Well, God Knows It Wasn't Me

Ashley Benigno emailed me: "Who Killed Bukkake?" Who, indeed. My mind is maximum-boggled by this lengthy ponderification upon the rise and fall of overwhelming win porn by Momus. Apparently, the Japanese have stopped making bukkake videos--for the record, I have no clue if this is true or not (uh, for what record, I do not know)--and Momus has taken it upon himself to figure out why. Why, indeed. His intellicocktualizing touches upon fashion, transgression, Kafka, calligraphy, shirudan, power ballads, consumerism, bushido, yakuza, gansha, Viagra, tantric sex, and shinto.

"3. Let's speculate, for a moment, that bukkake is a branch of calligraphy. After all, one of the pleasures of the genre is seeing the expressive, gestural shapes sperm can make on a face, the satisfyingly graphic representation of the transition from internal repression to sudden external release. It really is painting with the white ink of life. But maybe the Japanese are neglecting their traditional arts?"

It's a must-read.

American Bukkake Girl

I took this photo on the set of a bukkake movie a long time ago in Porn Valley. The PA had one hand. At a certain point, he would wave me over into the middle. I would stand right behind the director who was shooting. I would look over his shoulder. I guess you could say I wanted to know what the girl was doing. Looking back on it, I think I'd have to say she was somewhere else altogether. Then I shot her.

I'll Have the Overwhelming Win, Please

Apparently, Matsugen is offering Sea Urchin Bukkake.

"Yes, it is a kind of cold udon." (Via Balk.)

Related: "Bukkake is the noun form of the Japanese verb bukkakeru (打っかける), meaning 'to splash forcefully.' The compound verb can be decomposed into two verbs: butsu (ぶつ) and kakeru (掛ける). Butsu literally means to hit, but in this usage it appears to be an intensive prefix as in buttamageru (ぶったまげる, 'completely astonished') or bucchigiri (ぶっちぎり, 'overwhelming win'). Kakeru in this context means to shower or pour. The word bukkake is often used in Japanese to describe pouring out water (or other liquids) with sufficient momentum to cause splashing or spilling. Indeed, bukkake is used in Japan to describe a type of dish where the toppings are poured on top of noodles, as in bukkake-udon and bukkake-soba."

Win a Free Copy of Best Erotic Comics 2008

[Update: I have picked a winner. Details are forthcoming shortly.]
Today, I got my contributor's copy of Best Erotic Comics 2008 in the mail. I heard the UPS guy leave it on the front porch with a thump. Then I went down and got it. It looks great, and it's very big. It was strange to see my comic, "My, My American Bukkake," in print and so large. This is, in fact, the third time this comic has appeared in print. Previously, it appeared in Dirty Stories Volume 3 and Headpress 23. Now, here it is again. The second installment, "My, My American Bukake Too," lives on Artbomb. As I wrote once upon a time, bukkake never dies. In any case, Best Erotic Comics 2008 includes works by Phoebe Gloeckner, Dan Clowes, and Gilbert Hernandez, so being included was an honor. Far and away, I must say, my favorite contribution was by Cephalopod Products. A long time ago, I got to know Mr. Cephalopod, and he, out of the blue, as I recall it, sent me a package of his work in the mail. It's insane, his work--so obscene that it's beautiful. And I respect that. In this anthology, he's got a terrific piece called "Is Pornography Bad for You?" that I love. Generally speaking, this book is dir-ty. Lots of things going into things and substances rocketing and bodily orifices yawning. Not for the faint of heart. In any case, Last Gasp and the book's editor, Greta Christina, were kind enough to send me two copies of the book. Would you like to have one? If you would like to have your own personal copy of Best Erotic Comics 2008 to have and to hold, you are 18 or older, and you live in the US, send me an email telling me why you deserve it. I don't care how you do it--be creative, robotic, or psychotic--and the best reply will get a copy. Right now, it's wrapped in plastic wrap, so I could send it like that, or I could sign it, if you like. Inspired, I was, so I created a new panel for the third installment of the "My, My American Bukkake" comic series: "My, My American Bukkake... Never Ends." I hadn't worked on it for a while. It was a good time. The fact of the matter is that I'm not a very good artist. I can't draw, and I don't even know how to Photoshop very well. But with art, for me, it's different. I don't really give a shit. Writing, of course, is another story. Speaking of stories, I spent quite a bit of time today working on the essay I posted about yesterday. It's coming along well. Clocking in at 3,000 words for this rough draft, I estimate it will be 5,000 words when done in, I hope, the not so distant future.

Shit Fuck Bukkake

Daniel Radosh reports the New York Times printed the word "shit" for the second time this year. Radosh declares that censoring dirty words, rather than just reporting the facts, is a "journalistic sin." He adds the word "fuck" has appeared in the Times once. And that, I would add, is the same number of times the Lady has published the word "bukkake."

My, My American Bukkake Is Everywhere

This morning I got an email from Cory Silverberg, a sex educator and sex blogger at About.com. He sent me a link to the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. This November, they'll be hosting the SSSS 50th Anniversary: Honoring Our Past and Envisioning Our Future conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. Cory pointed me to the preliminary program, page 10, panel 30: "Erotica, Kink & Coke." It features seven panelists speaking on subjects ranging from the male response to erotic images to the relationship between cocaine's effects and sexual orientation. "I feel like I should attend this one on your behalf," he wrote. That's because one of the panel's papers is titled Student Judgments Concerning the Sexually Explicit DVD American Bukkake 14 by Randy D. Fisher, Ph.D., Daniel G. Linz, Ph.D., and... Christopher Seaman. In the new millennium, bukkake is academic.

Human E-Collar Goes International

A few weeks ago, I read a call for submissions on Boing Boing that announced the art collective monochrom was looking for reviews to be published in monochrom #26-34. There were looking for reviews of anything, so I reviewed the Human E-Collar. I got an email today saying the review and the image you see here have been accepted.

My, My American Bukkake...Never Ends V

That's as far as I've gotten with "My, My American Bukkkake...Never Ends." I have the next two panels planned out in my head. They are both double panels. They will emphasize text more so than the other two comics I've done. Something like Russian propaganda posters.
Or like the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass.

Siege: "I do often wonder at the historic roots of your intense struggle with porn. You, perhaps more than anybody I know, seem to have such an intense love/hate relationship with it, almost abusive, in a semi-detached voyeuristic way. It's intriguing. It's almost like you're a moth to the flame, and regardless of getting singed you return..."

My, My American Bukkake...Never Ends IV

This is the third panel for "My, My American Bukkake...Never Ends." This morning, it looked very different. I didn't like it. So, I changed it.

My, My American Bukkake...Never Ends III

This morning, I woke up to this: "Susannah Breslin Freaks Me Out." Several times this week, I've debated whether or not to delete this week's posts about bukkake comics because if you are the kind of person who sits around writing blog posts about bukkake comics you are making based on bukkake sets you visited, like, six years ago, you have to wonder about yourself. Then, I read it. It's very funny. This is what it says about "My, My American Bukkake," my first comic: "It was like the most terrifying murder mystery I had ever read crossed with the most awful motorcycle wreck I ever saw, with added jism." Today we are moving on to the second panel of "My, My American Bukkake...Never Ends." This time, I started with a photograph I took on the set of "American Bukkake 13." "AB13," as I like to call it in an homage to Vanessa Beecroft, is of special importance to me, Brent Ward, and America because the US government thinks it is obscene.

I found these photos on some old CDs of mine that survived the southern equivalent of an atomic blast. Bukkake photos are like cockroaches, apparently. They never die. In any case, I took this photo at some point during the bukkake. The man feet belong to Jim. The girl feet belong to Sabrina. As you can see, this is not a good photo, per se. But it had the potential to work in the comic. I was interested in her shoes and the contrast between her and the grim conditions in which she is working. Bukkakes are never, ever easy.

This time I flipped black and white before running the image through Stamp in Photoshop. I liked how it made her shoes seem illuminated, as if they are magic. And, it made her body blackly opaque. Bukkake, in many ways, is about obliteration. Visually, this echoed that. After that, I wiped out everything but her, and I flipped the image around.

It's pretty simple, but it conveyed what I was trying to say. She has been turned upside down. She is unmoored. In "My, My American Bukkake Too," I wondered if I identify with the woman or the men. These days, I'm all too aware as to who these comics are really about.

Then, I added the text. It says it all. Tomorrow, we'll look at the third panel, the first XL panel of "My, My American Bukkake...Never Ends."

My, My American Bukkake...Never Ends II

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.

Human E-Collar

This morning, Cory blogged about net-art collective monochrom's call for submissions to monochrom #26-34. They had requested reviews of anything. I reviewed the Human E-Collar--an Elizabethan-collar--as seen in "American Bukkake 13." The Human E-Collar has influenced Gaultier. "AB13" is of interest to the DOJ. The image is from "My, My American Bukkake," a comic I created out of photos I shot at "AB13."

Obscenity & Comics

The other day I came across the new cover for Best Erotic Comics 2008, edited by Greta Christina and published by Last Gasp, at Rachel Kramer Bussel's Lusty Lady blog. As it turns out, the anthology is available for pre-order on Amazon--although, it won't be released until November. I had no idea that my work would be appearing alongside that of Phoebe Gloeckner and Dan Clowes. "I Hate Comics" has no peer. The book will include "My, My American Bukkake," a comic I created after visiting the set of "American Bukkake 13," a movie targeted by America's "top porn cop" in an 18-count federal obscenity indictment. Is a comic inspired by what the US government considers obscene less obscene than its muse?

Bukkake Never Dies

I've been working on a long blog post about the US attorneys firings, how obscenity played a factor, and my own experience on the set of "American Bukkake 13," which is listed in this indictment. While this kind of coverage may be informative, it's completely fucking boring.

Best Erotic Comics

I got an email from Last Gasp, asking if they could reprint my bukkake comic, "My, My American Bukkake," which appeared in Dirty Stories Volume 3, in Best Erotic Comics 2008. (The sequel, "My, My American Bukkake Too," can be found online.) Greta Christina, the editor of the series, included the call for submissions of Best Erotic Comics 2009.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
"BEST EROTIC COMICS 2009," TO BE PUBLISHED BY LAST GASP

Last Gasp is seeking submissions for an anthology of adult comics, "Best Erotic Comics 2009" (the second in an annual series). The series is intended to showcase the most artistically interesting -- and most sexually arousing -- recent erotic comics, from both the literary comic side of the field and the smut comic side. We believe that the divide between literary comics and adult comics is unfortunate and unnecessary, and we plan to make "Best Erotic Comics" enjoyable both as a literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality... and as a fun dirty book.

In keeping with this vision, submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should be both:
a) Hot.
b) Interesting in some way in addition to being hot.

Here are some more details:

IF YOU ARE PRIMARILY A SMUT COMIC ARTIST:
Submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should not simply be hot sex comics. They should have some literary and/or artistic quality, as well as being arousing. We are looking for hot sex comics that are also thoughtful, insightful, engaging, funny, poignant, political, and/or exceptionally well-drawn.

IF YOU ARE PRIMARILY A LITERARY COMIC ARTIST:
Submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should not simply be about sex. They should also be hot. We are looking for thoughtful, insightful, engaging, funny, poignant, political, and/or exceptionally well-drawn comics that make the reader want to have sex and/or whack off.

IF YOU ALREADY WORK IN LITERARY SMUT COMICS:
Excellent! Send us your best work.

We are looking for a wide variety of erotic content -- straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and other; kinky and vanilla; from the points of view of women, men, and others. Both single-panel and multi-panel comics will be accepted. We are primarily looking for black-and-white work, but will be including a limited color section. We are accepting both original and previously-published comics; previously-published work should have been published or reprinted fairly recently, ideally after January 1, 2000. You can submit individual stories or excerpts from longer works. You can submit more than one piece at a time. Work should be in English or wordless.

The editor of the series is Greta Christina. Greta has been writing about sex professionally since 1989. She is editor of the anthology "Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients," and author of the erotic novella "Bending," which appeared in the three-novella collection "Three Kinds of Asking For It" edited by Susie Bright for Simon & Schuster. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, and the Skeptical Inquirer, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2003 and 2005. She has worked for Last Gasp Books and Comics since 2002.

Please do not send submissions electronically, either in email or on disc. Submissions must be sent on paper in the regular mail. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2007. Please send submissions to:

Last Gasp
Attention: Best Erotic Comics
777 Florida St.
San Francisco, CA 94110

Please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Do not send originals, or your only copy. All submissions with SASE will be answered, but submissions will not be returned. Deadline: November 1, 2007.

If you have any questions, please contact bec@lastgasp.com.

There's Too Much Bukkake, He Said

I sent my nonfiction book proposal about Porn Valley to my agent. He said it was "bukkake-centric." I will have to work on that. I told him I bet he says that to all his clients. (Bukkake Hotline: (818) 709-4452.) In bukkake, Jim Powers is behind the camera. You hear his voice. You see through his eyes. This American bukkake video clip is NSFW-XXX.