This allows a necessary aesthetic distance for the author and the viewer both, enabling them either to tell or to enjoy a story without the distraction of the leading mans unfortunate facial expressions or the guttural outbursts and the squelching meat percussion of the soundtrack. More importantly, since all the players are imaginary and are made from nothing except ink and paper, without need for models/actresses/whatever, then the viewer can be reassured that there is not some ugly and coercive backstory behind the leading ladys eager-to-please smile. All that we are seeing truly naked and exposed in an erotic comic story is the sexual imagination of the authors, and that, ultimately, is the only thing that we can criticize or judge the work by. If a sexual idea is morbid or banal, if it is expressed poorly, let us say so without fear that we shall end up on the side of censorship, denial, or repression.

Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy share an intimate moment in the fnal volume of Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbies Lost Girls trilogy.

Melinda Gebbies back cover design to Lost Girls Volume 3.

If erotica is to be taken seriously as a field, if it is to thrive and to develop, then it must become discriminating and show that it has some sort of standards; be something that we can still respect the morning after. Since all such aesthetic judgments are subjective, then by all means let us argue fiercely over where we set the bar, just as long as we all agree there is one, a dividing line that separates the works of genuine delight from those of no more value than the crumpled Kleenex that accompanied their genesis.

Within this current, beautifully presented volume it is likely that the reader will, according to his or her individual tastes, find pieces from both categories. When it comes to deciding which is which, try to be merciful and to remember that creating a graceful or satisfying pornographic work is much more difficult than it appears, perhaps because there are few good examples of the genre thus far upon which to model such a work. Pornography is very much like adolescent poetry: theres a great deal of it about because it is a very easy thing to do, and much of it is absolutely fucking dreadful because it is very hard to do it well. Please bear in mind that, being married to the exquisite Melinda Gebbie, I have let myself become a porn-snob with impractically high standards.