Sex In the Comics: Sex and Fantasy

Continuing transcribing the 1985 book Sex In the Comics (previous chapter here, the one before it hyperlinked there, and so forth), this is from the chapter Sex and Fantasy. As usual, I'm not 100% in agreement with the author's taste in comics or what was acceptable 30 years ago, but here's the text.

Of all the different categories into which comics can be conveniently pigeonholed, fantasy is the most amorphous. It extends from the realm of science fiction/science fantasy all the way to the outer limits of the visionary, the bizarre, and the occult. However it is in the guise of epic sagas set in the long-ago past or far-distant future (unless the action takes place in other dimensions) that the genre has acquired its most devoted following. Freed from the mundane requirements of time, place, and history, these tales of fantasy have also freed themselves to a remarkable extent from the requirements of linear logic and straightforward plotting.

Heroic fantasy has long been one of the mainstays of pulp and paperback fiction. Its success in the comics came more recently, spearheaded by the comic-book adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Conan in 1970. As originally conceived by Howard, Conan was a creation to delight the heart of the most hard-bitten Nazi. A primitive brute whose only concerns were survival and power, he hacked and clawed his way to the top of the heap without regard for decency, humanity or reason. The comic-book version, though considerably watered down, was still strong stuff, and its excesses were tolerated only because they purportedly occurred in a barbarian age before the dawn of history. Conan's lust for carnage was equaled only by his carnal lust. Once his appetites were satiated, he treated his bedmates with the same cruel contempt whether they were harlots, merchants' wives or princesses. The sight of Conan hurling some helpless wench over the city's ramparts down to the slimy moat below must have provided strong titillation for the acne-ridden adolescents who accounted for most of the book's readership.

Most of Conan's matings were mechanical copulations, never actually depicted though strongly hinted at. Once in a while, however, he would encounter a woman able to fill his barbarian's heart with something akin to admiration. Such was Bêlit, a pirate chieftain who was his only love and confidante (appropriately, she left him). In addition Conan, whose wits did not match his brain, often found himself bested in the games of both love and war by witch queens and enchantresses whose magic philters and wizardly tricks proved more than a match for his warrior's blade (hence the term “sword-and-sorcery” applied to this kind of tale.) These women provided an ironic Freudian twist to what would otherwise have been a monotonous series of fornicatings.

The popularity of the Conan strip soon led to a spinoff in the form of a Red Sonja comic book. The redheaded heroine was as hot-tempered as she was well-endowed: when the king of Hyrkania showed himself too pressing in his amorous advances she simply cut him open. After that exploit she was forced into exile, took up pillaging as her trade and crossed swords with Conan as well as myriad other male opponents. Because of the double standards still prevalent in comic books, on the convenient pretext of vows of chastity, she was never allowed (unlike Conan) to enjoy triumphs in the bedroom as well as on the battlefield. She came close, but her otherwise scanty chain-mail bikini provided too great an obstacle to awestruck males who came into bodily contact with her. Red Sonja owed much of her success to the artistry of Frank Thorne, whose depiction of the fiery-haired amazon remains the definitive one.

After leaving Sonja, Thorne went to draw his own barbarian warrior woman, Ghita of Alazarr, a “tacky blend of Fanny Hill,Barbarella, and Joan of Arc,” as her creator characterized her. The blonde-maned beauty gains her skills through a monstrous coupling with the resurrected empire of the Alizarrian armies. The general dies a second time from this encounter (presumably with a grin on his face), but the indestructible Ghita, thus energized beyond belief, leads the troops to victory over the dreaded half-human Trolls. Along the way she makes liberal love with friend and foe alike, without consideration of race, religion, ethnic origin, or even sex. Her acclaimed triumphs in this field come when she tangles with a protozoan creature from the deeps and subjugates it to her will, and above all when she succeeds in rousing the impotent king of the Trolls, the better to bring him to his knees. Thorne generously sprinkles his depictions of these various shenanigans with the salt of bawdy humor.

Among sword-and-sorcery strips Ghita of Alizarr shines with special radiance. The action is fast, the dialogue snappy, the magic appropriately mystifying. The obligatory scenes of violence seem to float in a fluid, almost balletic mise-en-scène. Best of all is Ghita herself, free in body and spirit, the vibrant, irrepressible, irresistible whore-goddess of myth and legend. In her bold, triumphant nakedness she appears the very embodiment of Aphrodite, come down one time from Olympus to mingle freely among the mortals for a fight and a tumble.

Once fantasy had been established in the minds of readers as a genre with no limits of any kind, it was inevitable that the most outré of all American cartoonists, Richard Corben, would be drawn to it. Of the unholy trinity that formed the major themes of underground comics—sex, drugs, and social protest—only the first was an enduring obsession with Corben, and the boundless domain of heroic fantasy allowed him to explore his theme with unprecedented license. His first foray into the genre came with Bloodstar, a loose adaptation of a tale by the ubiquitous Robert E. Howard. A bizarre commingling of Greek and Norse Mythologies, with a light admixture of science fiction, it embodies the sum of Corben's fantasies and nightmares in its fantastic array of repulsive-looking monsters, incredibly muscled heroes, and impossibly big-busted maidens. Bloodstar also embodies Corben's peculiar vision of heroic sex and heroic death as the twin saviors of mankind.

Compared to Bloodstar, Corben's Beast of Wolfton looks almost sedate, but the appearance is deceptive. The plot is simple and appears to follow the well-worn formula of the fairy tale, in this case Beauty and the Beast. In it a werewolf—actually a chief under the influence of an evil spell—can only be restored to his former self by the love of a beautiful woman. When he saves the pulchritudinous Lady Chabita from a gang of would-be rapists, he is rewarded with her favors, and his grunts of ecstasy match the grunts he emits in battle (the equation of sex with warfare is a Corben specialty). After the climax, when the hero has regained both his composure and his human appearance, the lady puts an axe through him and wanders off to give birth to “a very strange child”. Both sex and war are indeed the dangerous sports in Corben's universe.

In these stories even the layout of the pages takes on an orgasmic quality, breaking out in spasms of violent, discontinuous action splattered with bursts of color. The demons here are all too real, and the light of reason will not exorcise them. But in Corben's world, while the sleep of reason does not produce monsters, it also produces heroes to slay them.

Though better known for his science-fiction stories, Wallace Wood also ventured into the fantasy realm with a succession of short tales done for various publishers over the years, such as The Curse and Animan. These were in fact pretexts for the cartoonist to display his knowing appreciation of feminine flesh. In the face of peril Wood's women all had the same response: to divest themselves of as much clothing as possible and then run into the strong arms of the waiting hero. In retrospect these suggestive tableaux seem to have been warm-ups for the “dirty” comics the cartoonist drew in the latter part of his career, up until his untimely death in 1981.

Next to the Americans, Spanish cartoonists have been the most prolific producers of heroic fantasy. One major reason, aside from market demand, is the Spaniards' strong grounding of aesthetics and draftsmanship. Their knowledge of human anatomy, for instance, is particularly well suited to a field where the depiction of the human body is all-important. Be that as it may, Spanish fantasy strips are very expressive as well as quite suggestive in their delineation of erotic interplay in even the most extreme circumstances.

Among Spanish cartoonists there is probably none better known in the United States than Esteban Maroto, whose work has appeared in many of this country's comics publications. Maroto's barbarian hero Wolff bears a strong resemblance to Conan in his sullenness, valor, and sexual prowess. Unlike Conan, however, this barbarian never allows himself to be two-timed by the gorgeous creatures he meets on his perilous errands. Sultry Amazon queens may offer him half their kingdoms for his strong hand, alluring sorceresses may concoct magic charms in an effort to enslave him to their desires, but all in vain. Wolff stays obdurately faithful to his quest—whose object seems as compelling to him as it remains vague to readers.

While Maroto never openly depicted scenes of blatant sexuality(after all, Franco was still pretty much alive then). His image conveys a sensuousness and a broad suggestiveness that were even more intriguing in what they concealed than what they showed. Few comic-strip artists have been able, as Maroto was, to portray feminine beauty with such delicacy of tone. The flesh seems to quiver in expectation, and the sexual tension is apparent every time the hero comes into contact, however formally, with one of the female protagonists. If for nothing else, Wolff may be remembered for its gallery of lovely women and for the aura of subtle eroticism that pervades the strip.

About the same time—in the early seventies—Victor de la Fuente was also trying to break out of the oppressive straitjacket imposed by the Spanish authorities, and he too discovered that fantasy was the best way to achieve his goal. In his best work in the field, Haxtur, de la Fuente did not so much depict heroic fantasy as tie it to his purpose. Haxtur was a thinly disguised denunciation of all regimes, but since the one the hero was battling was set in prehistoric times, the author's intention escaped the censors. As heroic fantasy, Haxtur was very good of its kind, and the obligatory erotic encounters (there were never as many as Wolff) were handled with mastery and sometimes a strange lyricism. Between them, Maroto and de la Fuente established the artistic standard for most of the Spanish fantasy strips to follow.

Vincent Segrelles, by contrast, relies more on plot—farfetched though it often is—than on sheer draftsmanship in his tales of a moody taciturn Mercenary (no name given) whose amorous exploits rival his heroic deeds. In his first adventure the Mercenary is hired to retrieve a rich man's wife who is being held for ransom. He rescues her from her abductors, and the grateful woman rewards him with her favors. But when he refuses her plea to take her away with him and insists upon returning her to her husband in exchange for his customary fee in these matters, she accuses him of rape. Deprived of his monetary reward and fleeing for his life, he comes upon a sky island peopled and ruled exclusively by women. There he is freed by one of the women, who gives her life for the love of the handsome hero (a familiar move), and he escapes in a weird contraption in the company of a woman captive—whom he later also abandons to follow his mercenary calling.

The Mercenary's plot holds fascination on several counts. First, it brings to the fore, perhaps more clearly than any other, the aura of sexuality that permeates all the heroic fantasy strips, an aura that is indeed one of their strongest selling points. On a related level, it epitomizes the sharply misogynistic strain that is at the heart of the genre's appeal. Women are depicted as helpless and willing victims, or conversely, as treacherous, emasculating ogresses—an adolescent's view of feminine mystique.

Few are the contemporary Spanish artists who haven't at least dipped their toes into fantasy's dark waters. Two of them are especially noteworthy in this field, José-Maria Béa has woven disturbing tales of perverse old wizards and lubricious young maidens into little morality plays suffused with black humor and twisted lessons. The work of Jaime Brocal Remohi is such a blatant ripoff of Conan, right down to the hero's name—Kronan!—that such impudence deserves mention in and of itself, Kronan and it's later clone, Taar, display all the situations familiar with the sword-and-sorcery genre but go Conan one better by depicting the protagonist's numerous sexual encounters in elaborate detail of closely entwined bodies and rapturous faces.

In addition two veterans have entered or re-entered the lists in the late seventies and early eighties. Maroto came back with a vengeance in Dax el Guererro (Dax the Warrior) in which the hero carried on with equal fervor in his prowess on the battlefield and the bedroom in an explicit manner that would not have been tolerated in the less lenient era of late Francoism.

Dax is pretty much the macho hero, but it took another, tough-guy artist, Jordi Bernet (hitherto known for his gritty, take-no-prisoners renditions of gangster melodramas) to create a tough-gal heroine who could outfight, outwit, and outclass all her male opponents with a mix of guile, gall and sex that Spanish readers have found irresistible. Sarvan (thus named for the dark-maned heroine) runs Thorne's Ghita (and her most recent avatar Lann) in a close second for the title of second sexiest fantasy strip.

It fell to the Italians, however, to create a heroic fantasy to end all heroic fantasies, with The Ape, written by Silvero Pisu and drawn by Milo Manara, the genre o'er-leaps itself into giant bounds of absurdity and wretched excess. Freely based on the classic Chinese epic The Westward Pilgrimage, the strip relates the exploits of a young ape born of stone and gifted with supernatural strength. Armed with his only weapon, a golden rod, the Ape challenges the powers of both Heaven and Earth, but his attempts to restore order and peace to the Celestial Empire brings only turmoil. His sex life is no less agitated as he strives vainly to achieve the perfect union with whatever female (or hermaphrodite) chances his way. The Ape's sexual innocence contrasts ironically with his sexual vigor, and his mates never tire of taking advantage of his gullibility in worldly nature.

The joke, however, is always on the Ape's tormenters as the roused beast finally strikes back, wreaking vengeance on men and property alike. The ultimate joke is that the Ape at least exhibits some qualities—courage, generosity, compassion, honor—that have come to be recognized as human, while the humans only display animal fears and appetites; indeed, the more elevated their position, the more they wallow in sheer animality. The Celestial Emperor himself spends most of his time enjoying the attentions of his concubines; when he finally finds time to meet the Ape; he forgets his duties so far as to make a play for his guest's girlfriend. Is it any wonder that our primate goes ape at the sight of such corruption? The Ape is less a stright tale of heroic fantasy than a send-up of the whole genre, which the authors view as a self-indulgent justification of bestiality and barbarism.

All heroic fantasy tales share a common longing for a simpler time,when men were uncompromisingly men (and women were glad of it, as the old vaudeville joke goes), when sex was seen as an uncomplicated thing, blissfully divorced from thought, conscience or the findings of Freud. As a genre that appeals primarily to adolescence, heroic fantasy presents an appropriately sophomoric view of sex, but it has the merit of stating the question forthrightly. Whether it comes up with the right answers is a different matter altogether.

Sex In the Comics: Sex and Violence

Here's more from a book called Sex in the Comics from 1985 that I got remaindered somewhere. There's little enough text that I may as well retype it in its entirety. The book exists mainly for the images, many of which are blown up much larger than they were originally. Most of the chapters are much dirtier than this one, which mostly covers mainstream comic strips. A big problem with the book (among several) is that many of the examples that were originally in color are not reprinted in color here. Hopefully the hyperlinks that lead you to examples which are will make up for that.

The previous two chapters were posted here and here. Here's the third one written by historian Maurice Horn:

Sex and violence have gone hand in hand since the dawn of mankind. The caveman, it is reported, were not averse to using a little violence in order to get a little sex from the cave women. The bible is full of episodes linking sex with violence, and vice versa, from Judith vamping Holofrenes out of his head to Salome peeling off to get John the Baptist's. Examples drawn from literature and history are so numerous that it would be possible to fill an entire book with them. In fact, so interlocked are sex and violence that they are usually pronounced in the same breath by fire-and-brimstone evangelicals and overzealous PTA mothers: sex and violence, even in sex 'n' violence (sex, it should be noted, always gets top billing—perhaps because it is a shorter word).

In the comics sex and violence—or rather eroticism and adventure, their classier relatives—made their appearance as funnies started moving away from mere humor to action and thrills. Comic-strip artists and their readers seemed to discover with some astonishment that couples could spend time in pursuit other than bickering or hurling at each other—such as going around the world in a plane, fighting for justice or putting down mad potentates. The call of adventure, the thrill of danger, the smell of victory are a heady brew, and they make they blood of hero and heroine alike course faster. Action, especially violent action, is an aphrodisiac. This was all the more striking in the early comic pages, where the comics tried to avoid giving even a hint of sex. But the images of a male and a female in close intimacy, facing some unspeakable peril, spoke for themselves.

In the beginning the world of comic-strip adventure was a world of unquestioned male supremacy. The hero was there to rescue his girl, seldom the other way around. In fact, the fierce exclusiveness of heterosexual bonding was one of the most common motivations for the action. The Phantom was forever saving Diana Palmer (sometimes willy-nilly) from the clutches of rivals. Mandrake eternally getting Narda out of the predicaments she always fell into, and Prince Valiant perennially vying for the favors of Aleta. Only much later did the all-powerful male hero find a female counterpart in the comic pages.

In the jungle, where issues and people alike are stripped down to the bare essentials, the theme emerged with crystal clarity: ”Me Tarzan, you Jane” was a concise, if ungrammatical, statement of the situation. And Jane had to wait, half-naked and helpless, subjected to the whips of sadistic jailers and the whims of jealousy-crazed warrior-queens, until the Lord of the Jungle saw fit to come to her rescue. Similarly, the white African queens and high priestesses Tarzan kept encountering were there to be subjugated, whether through manly force or virile charm, by the male hero.

The situation was not too different in The Phantom. In the very first episode the obscenely fat and libidinous Kabai Singh, chieftan of the dreaded Singh Brotherhood, imforms Diana (clad in a flimsy and revealing outfit) that she is to become one of his harem girls. To teach her a lesson in obedience, he has her suspended over a shark basin, but the Phantom intervenes in the nick of time (natch). Diana spends the remainder of the story in her slave-girl costume, her charms advantageously exposed, as she and her hero gamely face (often in tight embrace) Kabai's minions, finally making their escape from the Singh hideaway. This opening tale set the tone for many of the adventures to follow.

Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates wove adult themes into its narratives more often than any other strip of the Depression era. His major female characters as much as male—Pat Ryan, the Dragon Lady, Burma, later Terry himself—displayed an earthy, healthy sexual quality that ran as an undercurrent through their adventures. The love-hate relationship between Pat and the Dragon Lady is significant in this respect: they were thrown in the countless perils together, sometimes as allies, often as foes, and their intimacy acted as an aphrodisiac, even though they might return to an antagonistic relationship afterwards.

Nowhere were sex and violence as intertwined as in Terry. The sexual situations constantly shifted with the ebb and flow of the action: the couples in this strip were always forming, dissolving, and re-forming in endless combinations. Sexual triangles abounded (Caniff's characters were seldom models of fidelity): Dragon Lady/Pat/Burma. Pat/Burma/Terry, April Kane/Terry/Dragon Lady, and all the permutations allowed by the vital flow of the narrative. There were all physically attractive characters, and with the ever-present threat of danger hanging over them, the attraction was heightened and quite naturally strongest between those who happened to be closest together at any given moment.

The same adult outlook carried over to Caniff's Steve Canyon, at least until the hero unfortunately got married (heroes never marry, as Hercules and Samson learned to their sorrow). In addition, the violence took on explicitly sexual overtones: in one adventure a voluptuous blonde is exposed (in more ways than one) to the threat of being branded with a red-hot iron. Scenes of sexual torture and bondage occur often in this long-lasting strip, almost as a matter of course.

The concept of male dominance in the field of adventure took its knock with Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. As Juanita Coulson described her in The Comic Book Book, Sheena would swing through the pages of Tarzan-style, her long, blonde hair flying an fur bikini plastered to her 42-22-34 figure. I'm sure it brought the drooling male male readers back for more.” Sheena had a male companion named Bob constantly in tow, and she was always busy saving him. But I suspect that she got her thrills more from tussling with strong-bodied male antagonists than from mooning with her cardboard lover.

The jungle-queen theme was later expanded and made even more explicit in the Mexican comic book ,Roratonga. The beautiful title character is described as a green-eyed, light-skinned mulatta who holds sway over her male counterparts in an unmistakably sexual fashion.

The threat of danger or violence acting as a prelude or a fillip to sexual activity emerges more clearly in Modesty Blaise, in which the heroine and her faithful male assistant, Willie Garvin, obviously enjoy a relationship made even more intimate by the requirements of action and suspense. Here are the male and female roles, while still firmly delineated (most of the heavy violence is left to Willie), come closer to a position of parity (indeed, it is Willie who occupies the subordinate role).

Modesty is British and even in the heat of action tends to preserve a modicum of quality for which she is named. The Italian heroines are not so reserved in their proclivities and activities. Bearing evocative names—Jungla, Jacula, Angelia, Lucifera—and scant costumes (if clothed at all), they freely mix the games of sex with those of violence in close encounters of any kind.

When the first detective of the comics, Dick Tracy, arrived on the scene in 1931, suspenseful, violent, often brutal action arrived with him. The focus of the violence has often been Tracy's girlfriend (and later wife) Tess Trueheart, and this has given an obvious sexual undertone to the goings-on. It was to avenge the murder of Tess's father that Tracy joined the force, and it was because of Tess that he went through some of his most harrowing ordeals. Tess has been the frequent object of violence on the part of sadistic criminals trying to take revenge on her mate or to trap him. Violence, often prompted by strong sexual motivations, has been visited upon many of the strip's other female characters as well.

Sexual jealousy also proved a strong motive in Secret Agent X-9, especially during the short time that Dashiell Hammett was writing the strip and Alex Raymond drawing it. Two-timing, two-faced dames were a staple, as were the acts of violence they either committed or provoked—they were not above trying to seduce him or scratching out the eyes of their rivals. Later, when Raymond went on to create Rip Kirby, this theme acquired a more polished, committed, upper-class tone in the form of crime passionel committed by the rich and famous. Meanwhile, Austin Briggs, who inherited X-9, continued the tradition with his gallery of alluring Mata Haris and slinky femmes fatales who would resort to any amount of physical violence when enticement failed to achieve their ends.

The tradition was further carried on, often tongue-in-cheek, in Will Eisner's The Spirit. A multitude of homicidal sirens were always crossing the Spirit's path, from the much married (and often widowed) Silk Satin to the sultry P'Gell, and our hero never tired of tussling with them. Later on the Spirit became kind of an emcee or umpire—he enjoyed the sex while others indulged in the violence. Along with his creator the Spirit had grown older, and wiser in the ways of the world.

Latter-day gumshoes became even more outspoken in their attitude toward the twin (and fatal) attractions of violence of violence and sex. In the Mike Hammer strip Mickey Spillane, who wrote the scripts himself, hardly toned in his hero's “bash 'em or bed 'em” method of detection, to the despair of his syndicate editor, Jerry Iger. Despite its success the strip was continued because of his outcries from critics during the squeamish fifties. Later, during the more liberated seventies, Wallace Wood brought out Cannon, a private-eye strip even more openly brutal and explicitly erotic than Hammer, nobody batted an eye.

In the late forties and early fifties the comic-book industry developed its own end o sex-explicit police titles. These often featured overendowed female sleuths, such as Phantom Lady and the Black Cat (a master of karate), who were then thrown into dangerous and revealing situations. Along with the horror comics, these crime comic books aroused the particular ire of the censors, who liked to point to the exaggerated anatomy of the female protagonists (“headlights”) and a pernicious influence on young readers.

For sheer imprudence, however, nobody can rival the Italian comic strip writers and artists. For instance, Diabolik, created by the sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani, has been featuring the bloody exploits of a master criminal for over twenty years. All through that period Diabolik and his beautiful companion in crime, Eva Kant, have been mixing sex and gore in almost equal amounts. The success of Diabolik has given rise to a host of imitators—Kriminal,Fantax, Demoniak, Sadik (sic)—each more sexually violent and more violently sexual than the last. In this domain, it should be noted, the Mexicans run the Italians as a close second with such superheated features as Fantomas,Arrabalera, and Sirenia.

The violent trend in American comics were exacerbated by the coming of World War II. The saying “All's fair in love and war” was soon transformed into “Anything goes” in the wartime comics. It was then that Dick Tracy featured a particularly sadistic episode, ”The Case of the Brow”, in which espionage, mayhem, torture and sexual bondage were all mixed up together and served hot. In Terry, Burma and the Dragon Lady both used their feminine wiles to lure the hated Japanese into deadly traps, while Captain Easy and Barney Baxter were kept busy saving innocent blonde American nurses from rape, torture, and death at the hands of their buck-toothed Japanese captors. In the European theater of war, secret agent Vic Jordan used beautiful resistance fighters as bait for sadistic SS guards and Gestapo henchmen.

The epitome of the war syndrome in comics was perhaps Black Fury (later Miss Fury). Miss Fury was in civilian life beautiful socialite Marla Drake, who donned a block leotard to fight for Justice and the American Way. Her adventures, already tough from the outset, became literally hard-boiled with the onslaught of the war. There were no holds barred in the heroine's battle against Nazi agents and their American accomplices. Females battling each other tooth and claw were staples, as were men savagely beating up on women, and the use of whips, branding irons, and other implements of torture.

The comic books particularly warmed to the theme as they discovered they could depict any amount of sex and gore as long as they kept the proceedings patriotic. This was a time when a costumed hero with the no-nonsense name Spy Smasher could beat the Dark Angel, an enemy villainess, into submission without too many questions asked. Nor was anyone perturbed by depictions of savage beatings or torture inflicted on helpless female prisoners or hostages by grinning Japs or monocled Nazis in such patriotic comic books as Captain America,Minute Man, and the aptly named Military Comics.

Many of the comic-book warriors were aviators, which gave them wide latitude to roam at will from one theater of war to another. Among them were the Blackhawks,Captain Wings, Captain Midnight and many others of the same ilk. They all featured incredibly violent action and displayed incredible amounts of female flesh. They also offered scenes of the heroes locked in deadly physical combat with women adversaries. The best example is perhaps Airboy, who fought a string of battles, aerial and otherwise, with the ruthless German female air ace Valkyrie and her squadrons of sexy Air Maidens. Aside from being an unconscious (and quite effective) Wagnerian pastiche, the Airboy comic books contained unbridled tableaux of sadistic violence (women being mercilessly whipped, Valkyrie slowly torturing Airboy, etc.).

All this went on without a murmur from the self-appointed guardians of morality. As Pauline Kael wrote in a later review of the 1945 movie Confidential Agent, “Those unfamiliar with the melodramas of the forties may be shocked at the brutalities that sneaked by under cover of the anti-Fascist theme.” Which goes to show that the violence in these comic books was a phenomenon of the time more than a flaw inherent in the medium, as later detractors would try to prove. More recent conflicts, such as Korea and Vietnam, did not arouse the same popular fervor, and thus did not provoke a corresponding level of violence in the comics of the periods, Steve Canyon to the contrary. After 1945, war—except World War II, which was still being fought in some comic books as late as the seventies—seems to have lost most of its sex appeal.

In the comics women have most often appeared (in men's eyes) as threats or victims—either terrifying Medusas or willing Justines. This is a world that is still divided into “good girls” and “bad women”, just as it is still largely divided into “bad guys” and “heroes”. Yet in the comics the division is mot so rigid that it doesn't allow some movement from one sphere to the other. One of the clichés of the medium, as of all popular literature and movies, is that of the “bad woman” not only reforming but protecting the hero at the cost of her own life. This theme is particularly evident in many of the crime strips (Secret Agent X-9, Red Barry, Cannon, etc.) The woman's earlier hostility towards the incorruptible hero thus stands revealed as the measure of her sexual frustration.

Of course, the more hard-boiled dames harbor to no such qualms. They do not hesitate to play out their characters in full by trying to do in the hated male (The “Hell hath no fury...” syndrome) in a variety of ways, always in vain, as it turns out. Examples of this kind of behavior (deplorable or admirable, depending on the viewpoint) abound in comic strips as well as in comic books. It can be found in The Phantom, in Inspector Wade, in Daredevil, even in Batman, sometimes taken to extremes, as in those not infrequent cases where the villainess tried to take the hero's life along with her own. That's what may be called vengeance with a vengeance.

Examples of openly sexual violence, as distinct from sexually motivated acts of revenge, were rare in the early comics (except during World War II, when they masqueraded as acts of patriotism, as we have seen). The situation has changed drastically over the past two decades: not only have literary works of sadism been adapted into comics form Sade's Justine and Juliette, among others, but sexual cruelty has emerged as one of the major “adult” themes of the medium.

In our culture rape is considered to be the primary symbol of sexual violence, which may be why the comics long shied away from its depiction, or even its mention (fear of words is the puritan's obsession, as Sartre observed). Graphic intimations of rape were not uncommon in such strips as Rip Kirby, Smilin' Jack, Mandrake, and others: One scene in Skyroads, for instance, shows a repulsive, hunchbacked dwarf dragging a young woman away by her long blonde hair. But the act itself never consummated, or even initiated: the hero always managed to get there in time and save the beauty from the clutches of the beast. Only recently has rape (even homosexual rape) been depicted in graphic terms.

The question of sex and violence in the comics has always been a touchy one. This was the issue that prompted Dr. Frederic Wertham's attack on the medium in Seduction of the Innocent and caused the long period of ostracism and censorship that followed. Ever since those dark times in the fifties, comics fans have lived in fear of another anticomics crusade, and they have watched with apprehension (as well as furtive enjoyment) the rise of nudity, sexuality, violence, and other formerly taboo subjects in the comics. Their fears seem to be largely unfounded. The comics have only belatedly caught up with the trend apparent in other media, notably television. Times have changed, and the comics have changed with them, gradually becoming a more mature medium, in readership as well as in concerns. There is no way the clock can now be turned back. A lot of the illustrations have no accompanying text, which wasn't the selling point of the book anyway.