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.

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.