The Horror, the Horror

Is the Internet as full of wonderful things as it used to be? Sometimes, I wonder. Perhaps it's just become harder to find the wonders amidst all the chum. If you have a sick sense of humor like me, you, too, may enjoy this delightful comic. Found via the incomparable Nevver, Bernie Wrightson's 1984 "The Potty's Over" is wonderfully, obscenely, totally NSFW.

Monsters

The Comics Reporter has a terrific interview with Lynda Barry that is about a lot of things, but perhaps mostly about the creative process. What makes the creative process "work" is pretty fucking enigmatic, but Barry gets at some of the marrow of it here. "There is a specific feeling, a state of mind that happens when the strip starts to roll." She also writes about being rejected by editors, and struggling to do what she wants to do, and what it's like when you have been doing what you do forever and you still aren't sure it's right. It's hard. I haven't been doing what I do for as long as Barry, but it's been a pretty long time, a dozen years, and I'm fucking exhausted. Sometimes I think it's easier to do what I do, and sometimes I think it's harder. It is exceptionally difficult for me to find a place to do what I want to do and keep afloat. And right now? Right now, I feel like I'm drowning. Last night I had a dream I was touring a prison for midgets, and I don't think I even want to know what that means. What's tough is not knowing if you've come so far or if you've crawled a few feet. Yesterday someone I don't know wrote me an email and near the end it said: "Please keep writing your book. After reading your blog for this long, I know how important that book is to you. Your readers are rooting for you." And I am. I am I am I am. I am really fucking trying.

Quote of the Day: Jacob Covey

"Even the way Wonder Woman is lying in the middle of this house of men, possibly masturbating, is accidental art on the grandest scale." -- "Gotham Apartments"

Happy Feet Heels

Just in time for summer, Spanish Comic-Book Platforms, $750, for the girl who likes to bring something more than a milkshake to the yard.

Is Pornography Bad for You?

[Note: Click on the image above to see a larger version of the work.]
Yesterday, I got my copy of Best Erotic Comics 2008 in the mail. As I wrote, my favorite piece was by Cephalopod Products, a.k.a. Glenn Head, who is awesome. So, I sent Mr. Cephalopod a note, asking if I could post one of his Best Erotic Comics pieces, "Is Pornography Bad for You?", on this blog. And he said yes. And so here it is. Thank you so much to Glenn for letting us all look at it. Glenn is so cool, he has his own page on Lambiek. These days, he's working on HOTWIRE, a Harvey and Eisner award nominated anthology that Publishers Weekly called: "window-smashing nuttiness." HOTWIRE2 just got released and features work by a bevy of great artists. In other news, a young woman who shall be known as KK won yesterday's contest for a free copy of Best Erotic Comics 2008. Why? Because she responded first, she's a hooker in the rugby sense, she likes girls in the Biblical sense, she's a student at one of the UC's, and she wrote that she wanted it because "I'm in the gaping death-maw of finals right now at UC[redacted] and I have to write some 30 odd pages on about 8 books in about fifteen days and winning anything would pretty much make the world manageable again." So, there ya' go, girl. Click on the image above for a closer look at Head's amazing work. I like the porn addict thingamy at the bottom who's about to blow his brains out.

Fast and Dirty: Interview: Ellen Forney

Ellen Forney is a Seattle-based artist, cartoonist, and illustrator who has a new book out, Lust: Kinky Online Personal Ads from Seattle's The Stranger, from the boys at Fantagraphics. (Her last book, I Love Led Zeppelin, was nominated for an Eisner.) Lust brings together three years worth of Forney's "Lustlab Ad of the Week" series in which she creates comic works inspired by real ads that appear in the Stranger's personal ad section: Lustlab. For the second installment of Fast and Dirty, I interviewed Forney about what it's like to bring the secret fetishes of Seattle freaks to life. Buy your own copy of Lust here.




Reverse Cowgirl: How did you come up with the idea for your Lustlab Ads of the Week?

Ellen Forney: I wish I could say it was my own idea but it was The Stranger’s--they mostly wanted to draw more attention to their Lustlab section. I just loved the idea; I jumped at the job. The pervy content really appealed to me, of course, but it’s also a fun challenge to whittle down a whole ad into one panel. I write and edit, draw, design, ink--a lot of comics-related skills--but then create something almost more like a tiny poster than a comic. I play with lettering a lot, too, which I love.

RC: What's your process like?

EF: It’s hard to say how I choose an ad... an unusual kink, or an unusual way of wording something, or just something I think is interesting. I also try to keep moving around sexual orientations. I’ve only used one female/female couple’s ad--they’re hard to find. Everyone wants to fuck them but they’re never “seeking.”

First, I edit down the ad, and sometimes it comes to me right away how I might treat it (maybe literally, like, foot fetish: draw feet) or I might use some pop culture reference (furry fetish: Chewbacca).

Sometimes brainstorming can seem pretty random and I couldn’t say how I get to an idea. The main thing for me in this gig is that I get to play with different styles and approaches, and I try to make the cartoons different every time.

RC: What's the kinkiest/strangest/weirdest one you've done?

EF: Strangest: hard to say. I’ve learned some things: I’d never heard of “pantyhose encasement,” or a “Sybian.” One woman wanted to watch a very fat woman straining to take a shit on a toilet. A butch dyke wanted to do medieval reenactments with a femme; I thought that was pretty cute. One guy just wanted a woman who was kind of hairy and didn’t shave; I thought that was pretty cute, too.

I don’t do ads that request “discreet” encounters when they don’t want their partners to know, I can’t really hang with that. And I usually skip the ones where women want to be abused pretty severely by a man. I don’t know that Lustlab is the right forum for that, to be honest. I’m not judging but I fear for their safety with some guy they don’t really know--and it’s MY cartoon; I’m the one that gets to make that call. But, regardless, I only have so much room for people who want to be tied up and really submissive. It’s a totally common kink.

RC: How did the book come about? Were there any restrictions?

EF: My publisher asked that I just not include any that showed people fucking, which was easy because I’d only drawn a few that way. The hardest part was dividing the book into categories--I couldn’t cross-reference like the online ads do. And I had to figure out how to categorize transvestites, MTF’s, FTM’s, and genderqueers--I just gave up and lumped them all together as “trans.”

The book collection also includes several interviews with people who used Lustlab. Besides being titillating (hopefully), it shows that the service really works, that perverts do actually get laid. I think that’s an important thing for sexually conservative readers (I consider them “voyeurs”) to know.

RC: Have you heard from any of the creators of the ads you illustrated?

EF: I’ve only heard from a few, but they were really into it. I got an email from one woman recently whose now-boyfriend’s ad was featured in one of my cartoons--she wanted to get a print of it for herself and one for him. I know he liked the ad--he’d left a comment on my blog thanking me for it.

“Lustlab Ad of the Week” is my dream assignment, in a lot of ways. The subject matter is kinky and playful, I have a lot of freedom with the text and imagery, and the size and content are within very strict parameters, which makes it a challenging puzzle. It’s great.

Fast and Dirty: Interview: Peter S. Conrad

RC pal Xeni Jardin was kind enough to link to Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls on Boing Boing. In the comments, a reader posted a link to a project in which the artist had turned sex worker stories into comic strips. That artist is Peter S. Conrad, a Northern California based writer and artist whose work has appeared in True Porn and will appear in I Saw You: Missed Connection Comics. I dropped Conrad an email about the project. He wrote back and sent the comic I've posted here. I asked him if I could ask him a few questions, and he said yes. What follows is a short interview and the rest of "Going Back." You can click on each panel for a bigger image. Thank you to Peter for allowing me to reproduce his work here.

Reverse Cowgirl: How did you come up with the idea of turning sex worker stories into comic strips?

Peter S. Conrad: I learned that a very close friend had worked briefly as an exotic dancer. Her family doesn't know, but she told me a few stories. I thought there might be other people out there with something to say.

RC: How did you get the stories from the sex workers?

PSC: It turns out there are online forums where people compare local clubs, customers, laws, etc. as well as exchanging wardrobe and makeup tips and so on. I posted a couple of times on the site explaining my idea for the project, and received responses right away. The community is pretty tighly knit, at least online, so people referred each other to me too. I have not met any of these women in person. I'm not against meeting them, but I think it's not necessary--and it might be easier to tell a story to someone you haven't met, anyway.

RC: How did you create the artwork for the stories?

PSC: As much as possible, I don't want to be in the way of the story. I print out the words typed by the person who told the story and use a pencil to make marks where I think page divisions will go. Sometimes I have to make a lot of cuts, or sometimes I replace a bunch of words with a picture that gets the idea across, so I know I am having an effect on the story, but I use as much as I can verbatim. My goal is to be invisible, because it's not really my story to tell.

RC: What did you learn about sex, sex workers, and/or sex work?

PSC: That it's a job. There are people who hate the work and are tremendously unhappy; there are people who don't hate the work and are not tremendously unhappy. There is a community. There is a lot of diversity among sex workers, in terms of how they ended up in sex work, who they are, personality, everything. It's a mistake to try to categorize sex workers too broadly.

RC: Do you have any plans to publish the series as a book?

PSC: I think it would make a good book. I am considering inviting other artists to illustrate stories so that it won't all be in my voice.

Best Erotic Comics 2008 & 2009

Editor Greta Christina says Best Erotic Comics 2008 will be out in December. The anthology--"A literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality--and a fun dirty book, featuring today's smartest, raunchiest, funniest, filthiest, most beautiful, and most arousing adult comics!"--features artworks by Cephalopod Products, Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa, Justin Hall, Gilbert Hernandez, Trina Robbins, and me. And if you're interested in contributing, Greta's put out the call for 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.

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.

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?

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.