Manara Erotica Volume 1 (1982-2012/ Collected 2012): written and illustrated by Milo Manara; translation by Kim Thompson; containing Click!, "Fatal Rendezvous," and "Piercing."
A few years back, Marvel drew criticism for having Italian writer-artist Milo Manara draw an, um, controversial cover for Spider-woman. Clearly Marvel thought this was a good idea. And they can't have been ignorant of the fact that Manara's biggest claim to fame has lain in erotic comics with a satiric bent for about 40 years and counting.
Everyone got worked up. Nothing was solved. Interest in Spider-woman reached an all-time high, which was almost certainly Marvel's motivation for the whole thing.
Of course, that Spider-woman is kid's stuff compared to the sexual material in 'non-erotic' Manara works that include Indian Summer, much less explicitly erotic comics as are collected in this first of three Dark Horse volumes of translated Manara erotica. Or Manara porn, depending on how you feel about these sorts of things.
An honest review should probably read something like Kevin Nealon's SNL bit reviewing a porn movie -- "Not interested, not interested, interested, interested, very interested, VERY interested, not interested, and then I went to sleep."
Manara is certainly a master of a certain type of idealized female form. As these stories come from the 1980's, the women often even have pubic hair, which probably looks archaic to younger readers. What is that stuff?
The women may be idealized; the men run the gamut from idealized to comic grotesques. The story of the main graphic novel here, Click!, is an occasionally quease-inducing masterpiece of... something. The basic plot involves implanting a computer chip in a prudish female celebrity's brain.
The chip, controlled by a black box that moves through the possession of several people, causes the celebrity (also married to a much older, prudish, grotesque politician) to become a sex-crazed exhibitionist. OK!
Suffice to say, no one ever fixes the cable in these stories. Highly recommended.
The Big Sleep (1939: Philip Marlowe#1) by Raymond Chandler: Worried that in seeing the great Howard Hawks adaptation of The Big Sleep you've ruined yourself for the novel? Worry not! The novel diverges enough by page 50 or so that it's pretty much a different story than the movie.
Of course, it's also a lot more explicitly bigoted and homophobic than the movie, so there's that too. Get through that stuff and you've got a superior hard-boiled detective novel, one which had a psychological and stylistic depth that would influence hard-boiled fiction ever after.
This is the first novel-length adventure of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles PI with a heart of gold. Well, gold alloyed with cynicism and pithy, pungent comments on The Way Things Are. Chandler's Marlowe arrives here pretty much entirely formed. He'll stay on a case if he thinks justice needs to be done, regardless of what a client wants. He likes chess, whiskey, and pondering the dusty nature of his office.
The written word in America 1939 had a bit more freedom than Hollywood movies in 1946, so certain portions of the plot are simply a bit more explicit when it comes to the pornography ring that drives part of the action. This also leads to the bigotry and homophobia becoming more explicit -- Bogart couldn't utter the opinion that "a pansy has no iron in his bones" in a movie, but Marlowe sure can, and does, in the novel. Hoo ha!
Nonetheless, the novel still reads with a surprising amount of stylistic freshness. Chandler was not better than all those who would follow him into the hardboiled world he remade, but he certainly was better than most -- and better than Dashiell Hammett, who was the epitome of the hardboiled writer before Chandler. Highly recommended.
The Mormons know how to deal with pornography. Also, they have spleens.
Seriously...
The Playboy: written and illustrated by Chester Brown (1990-91; collected 1992): Canadian national treasure and cartoonist Chester Brown shifted to autobiographical comics in the early 1990's after a decade of mixing the surreal, the grotesque, the comic, and the just plain weird in the pages of his brilliant independent comic book Yummy Fur. The Playboy, originally serialized in several issues of Yummy Fur, was his first long-form attempt at memoir.
Brown takes us back to a time when teenagers read Playboys, hid Playboy around the house or in the world outside, and occasionally even bought Playboy at convenience stores rather than just stealing them from someone's father or older brother. Chester's relationship with Playboy magazine began in the mid-1970's when he was a teen-ager. He charts that relationship's ups and downs over the subsequent 15 years or so, autobiographical vignettes interspersed with a narrator's commentary.
By Brown's standards, The Playboy is fairly tame and contemplative, and lacking in didacticism. Oh, sure, there are graphic scenes of masturbation. This is an autobiographical comic, after all, and a Chester Brown comic. Money shots are mandatory. The cumulative effect is surprisingly gentle and nostalgic -- an elegy for a lost world of pillowy soft-core boobs, of a small cache of porn magazines and not the endless naked lunch of the Internet.
It's also quite funny at times as it details Brown's attempts to hide his magazines from his parents, leading at one point to burying pornography in a nearby meadow. In another scene, he bikes across his small town to buy Playboy at a convenience store as far from his hosue as possible; of course he meets adult neighbours as he exits the store with his bagged Playboy in his hands. What to do?
Coming out as it did during the height of McKinnon-Dworkin anti-pornography rageaphobia in the early 1990's, The Playboy seems contextually brave. It's not an indictment of pornography, regardless of what one of the back-cover quotes says. It's also not major Brown. Nonetheless, The Playboy is still a nice piece of work, interior-cover cumshots and all. Recommended.
Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story: written by Flynn Hundhausen and Michael Lee Nirenberg; directed by Michael Lee Nirenberg (2014): Fascinating documentary about the history of Hustler magazine from its creation in the early 1970's to today. I'd never really considered the fact that Hustler founder Larry Flynt "won" the American pornography wars. Hustler is still a vital, successful online porn presence. The other three major American porn magazines -- Playboy, Penthouse, and Screw -- have all either dwindled, been sold off, or completely disappeared.
With the McKinnon-Dworkin Anti-Porn Goofiness behind us, one can see how important porn was to free speech in the United States. Both Al Goldstein's Screw and Larry Flynt's Hustler fought multiple battles against censorship and obscenity laws. That isn't to say Flynt was a saint -- the film does a nice job of laying out all his weird moments, with Flynt himself commenting on his own weirdness with the benefit of hindsight. His completely bananas, muck-raking Presidential campaign in 1984 is probably Flynt's crowning moment as a social commentator.
As the song goes, it's hard to kick against the pricks. Was Hustler important? Yes. How? Well, it de-mechanized the female body in American pornography, following Screw's lead in eschewing airbrushing and other photo touch-ups. It actually ran real investigative journalism. And Flynt was almost fearless. You may not always get the free-speech advocates you want, but sometimes you get the one you need.
Made by the son of one of Hustler's early art directors, Back Issues does fall down in two places. The timeline sometimes isn't clear. And the movie takes vast jumps in time to get to its 90-minute length. But a fascinating documentary nonetheless. Highly recommended.
No Clue: written by Brent Butt; directed by Carl Bessai; starring Brent Butt (Leo), Amy Smart (Kyra), David Koechner (Ernie), Kirsten Prout (Reese), David Cubitt (Horn) and Garwin Sanford (Nelson) (2013): Pleasant spoof of film noir and hardboiled detective movies, starring and written by Corner Gas's Brent Butt. It looks and feels like a nice time-waster of a TV movie, very much in the pleasant, mildly observant comedy tradition of Corner Gas. And it admits that it's set in Canada (Vancouver, to be exact). Boy, though, did the director fall in love with his overhead helicopter shots of the city. Recommended.
