Hello, and welcome back to making bukkake comics with Susannah Breslin. Yesterday, we discussed the "do's and don'ts" of crafting a bukkake comic title page. Today, we'll be learning how to create a first bukkake comic panel with that certain je ne sais quoi. In case you haven't noticed, my intention with this comic, which isn't all that different from its predecessors, is to make it pretty dark. In that light, at a point in the not too distant past, I came across this photograph.
This was one of the first photographs I ever took on the set of a porn movie. At the time, Nerve had a print magazine. I pitched them a story on bukkake. They gave me the nod and asked if I would take a camera with me. I had no training in photography and little experience, with the exception of the kind of horrible photos one takes of one's friends. I didn't even own a camera, so I borrowed my then boyfriend's digital camera. Then, I set off for the set of "American Bukkake 11." (Read more about it here.) Every "American Bukkake" features three scenes. This one featured the buxom blonde porn star, Kiki D'Aire. In the photo, D'Aire is kneeling on the floor in front of a desk. Several bukkake boys, as they are known, surround her. The foot on the desk belongs to a second shooter (with a video camera). The man whose shoulder over which we are peering is the one and only Jim Powers, bukkake mastermind, extreme pornographer, and director and shooter of every "American Bukkake." Invariably, near the end of every bukkake shoot, a one-handed P.A. would wave to me as if beckoning to me. So I would go, into the middle of the bukkake, camera in hand. Most of the time, I would stand behind Jim, as doing so reduced the likelihood I would be shot by friendly fire. Kiki is holding a "bukkake bong." The Olympics was underway, and Jim said this event was for the guys who couldn't make it to the real Olympics. Kiki's image in the viewfinder is a compelling one. It mirrors a discomfiting duality that haunts Porn Valley, a place where reality and fantasy become one.
To begin the process of turning this photo into something that looks like a comic, I ran the image through a Photoshop process called Stamp. Previously, I hadn't used any photos from this set in a comic because they're low-res, and that meant a lot of the information was lost when sent through Stamp. As I see it, this comic will be more abstract, stark, and, if I may, iconic, so I didn't mind so much when, as you can see, a massive amount of detail was lost. I didn't care for the various white splotches you see here and there, so I got rid of them. But I very much liked the small image of what remained of Kiki's face, framed in the viewfinder of the video camera. I liked how it made this girl seem trapped, stuck in a story from which there was no escape. Let's say it worked for me narratively, and leave it at that.
Finally, I added text. And that was that. Tune in tomorrow to find out what happens in the enigmatic second panel of "My, My American Bukkake...Never Ends," a bukkake comic online work-in-progress.
