Utilitarian Review 6/21/13

Posted on June 22, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

News

As most folks probably know, Kim Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics, died this week. I had my first ever troll battle with Kim; he showed up in my inbox after my piece on In the Shadow of No Towers came out to tell me I was rash and foolish and an idiot. It was actually a really fun conversation; he was extremely gracious while telling me what a fool I was. It’s a treasured memory.

I don’t feel like I knew him well enough, or was familiar enough with his legacy, to write a full obit, but…I did just want to say that I always felt lucky when he came by to comment on HU, often to tell me again that I was an idiot. He was a friendly acquaintance rather than a friend, but like lots and lots of folks who he met, briefly or otherwise, online or elsewhere, I’ll miss him.

For a better sense of what Kim meant to comics, a nice place to start is with Chris Mautner’s discussion over at Robot 6.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ted Rall: Not Mean, Just Dumb.

I argue that you should get rid of comments threads if you’re not going to moderate them.

Chris Gavaler on Joe Shuster’s drawings of rape and torture.

Jog on how After Earth has that thoughtful take on violence all the critics are bemoaning the lack of in Man of Steel and everything else.

Patrick Carland on what to remember and what to forget about Ralph Bakshi.

Owen Alldritt on the alternating charm and irritation of One Piece.

Richard Cook on Bioshock Infinite, violence, and video games’ crappy aesthetics. There’s an interesting comment thread too.

I wrote the best post ever on the Internet if you want it to be.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about Nancy Friday, sexual violence, and sexual fantasy.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

The liberal dilemma in giving taxes to Obama.

The Bechdel Test and Emily Dickinson.

how misogyny leads to sexism against men.

Other Links

Inebriated Spook on Daft Punk.

Jason Thompson on Peepo Choo.

Dodai Stewart on Miley Cyrus appropriating black people.

The Best Post Ever on the Internet If You Want It To Be

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Thanks to the internets and the wonder of ever-increasing connectivity and what not, everyone can listen to the band that is the best all the time. This means that no one is listening to any of the other bands because they suck. Kanye and Beyonce and Kanye and Beyonce and also, maybe Metallica, I guess, on constant rotation, with Mick Jagger gagging, “Start me up!” as his ancient bony bits spurt ever new shiny new quality product.

Anyway, here’s a graph, showing that the most popular graphs are getting ever more of the clicks.

See? Just looking at that graph makes you hipper and more content-optimized.

But…does it? Just because it is the graph that all the wonks are looking at until other graphs turn green with envy and their trend lines droop with despair — does that mean that it is really the best of all possible graphs?

The answer is, shockingly, no. People look at the graph they look at just because that is the graph people look at. It doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the graph, or the freshness of Mick Jagger’s spurting. Here is a graph showing that that 1 Elvis fans is right only in the sense that he or she has correctly identified the website where the 49 million other Elvis fans hang out.

In short, I could be Andrew Sullivan if I’d just supported the Iraq war at the right time.

Neil Irwin, whose graphs I stole, quotes Alan Krueger who is an economist and therefore has succeeded entirely by merit explaining that he is shocked (in a low-key way that won’t damage his brand) to learn that art is not about quality despite the sterling example of Tom Petty.

“In addition to talent, arbitrary factors can lead to success or failure, like whether another band happens to release a more popular song than your band at the same time,” said Krueger. “The difference between a Sugar Man, a Dylan and a Post Break Tragedy depends a lot more on luck than is commonly acknowledged.”

Mathematically, Dylan’s Dylan not because he’s great but because a bunch of people stochastically tuned in and everyone else dropped on after. We’re all just basically sheep slipping on the hillside and bathing our sheep ears in giant wads of everyone else’s sheep shit.

Or that’s one interpretation. Another possibility, though, is that we’re not quite as dumb as those sheep — or, perhaps, those sheep aren’t as dumb as we are. Or, at least, when we are together with the sheep, we revel in the earthy sheep power of bathing in shit together. We may be sliding down that hill, but it’s by choice.

This is somewhere in the vicinity of what Paul Lauter argues in his essay “Class, Caste, and Canon” (1981/87). Lauter starts his essay by talking about one time he was sitting listening to a feminist literary crit collective, as you end up doing sometimes when you’re a lefty literary critic, and they started to analyze a poem by Adrienne Rich, because all feminist literary crit collectives analyze poems by Adrienne Rich, and/or by Beyonce, depending. Lauter assures us that he likes Adrienne Rich (and/or Beyonce), but, he says, why always this thing? Why always the standard of meritocratic excellence and formal beauty? Why not instead follow in the well-worn boots of the working class, and embrace art that speaks to communal enthusiasms and needs and desires? Working class art, he says, is valuable because of its use [his italics] in the lives of the proletariat. Art is not to loose anarchy or Yeats, but to bind us together so we can overcome and love one another right now. It’s the song, not the singer.

These days, of course, the proletariat is exponentially less likely to be listening to Roll Jordan Roll than to be watching American Idol or the Voice where hopefully they’re not singing Roll, Jordan, Roll. But whose to say that the change is for the worse? After all, if the point of art is the community that it fosters, then it seems like any community will do. What does it matter if you’re singing authentic volk songs or reading Adrienne Rich or watching Mad Men with a billion friends on Twitter? The point is the use as communal totem. People aren’t confused when they choose the most popular graph as the best graph. On the contrary, they’ve got it just right. Art makes a culture a culture, and it does that by being the culture you take as your culture. Who can buck the trend when the trend is the trend?

There are sub-trends of course, and subcultures, whether built around Dr. Who or Foucault or Richard Linklater or (as Lauter would presumably have it) work songs and sea shanties. The polite fiction is that we enter communities of culture because of what we like, but that’s just a way of inserting ourselves into the algorithm whereby our art sells our community back to us as ourselves. “Quality” is a ghost that haunts our skulls; a mirage we worship like a mirror. The Internet’s just given us a bigger frame on which to be somebody, too.

Shut Up

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Comments sections can be sewers. Anybody who’s been on the web knows this, of course. But there’s an extra special rush of bile when it happens to the comments section on something you’ve written. I think the low point for me was this review I wrote recently about the documentary Hitler’s Children. The film focused on how the descendents of Nazis like Hermann and Goering have tried to cope with their ancestors’ atrocities. Many of the comments were thoughtful and positive. Some, though, were flat out anti-Semitic.

Again, that was unusually vile. But if you look at any mainstream site, you’ll see it isn’t off the scales. People in comments are regularly rude, insulting, inflammatory, racist, sexist, homophobic, and just generally cruel and vicious. In many cases, it’s clear that they have little if any interest in commenting on the article in question. Rather, they want to get upon their hobbyhorse and spew their own particular brand of hate in a venue where they can be assured of readers and visibility. Set up an anti-Semitic blog in a corner of the interwebs, and no one will hear you Sieg Heil. Spew your hate in the comments of an Atlantic article or a Slate article, though, and you’re assured of a good number of eyeballs passing over your invective.

So why do mainstream sites have comments at all? There are a lot of reasons, probably. Comments can be useful in catching errors — a boon in an age when even the big media outlets can’t afford to hire proofreaders or fact checkers. In addition,, comments are vital for that much-hyped web-buzz word “community”. And, of course, comments are good for clicks. An active, controversial comments thread can be its own draw, resulting in more links, more pageviews, and more advertising dollars.

Sites aren’t merely plagued by their trolls, then — they are actively in collaboration with them, in many ways. Trolls can make an article more popular — or at least more viewed. And, in return, for goosing the stats, the trolls get a chance to talk to a larger audience than they could find on their own. Everybody wins!

Of course, there remain some open questions. While trolls may increase hits in some instances, they also drive some readers away, and reflect poorly on the site as a whole. In addition, it seems like sites should have some ethical duty to pay attention to the messages being promoted under their names. In the US, at least, websites cannot generally be sued or prosecuted for the statements of commenters. But still, editors at large sites carefully vet the topics and language of the people who write for them. They do this because they want to preserve their brand, and also because, presumably, they have some professional pride in what is published on their watch. And yet, often no such care is exercised when it comes to the comments sections — where any moron with a grudge can say whatever inflammatory thing he or she wants, and have it distributed far and wide by the most reputable names in journalism.

Some sites have seen this as a problem, and taken steps to try to address it. The New York Times has a team of comment moderators who have to approve every comment posted. Ta-Nehisi Coates carefully polices the comments on his blog at the Atlantic — and as a result his comments section is widely regarded as one of the most civil and productive on the web.

The NYT and TNC are exceptions, though. Most large sites try, instead, to get by with shortcuts. Some sites have tried to use software to filter out obscenity, or else have asked users to register using Facebook accounts to cut down on anonymity (though the truth is that anonymity in itself isn’t really the problem. Otherwise, editors or moderators simply moderate on a catch-as-catch-can basis, perhaps deleting some of the worst comments (as in my article on the Holocaust)…or not, as time and energy permit.

I can completely understand why sites don’t want to moderate comments. I’m a very hands on moderator at my own site here — and it requires a lot of time and effort, even though our traffic is a rounding error compared to someplace like the Washington Post. The media industry has enormous cash flow problems and business model difficulties as it is. The last thing they want to do is hire multiple full time staffers to read through their comments.

Still, there are other alternatives. The cheapest of these, and probably the best, is simply to get rid of comments altogether. If you can’t afford to deal with them, it seems like the best thing to do is shut them down. This is what Andrew Sullivan does at his site. It’s also been the path taken by Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter. Spurgeon will occasionally print selected correspondence from readers, and Sullivan often prints what amount to curated comments threads on individual topics of interest. They both, in other words, are interested in, and respond to, reader feedback. They just don’t use comments threads to do it.

I’m sure comments threads won’t ever disappear. People are always going to enjoy chatting about articles they’ve read, and as long as there’s a demand for that, someone will provide a venue. But surely we could start moving to a place where open comments was an option to be chosen, rather than the always-selected default. It seems to me that many sites would benefit from at least considering whether the comments are worth the trolls.

Utilitarian Review 6/14/13

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

News

So I’m musing about future roundtables. Any interest in comics and fashion? In a roundtable on Michael DeForge? Any other ideas? Let me know in comments….

On HU

William Leung kicks Darwyn Cooke one more time.

Me on why Matthew Houk is not Johnny Cash, and should shut up.

Jacob Canfield on Moebius and consistency of backgrounds.

Chris Gavaler on why Americans need James Bond.

Kailyn Kent on comics vs. the deskillers.

Me on how homosexuality makes Watchmen more real. Plus! Beyonce and Andrea Dworkin.

Vom Marlowe creates a comic with neither words nor images.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader I talk about how country music sells whiteness to white people.

At the Atlantic I

suggest that maybe it’s okay not to try to maintain desire in your marriage.

talk about how writers write to talk.

At Splice Today I talk about the Kelly Rowland/Camera Obscura mash-up that wasn’t.

Other Links

If you think comics is sexist, you should see gaming.

Nice takedown of analytic philsophy and Steven Hawking.

Mark Waid with a heartfelt rant against Man of Steel.

Kate Clancy on not being immune to sexual harassment.

Homosexuality Will Make Your Comic Real

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

In her 2002 essay Comparative Sapphism (recently made available for download, my friend and colleague Sharon Marcus contrasts the place of lesbianism within 19th century French literature and 19th century English literature. In simplest terms, that difference is one of presence and absence.French writers include lesbian themes, characters, and plots; English ones, by and large don’t. As Sharon demonstrates with a fair amount of hilarity, this posed a problem for English reviewers of French books, who somehow had to talk about lesbianism without talking about lesbianism — resulting in the spectacle of intelligent cultured reviewers demonstrating at great length that they knew the thing they would not talk about, and/or didn’t know the thing they would.

What’s most interesting about this division, as Sharon says, is that it ultimately isn’t about attitudes towards lesbianism. It’s true that the English back then didn’t like lesbians…but the French back then didn’t like lesbians either. Everyone on either side of the channel was united in a happy cross-channel amity of homophobia. So, if they hated and hated alike, why did the French write about lesbians and the British didn’t? Not because the first liked gay people — but rather because the first liked realism.

Since French sapphism was fully compatible with anti-lesbian sentiment, and since Victorian England easily rivaled its neighbor across the Channel in its homophobia, we cannot explain the divergence between British and French literature solely in terms of the two nations’ different attitudes to homosexuality. Rather, any explanation of their sapphic differences must also compare the two nations’ aesthetic tendencies. Such a comparison suggests that there would have been more lesbianism in the British novel if there had been more realism and that British critics would have been more capable of commenting on French sapphism had they not been such thoroughgoing idealists.

In other words, the French saw portrayals of lesbianism as part of the seamy, ugly, realist underbelly of life — and they wanted to show that seamy underbelly because they thought realism was cool and worthwhile. The British also saw lesbianism as part of the seamy underbelly of life — but since they were idealists, they felt that literature should gloss over such underbellies in the interest of setting a higher tone and generally leading us onto virtue.

One interesting point here is that everybody — French and British — appears to agree not just on the ickiness of lesbianism, but on its realism. Which means, it seems like, that the French might discuss lesbianism not merely because they are comfortable with realism, but as a way to underline, or validate, their realism. That is, lesbianism in French literature serves the same purpose that grime and “fuck” and drug dealing and people dying serve in The Wire. It’s the traumatic, ugly sign of the traumatic, ugly real.

Nor were the French the last to use queerness in this way. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 1980s exercise in superhero realism, does much the same thing.

This isn’t to say that Watchmen is homophobic; on the contrary, Alan Moore in particular is, and has long been, very consciously and ideologically queer positive. But it’s undeniably the case that Watchmen‘s goal is, in part, to imagine what superheroes would be like if they were grimy and seamy and nasty and real. And part of the way it imagines superheroes as being grimy and seamy and nasty and real is by imagining them as sexual — particularly as perversely sexual, which often means queer. Indeed, the first superhero, who inspired all the others, is Hooded Justice, a gay man who gets off on beating up bad guys. Thus, the founding baseline reality of superheroics is not clean manly altrusim, but queer masculine sadism.

Incipient buttcrack, bloody nose, homosexuality. You don’t get much more real than that.

The hints of homophobia in Moore/Gibbons, then, seem like they’re tied not (or not only) to unexamined stereotype, as my brother Eric suggests. Rather, they’re a function of the book’s realist genre tropes.

Which perhaps explains why Darwyn Cooke, infinitely dumber than Moore and Gibbons, ended up, in his Before Watchmen work, with such a virulent homophobia. William Leung in that linked article suggests that the homophobia is part of Cooke’s retrograde nostalgic conservatissm — which is probably true to some extent. But it’s probably more directly tied to Cooke’s effort to match or exceed Moore/Gibbons’ realism. Portraying gay characters as seamy and despicable is a means of showing ones’ unflinching grasp of truth. In this case, again, realism does not allow for the portrayal of homosexuals so much as (homophobic) portrayals of homosexuals creates realism.

In the discussion of superhero comics, generally allegations of retrograde political content go hand in hand with allegations of escapism. Superhero comics are “adolescent power fantasies,” which is to say that they’re both unrealistic and mired in violence and hierarchy. The link between realism and homophobia, both past and present, though, suggests that when you take the opposite of adolescent power fantasies, you get adult disempowerment realities. And the groups disempowered often turn out (in keeping with realism) to be those which have traditionally been marginalized and disempowered in the first place.

In that context, I thought it might be interesting to look briefly at this image that was following me around on Pepsi billboards in San Francisco when I was there last week.

Obviously that’s Beyonce. Less obviously it’s basically a comic — the character images are repeated in a single space to suggest time passing or movement. And, perhaps, least obviously, it’s fairly deliberately referencing queerness. Beyonce often looks like a female impersonator, but the aggressively blond hair and the exaggerated flirty facial expressions here turn this image into a quintessence of camp. Also, note the position of her hands; one hovering around crotch level on her double, the others behind the butt. Gender, sexuality, and identity are all labile, and the lability is the source of the picture’s excitement and energy, as well as of its deliberate and related un-realism. Rather than queerness being the revealed and seamy underbelly of truth, in this image it’s a winking fantasy of multiplying, sexy masquerade and empowerment.

The entanglement of homophobia and realism may help to explain in part why gay culture — faced with tropes defining homosexuality as a sordid ugly truth — has often gravitated to artificiality, camp, and the empowerment of self-created surfaces. None of which is to say, of course, that realism must be always and everywhere homophobic. As an example, I give you…Andrea Dworkin in overalls.

Hooded Justice and Beyonce just wish they were that ugly, solid, real, and awesome.

Utilitarian Review 6/8/13

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post on the dreadfulness of Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier.

Eric Berlatsky on how Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen may be just slightly better than that.

John Hennings on how country music got more racist.

Alex Buchet on some oddities of Uderzo and Jacobs.

RM Rhodes with a guide to what to see if you’re a comics fan in Brussels.

Isaac Butler on the boring beauty of Upstream Color.

Chris Gavaler on the Hollywood superhero and 9/11.

Me with a brief NSFW survey of porn comics through history.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I contributed to a roundtalbe on 50 Shades of Grey over at Public Books.

At the Atlantic I talk about how Hollywood puts icons ahead of people.

At Splice Today I write about:

Male fantasies and feminism.

How freelancing eats the soul.

Other Links

Jon Reiner on the modern writing school paradox.

Kelly Sue Deconnick on comics and sexism. (Edited because I was confused on the initial description.)

The city of Chicago sucks.

Sequential Splortch

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I wrote this some years back for a sex toy website. I don’t think they ever published it…so I thought I’d finally run it here.
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“You think they [comic books] are mostly about floppy-eared bunnies, attractive little mice and chipmunks? Go take a look.”
—cover flap of Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent

Erotic comics first surfaced in the dim dawn of pre-history among cave-dwelling ungulate-fetishists who, in animistic rituals, drew upon the stone walls choice mammoths with whom they wished to have congress. Some time thereafter, in the early 1800s, the Japanese developed…SHUNGA! Which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Perhaps the most famous shunga illustration is Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which, coincidentally, also features a rape-by-mammoth. Ha ha. No, of course it doesn’t. It actually features a rape-by-octopi.

Lascivious, decadent Europeans, inspired by such hot-and-heavy Japanese print-making, erected sophisticated fantastic visions of their own. Here, for example, turn-of-the-century Brit Aubrey Beardsley makes a subtle phallic reference.

Can We Get More Animation Down There, Please?

If you studied the pictures above very closely, you probably need to stop and take a deep breath. If you examined them somewhat more cursorily, you probably noticed that they’re not actually comics — just influential genital progenitors, as it were. Comics as we know them coalesced as a form in the early 1900s. At first, of course, they were mostly aimed at kids, so sexual content tended to be muted. Winsor McCay drew the occasional picture of a woman in bed with a warthog, but that was about as racy as it got.

No form can escape filth forever, though. By the 1920s, cutesy childhood icons were frolicking like hardened whores across the pages of crude 4″ x 6″ pamphlets known as Tijuana Bibles. Violating propriety and copyright with equal vigor, these eight-page narratives featured such familiar faces as Popeye, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and the eternally underage Little Orphan Annie demonstrating the use of heretofore unillustrated appendages.

Tijuana Bibles were most popular during the Great Depression, when most people were too poor to afford orgasms. During the late 50s, though, men’s magazines began to publish real photographic evidence that anatomy existed, stimulating the poor Tijuana Bibles right out of existence.

Balling with Gags

Luckily, the girly mags were a fickle bunch; photos may have been their true love, but they inevitably had a passel of mistresses on the side. These included gag cartoons. From Eldon Didini to Jack Cole (of Plastic Man fame) to Dan DeCarlo (of Archie fame), some of the biggest names in comicdom set their work atop clever captions like “The job is yours, Miss Bigelow, providing you fit just as well on my partner’s lap!” and “Two aphrodisiacs please!” Not that anyone was looking at the captions, exactly.

The pinnacle of men’s magazine cartooning is generally considered to be Little Annie Fanny, a strip cartoon which ran sporadically in Playboy from 1962 to 1988. Written by Mad-magazine alum Harvey Kurtzman and lavishly painted by Will Elder the titular character (in various senses) was an empty-headed naif who kept stumbling into preposterous situations, upon pop cultural tropes ripe for satire, and out of her clothes. Mostly that last one.

Under Where?

Men’s magazine illustrations were aimed at a broad, mainstream audience, and so were fairly tame by earlier illustrational standards; visible penises were a no no, much less octopus rape. With the late sixties underground comix movement, though, more idiosyncratic perversions became available from a head-shop near you. S. Clay Wilson’s raunchy fornicating bikers, satyrs, and pirates led the way, but even more influential was R. Crumb, whose comics indulged his fetish for large, powerful women and their hindquarters.

In Europe, one of the most influential underground cartoonists was Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. His well-endowed, pumped-up, and frequently pumping leather-clad, uniform-sporting men were hugely popular through the 60s and 70s, and remain widely recognized and (ahem) utilized today. Laaksonen was even an important influence on the visual style of the Village People. Eat your heart out, Jack Kirby.

The undergrounds opened the way for independent comics in general, and for more sexual and personal material in particular. At the extreme is Johnny Ryan, whose supremely and surreally filthy comics have at various points featured disembodied invisible anuses, severed butt-cracks, quarts of Dracula piss, and sex with midget Hitler. Much more literal is David Heatley’s “My Sexual History” which, like the title says, is a chronicle of every sexual encounter the author has ever had. Other autobio creators, from Jeff Brown, to Julie Doucet, to (my favorite) Ariel Schrag, have also chronicled their sexual lives in detail that veers between the arousing and the more-information-than-I-really-want-to-know-thanks.

One of the most acclaimed independent adult titles is Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s 80s series, Omaha the Cat Dancer, a sexually explicit soap-opera with funny animals (the title character is actually a feline…more or less.) Equally idiosyncratic is Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s 2006 Lost Girls, which features Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Alice from Alice in Wonderland musing on matters philosophical while engaging in a marathon of sexual trysts.

Porn actually played a vital part in the survival of one of the most respected independent comics publishers. Fantagraphics — whose catalog includes Dan Clowes and Los Bros Hernandez — was poised to go out of business in the early 90s. It was saved in part by the launch of its adult-oriented Eros line. It’s kind of funny to think that there would be no Chris Ware as we know him without concupiscence and gushing bodily fluids (though that’s true for all of us, I suppose.)

Foreign Trollops

Influential European comics with sexual themes began to appear in the early 1960s. Guido Crepax’s character Valentina started her erotic run in the Italian comics magazine Linus in 1963; Crepax would go on to work on graphic adaptations of porn classics like Histoire d’O and Justine.

Another Italian, Milo Manera, is perhaps Crepax’s most famous heir. Both artists have had work appear in Heavy Metal, an American offshoot of the early 70s French magazine Métal Hurlant. Heavy Metal’s Europulp-fantasy-smut remains a touchstone in American comics, from Frank Thorne’s Lann to Michael Manning’s ongoing fetish, gender-bending, humidly romantic, paranoid cyberpunk opus In A Metal Web.

The real top in recent foreign-on-American porn, though, has been Japan. Manga, or Japanese comic books have penetrated…er…pushed their way into…um…stickily saturated? Anyway, they’re very popular in America, and porn manga is no exception. For those who want to be taken seriously by your local otaku, Japanese porn is usually referred to as hentai. Hentai can refer to any number of fetishes, some of which (giant breasts) are fairly mainstream, others of which (girls-with-penises, tentacle rape, or sex with underage-appearing girls, known as lolicon) are less so.

From a western perspective the most unusual hentai genre,is probably yaoi. Yaoi depicts homosexual relationships between beautiful men, but it is created by and marketed mostly to women. In contrast to gay porn for gay men, yaoi tends to feature complex characters and intricate relationships — it is, in other words, a romance with lots of gay sex added. Pundits often like to claim that girls like yaoi because identifying with boys is more distant and somehow safer. Probably the real appeal is more straightforward (ahem) — if you like to look at pictures of hot guys having sex, surely two is better than one? In any case, yaoi has proved quite popular with het- (and not-so-het) female readers in the U.S. Among the most popular titles featuring boy-romance are Maki Murikami’s Gravitation and Sanami Matoh’s Fake. More consistently explicit fare includes Youka Nitta’s Embracing Love and Fumi Yoshinaga’s Gerard and Jacques.

In the Future, There Will Be Only Virtual Sex

Paper publishing is currently in the middle of a death-spiral, and porn comics have certainly taken a hit as well. Yes, a wide array continue to be available for all tastes, from furry-friendly-fare like Richard Moore’s Short Strokes to trans fetish fare like Roberto Baldazzini’s Bayba: The 110 BJ’s and Christian Zanier’s Banana Games to always-popular vampire erotica like Frans Mensink’s Kristina Queen of Vampires . But it seems likely that in the near future most explicitly pornographic comics will be online — like current Indian semi-sensation Savita Bhabi series. Dirty drawings never die…they just digitize.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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