[ week 27 | 41 ]
While we’re on the subject of sex and comics.
Friday, 21.22
Which all too often don’t go together nearly so well in practice as they seem they should in theory. (Or maybe your expectations are just lower than mine.) —Anyway. While we’re waiting for Top Shelf to put Dylan Horrocks’s Dirty Stories and Alan Moore’s and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls on the shelves already, I thought I might try capitalizing on the power of this inter-web thingie and ask: anybody know what became of a trifle published by Eros Comix back in the early ’90s called Les Liaisons Delicieuses? Seems to have dropped off the face of the planet—or never to have made it to the web, same diff—and my own copies went the way of all flesh. Not that it was anything to write home about, especially; no great, meaningful riffs on Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Chodleros de Laclos—mostly what I remember is some nice Euro-trashy brushwork that came off less skeevey than most who work that particular furrow.
Anyway. If you can even just help me remember the cartoonist’s name, drop me a line, would you? Seeing as how I’m in a curious frame of mind and all.
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Cute as the dickens.
Tuesday, 17.23
While the folks over at Wordwizard have the most complete etymology of “dickens” I’m able to find at the drop of a Google, and their tracing of it as a euphemism for the Devil, suitable for mild oaths, is more than plausible (not unlike “deuce” or “deuced”), still: they fail to mention the idea of dickens as, well, you know: dick.
—Which is not to say that dicks qua dicks must necessarily be involved with something that’s cute as the dickens. But that devilish, impish, saucily anarchic charge, the raucous energy you find in anything dickens-cute (you say it of the kid who’s running around making an adorable nuisance of himself, “Oh, he’s cute as the dickens”; not of the kid sitting quietly polite in the corner)—it’s a perfect spice for anything erotic: the devilish gleam, the wicked grin, the saucy hand on a hip, the playful (but impatient) tap of a bare foot: cute, perhaps, but dickens-cute. (And an appealingly devilish subversion of what the æsthetics of cute are supposed to signify: something powerless, helpless, submissive, controllable. Perhaps. But also remember that devils and imps are darned cute these days...)
But whether there’s really a dick in dickens I can’t say for sure, and Capt. Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is (sadly) of no help, for once: not a word on “dickens.” “Dick,” we’re told, is used in phrases such as “Oh, that happened in the reign of Old Queen Dick” or “queer as Dick’s hatband,” and a dicky is a woman’s underpetticoat, yes (cute as the dicky), but to be “dicked in the nob” is merely to be crazy. Over someone as cute as the dickens? Perhaps. But we’d be stretching things a bit.
Diversions all, perhaps, but I want you to understand as precisely as possible what it is I mean when I tell you Colleen Coover’s comic book Small Favors is as cute as the goddamn dickens; all of them. Every one. Devilish, impish, saucy, anarchically fantastical, delightful, light as a feather, playfully cartooned, and (yes, of course) quite sexy. There’s five issues out now and sixth on the way soon enough (at least, according to her journal/blog thingie), so go, hie thee hence, get thee to a comic book shoppe or order an issue online from Eros; it’s worthwhile stuff.
[ # ]
Oh, that wacky Bruno.
Tuesday, 08.33
So for a while there back in the go-go ’90s it was hip in alternative comics circles (and not so alternative) to do the “stripper” thing. Everybody from Martin Wagner to Jaime Hernandez was trying to stagger a mile in an ecdysiast’s high heels, or at least offer up their ideas of characters who had—and while there were good stories in there with the puzzling and just plain weird (and bad, oh, yes), the synchronicity was bizarre and vaguely suspect. (But no more so, really, than the waves that pass through TV cop shows and indie movies. Just more noticeable, because comics is such a small place.)
Anyway. Some years later: Bruno, the eponymous main character of one of the long-running daily strips on the Web, wants to take up stripping so she can make more money than she does at her crappy day job, and maybe have more time for writing and hanging out with her friends and not being at, you know, a crappy day job.
But—despite the fact that we have yet another male cartoonist attempting to do the stripper thing—there is an interesting difference. Bruno’s the first main character of a strip or series to decide to try shaking her moneymaker (as it were), rather than merely being an ancillary character brought in to liven the place up. —More to the point: she’s the first character to decide to dip her toe into The Life; she didn’t come to the strip already “tainted” (as it were). She doesn’t come to us as an exotic dancer, already laden with (buried beneath) all that connotative baggage; she’s, well, she’s Bruno, you know? Whom we already know. Or like to think we do, after following her life for, what, five years now? Six? —And who’s made the decision to at least try dancing. For a variety of reasons.
Not a scrap of clothing has yet been flung from the stage (though Baldwin doesn’t shy from dealing directly with the sex lives of his characters), but the decision is already causing something of a (mild) ruckus on the strip’s discussion boards. Reaction is mixed, with a vocal “That’s not her!” contingent, and quite a lot of worrying about self-esteem issues (leaving aside whatever you or they or Baldwin might think of connections positive or negative, necessary or otherwise, between sex-work and self-esteem; with depressive, introspective Bruno, it is something of an issue) and whether sexuality ought ever to be commodified (singing is darn special, too, but we commodify that) and (yes) the occasional “Woo hoo!” post. (The last such ruckus occurred eariler this year, when a popular minor character was revealed to be a “stealthy” MTF transsexual. Not that I’m trying to draw a direct comparison by any means, but the parallels are interesting...)
I have no idea how far Baldwin’s going to take this (I hope quite far indeed), but he’s a good (if at times a bit earnest) cartoonist with a pitch-perfect ear for his characters and a flair for the unexpected. You ought to be following Bruno anyway, but for anyone interested in the intersection of art and sex and daily life, this next turn in her checkered, panelled life should prove to be good readin’.
(Of course, there’s still plenty of time for him to fuck it up. I mean, I don’t necessarily think he will, you know? But still. I’m just saying. You know?)
PS: Let me take that back, about her being the first main character of a strip or series to be a stripper; I’d momentarily forgotten Sylvie Rancourt’s Melody strips, say, or that issue of Joe Sacco’s Yahoo, about which I can find no specific information online, and my copy of which is packed away in a box somewhere, but anyway, it’s a phenomenal first-person account of stripping in the Pacific Northwest and Canada by someone who’s name I’ve criminally forgotten that he did a great job of drawing and arranging as comics, and what do you care, if you don’t already have a copy you’ll never find one for yourself. But I stand by the point that Bruno’s the first character we’ve come to know over such a long time to make this decision and to take at least the first few tentative steps towards it. Not just in comics; in any medium. —So there.
