Sex In The Comics
(1985 - Chelsea House Publishing)

[-BELOW THE LINE-] (by Maurice Horn) Not appropriate for children or adolescents. Not surprisingly, this canvassing of adult themes in comic strips and comic books is mostly a display of sequential art. In fact, over half of its 215 pages are so. Even a couple of decades old now, it is still a seminal treatise on the subject for works of that time and before. It spends quite a few pages exploring how adult themes are suggested, touched on, hidden, or even ignored, in mainstream comics before moving on to showing how much risqué- or racy-ness was acceptable by the general public of different countries and, finally, there is no shortage of examples of work that skirted the fringe of the market, providing explicit material for those that wanted it. You will find here another 29 pages that present a large single reproduction of an artist's work, whether mainstream-innocent or extreme. Of course, in this context, accommodation has to be allowed for the word balloons, titles & onomatopoeia that were part of their published presentation. Those artists being 'well-presented': Richard Corben, Paul Cuvelier (2), Dany, Pierre Dupuis, Frank Frazetta*, René Giffey, Jean Giraud, José Gonzalez (2), Ethel Hays, Burne Hogarth, Kazuo Kamimura, Bob Kane, Esteban Maroto (2), Marcel Moniquet, Zack Mosley, Georges Pichard, Martin Sauri, Frank Springer, Wally Wood, Juan Zanotto and UNKNOWN.