Can’t talk. Reading.
I just got my copy of Harry Potter (I ordered it from the U.K. to get the edition that’s not translated into American English — how nerdy is that?), and it just arrived today. So I’m taking a brief blog break while I geek out. See you in a few days — with a winner of the prediction contest!
First of all: Atheist or not, if you haven’t read Craig Thompson’s Blankets, it’s a reading emergency. It’s not just one of the most beautiful and compelling graphic novels I’ve read; it’s one of the most beautiful and compelling books I’ve read in any format.
And if you’re interested in religion — whether you’re godless or a believer — it is absolutely a must-read, pretty much right this second. Thompson’s depiction of his fundamentalist childhood is a pitch-perfect depiction, in vivid and unignorable detail, of how, precisely, a religious upbringing can traumatize and fuck up a child. It’s not written as a critical argument, it’s not Dawkins or Dennet or Hitchens; it’s a personal, emotional, intensely intimate view of what this experience felt like from the inside. I don’t actually know if Thompson is an atheist or if he’s just discarded the fundamentalist faith of his childhood (maybe I should have called this post “Questioning Religion in Pop Culture,” but I’ve dubbed the series “Atheism in Pop Culture” and I’m sticking to it). But if you want to know how religion is playing out in families across the country, you have to read it stat.
So here, more specifically, is what I want to say about it.
Over at Daylight Atheism there’s a beautiful, eloquent post about how religious teachers act and speak as if they know how the spiritual world works — often in startling detail — better than the rank and file. The post, and the discussion that followed, reminded me immediately of this scene in Blankets:
Craig is a child in Sunday school, being told in detail about what Heaven is like, how everyone will be singing songs and praising God forever. Craig asks his Sunday school teacher if he’ll be able to draw in heaven (even as a child he loved to draw), if he could praise God and creation with drawing instead of singing. And the teacher says, unequivocally and with complete confidence and authority, No. You can’t draw in Heaven.
The exact words in the book: “I mean, come on, Craig. How can you praise God with DRAWINGS?” And when Craig asks if he can “draw His creation — like trees and stuff,” she replies, “But Craig… He’s already drawn it for us.” She’s quite adamant about it.
Now, let’s set aside for the moment how appalling it is to squelch a talented child’s creativity by saying something like that. My point is this: How on earth did the Sunday school teacher know that you can sing in Heaven, but you can’t draw? On what basis was she making that claim?
None at all, that’s what. It’s not what she was taught about Heaven — she was taught about singing God’s praises, not drawing them — and in her closed mind, drawing therefore couldn’t be part of Heaven. But she didn’t really have any basis for her answer. She taught it to a child as if it were a plain fact — but she was just making it up.
The same way that all religious teachers are just making it up.
They don’t have any basis for their detailed claims about Heaven or Hell, God and the soul. They have Scripture, sure; but Scripture is self-contradictory and vague, and if you ask ten religions teachers what Scripture means you’ll get ten different answers. And there’s no evidence for any one of those answers being right or wrong. Ultimately, it always comes down to faith.
So I think this Blankets story shows beautifully how the very idea of religious teaching warps the basic idea of authority. I don’t mean authority like cops or bosses — I mean intellectual authority. Human civilization is based, at least partly, on the passing down of knowledge from generation to generation, from people who know stuff to people who don’t; and in particular children’s brains are wired, for good evolutionary reasons, to believe what adults tell them. But that only works when the intellectual authorities have their teachings based in reality and evidence (and are open to new ideas and being proven wrong). Religious teaching, of the “I know what Heaven/ Hell/ God/ the human soul are like, and I’m going to explain it to you” variety, completely hijacks that process, by presenting with the conviction of authoritative truth ideas that they are just making up.
Just a reminder, folks: The deadline for your predictions in the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Prediction Pool is coming up (12:01 am Pacific time on July 20.) So if you’re planning to play, get your predictions in soon! The full rules are here in the original prediction pool post. Remember: five predictions, plus a optional tie-breaker question — which two major characters will die in Book Seven? (And if you made predictions already but didn’t answer the tie-breaker, please feel free to do that now.) Let’s play!
I wrote this review for Adult FriendFinder magazine, but for some reason the publication got delayed, so the reprint rights only recently returned to me. Enjoy!
Lost Girls
by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
Top Shelf Comix, ISBN 1-891830-74-0. $75.00.
It’s not just that it’s surprising — although it is. The first printing of “Lost Girls” — 10,000 copies — sold out in a day. The second printing, also of 10,000 copies, sold out in advance two days later. The day the book went on sale, it hit Amazon.com’s “Top 20.” And it’s gotten passionate rave reviews, not just from the adult press, but from places like Publisher’s Weekly, USA Today, Kirkus Reviews, Variety, Booklist, and many, many others — and from individuals ranging from Neil Gaiman to Brian Eno to Susie Bright.
A pretty surprising response for a book of pornography — and even more surprising given that it’s essentially a big, beautifully-made dirty comic book.
It’s not just that it’s groundbreaking, either — although it is. I’ve been reading (and writing about) adult comics and graphic novels for many years, and not only have I never seen anything like “Lost Girls” — I’ve never seen anything that comes close. “Lost Girls” is a full-length, three-volume, adult graphic novel that attempts to be both pornographically hot and artistically substantial… and that overwhelmingly succeeds at both. Now, I’ve seen excellent work in adult comics before — fun dirty comics with good stories and good art, comics that gave me new perspectives on sex while they were making me shove my hand in my pants. That’s not new.
But I’ve never seen anything this ambitious, with this much labor lavished on it — Moore and Gebbie spent sixteen years on the project. And I’ve never seen an adult graphic novel with anywhere near this much depth and breadth. “Lost Girls” has single-handedly raised the bar on dirty comics and graphic novels, destroying with a single stroke every snarky, dismissive assumption about what the genre can do. It’s profoundly important for that reason alone.
And it’s not just that it’s ravishingly beautiful — although it absolutely is. A hefty, hardbound, three-volume deluxe boxed set printed on thick, archival paper, the book is a sensual treat just to pick up and hold. Then when you open it up, the sensual treats pour out like a river. The elegant, luscious color art, influenced by Victorian and Edwardian illustrators of all genres, is both finely detailed and lush. And the exquisite beauty of the art takes the explicit images — explicit, excessive, wildly promiscuous, profoundly filthy, often perverse images — and makes them seductive and intriguing, like an upper-class courtesan or a handsome rake.
Yes, “Lost Girls” is all these things — surprising, groundbreaking, stunningly beautiful. But it’s also — and perhaps most importantly — all these things… while at the same time remaining blindingly hot.
There is way too much erotica in the world that’s artful and touching but completely forgets to grab your cock or tickle your clit. “Lost Girls” isn’t among them. Co-creator Alan Moore (“Watchmen,” “From Hell,” “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”) has said flat-out that “Lost Girls” is not erotica — it’s pornography. It’s a story about sex, not love. And it’s clearly meant to get you off on almost every page. The first-rate storytelling and superb artwork are in service to the lewd, sybaritic sex … every bit as much as the smutty sex is in service to the story and the art.
In fact, the art and the smut aren’t separate. They’re intricately entwined, each supporting the other. This isn’t one of those art-smut books that alternates between plot and sex scene, plot and sex scene. Not only does the smut not conflict with the art and the story — there’s never a hint that they should conflict. When you read “Lost Girls,” the all-too-common idea that porn can have quality or heat, but never both at once, seems like a fading memory of a truly ridiculous bad dream.
Gosh, I’ve told you all this stuff about how great the book is, and I haven’t even told you what it’s about! “Lost Girls” is a re-imagining of three characters from classic children’s stories: Alice from “Alice in Wonderland,” Wendy from “Peter Pan,” and Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz.” All grown up now, Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy meet at an elegantly decadent Austrian hotel just before the start of World War I. The three women — a decadent and seductive older Alice, a repressed and conventional middle-aged Wendy, and a young, adventurous, exuberantly horny Dorothy — soon discover that they have similarly bizarre sexual pasts. In the midst of seducing one another — along with the hotel staff, other guests, and anyone else they can get their hands on — they tell each other their histories… illustrated, of course, in full detail.
I won’t spoil things for you by telling those stories here. I’ll let you discover them for yourself. What I will say is that each of the stories is inspired by the children’s book it’s based on. Wendy does her sexual exploring with an innocent band of lost urchins; Alice does hers with a dizzying cast of fascinating but often selfish or cruel characters; and Dorothy does hers with an assortment of farm hands in sore need of brains, heart, and courage.
And when entwined with the women’s present-tense lives and explorations, their histories become more than just porny flashbacks. They become complicated ballets of the shaping of sexuality, sagas of sexual trauma and sexual healing, with the women’s libidos becoming stunted or nourished or twisted — or a little bit of all three.
On a purely smutty level, of course, the sexual images in “Lost Girls” are intensely compelling — a diversely perverted medley of lesbianism, heterosexuality, bisexuality, bestiality, foot fetishism, orgies, sex toys, sadomasochism, dominance, role-playing, game-playing, and more, with a side story of male homosexuality thrown in for good measure. But both the sex and the story are made even more compelling — and more erotic — by the fact that, despite the sybaritic fantasy world the women lose themselves in, the sex doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Sex is a powerful force in “Lost Girls,” with the power not only to create the ecstasy of a moment, but to drive and shape an entire life. Unlike so much porn that somehow dismisses sex even as it places it center stage, the sex in “Lost Girls” is never trivialized. It matters.
And that, all by itself, makes it a rare and important piece of work.
Now, before you go running to the bookstore with your credit card in hand, there’s something important you should know about “Lost Girls.” And that’s that it depicts underaged characters having sex.
Frequently. It’s not just in a scene or two — it’s all over the book. In fact, it’s one of the central themes of the book: how sexual experiences in youth can shape not only your adult sexuality, but your entire adult outlook on life.
Now, I happen to think that “Lost Girls” deals with this subject tastefully and thoughtfully, in a way that acknowledges the sexuality of minors without exploiting it. And when I say “minors,” I’m not talking about five-year-olds — the underaged characters in “Lost Girls” are, for the most part, in the fifteen-to-sixteen year old range, not legal in most states but not children either. More importantly, while the sexual play among minors is generally depicted as joyful and healthy and even innocent, the book has nothing but harsh words — and pictures — for any predatory adults who tamper with them.
But I realize that this topic pushes huge buttons for a lot of people — not unreasonably — and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it. And in fact, it raises a crucial question: If it’s profoundly fucked-up for adults to be messing with minors, what makes it okay for adults to get off reading this smutty graphic novel about minors?
The authors don’t ignore this apparent contradiction — they deal with it head-on. In the third volume of “Lost Girls,” the proprietor of the hotel — and the creator of a pornographic book that he’s thoughtfully placed in every room — discusses this very question, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like the authors explaining their own erotic philosophy.
“You see?” the hotel owner says of his lavishly perverted porno book. “Incest, c’est vrai, it is a crime, but this? This is the idea of incest, no? And then these children: how outrageous! How old can they be? Eleven? Twelve? It is quite monstrous… except that they are fictions, as old as the page they appear upon, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them… You see, if this were real, it would be horrible. Children raped by their trusted parents. Horrible. But they are fictions. They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence. Why, they are almost innocent.”
In other words, pornography, by its very nature, is consensual. Certainly pornographic writing and drawing is. The creator consents to make it; the audience consents to look at it; and nobody else has to be involved. Getting excited by immoral acts in a porn story is no more immoral than getting excited by immoral acts in a crime or horror story — and it doesn’t violate anyone.
Of course, the sex in “Lost Girls” isn’t uncontaminated by effect and consequence. It’s not some silly Victorian smut novel where incest and rape happen blithely with no repercussion but the reader’s orgasm. The women in “Lost Girls” are real characters, and while their sex lives are definitely on the fantastic and implausible side, you still care about how they feel and what’s going to happen to them next.
But that’s one of the things that makes “Lost Girls” so brilliant — not just artistically brilliant, but erotically brilliant. It makes the more twisted and perverse parts of the story that much more intense, by making you believe in the characters and care about how they turn out. Yet at the same time, it explicitly gives you permission to get off, even on the seriously fucked-up stuff — by reminding you that porn is fiction, and fiction is always consensual.
I could nitpick the book if I wanted to. I could point out that Dorothy’s Midwestern farm-girl accent doesn’t ring true. Or that some of the parallels with the original children’s stories are cutesy and awkward. Or that not all of the art is consistently stunning — some of it is merely lovely. I could even nitpick about how the deluxe oversized printing makes one-handed reading a challenge (the books are a bit too heavy to read with one hand, and they’re far too pretty and expensive for you to want to get goo all over them).
But none of this matters in the slightest. Of course I could nitpick on “Lost Girls,” and if there were more books like it, I might be more inclined to do so. But “Lost Girls” is a first, an important and groundbreaking book as well as a beautiful and blisteringly hot one, and I have no desire to lay anything on it other than praise. “Lost Girls” hasn’t just raised the bar for adult comics and graphic novels — it’s grabbed the bar and raced up the stairs with it, and is now dangling the bar over our heads from several stories high, waving it triumphantly and daring everyone else to chase it. And I passionately hope that its success — both artistically and commercially — inspires other serious comic artists to dip their pens into the murky but fertile well of pornography, and see what they come up with.
(P.S. Quick conflict-of-interest confession: I work for a company, Last Gasp, that sells Lost Girls. That’s not how I found out about it, but it’s how I managed to get my mitts on a first printing.)
It’s time.
The book is on sale for pre-orders. It comes out in July of this year. And rumors about the possibility of spoilers are already starting to circulate. So now is the time to begin Greta Christina’s Harry Potter Book Seven Prediction Contest.
I’m not quite sure why I do these. When I did my Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Seven Prediction Pool, I got exactly zero out of five predictions right. But I had a gas doing the pool anyway, and was entertained and impressed by how well other people did on it. (Rebecca and Jack both got four out of five, and the game wound up coming down to the tie-breaker.)
So here are the official rules to Greta Christina’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” Prediction Contest. If you don’t like ’em, hold your own damn contest.
1. Predictions must be posted as comments in this blog. No private emails.
2. Each player should submit a list of five predictions. If you want to make more, you can submit a second list of five — but correct predictions from the two lists will not be added together. Each list of five stands on its own. (No more than two lists per player.)
3. Predictions must not be totally obvious. For instance, “The book will be longer than 300 pages” or “Harry will use magic during the course of the book” will not count.
3a. On that topic: “Harry will defeat Voldemort,” “Harry will kill Voldemort,” and “Voldemort will die” will not, by themselves, be accepted as predictions. You can, however, predict how Harry will kill/defeat Voldemort, how exactly Voldemort will die, or whether Harry will die himself in defeating Voldemort.
4. Predictions must not be totally vague, either. I have to be able to reasonably determine whether what you predicted did or did not happen in the book.
5. Your predictions may duplicate other people’s predictions. You’re on the honor system to not cherry-pick the best predictions from other people’s lists. However, each new player must make at least one prediction that’s not on a previously posted list — so it’s in your interest to post your predictions early.
6. Predictions may not be changed once they’ve been posted.
7. Predictions must be submitted no later than 12:01 am Pacific time on July 20 (that’s the day BEFORE the book comes out). If serious, credible spoilers about the book leak out in the media before then, I’ll stop accepting predictions. (So again, get your predictions in early!)
8. In the case of judgement calls, I will be the final arbiter. If you don’t like it, tough. This isn’t global warming, people — this is a Harry Potter prediction contest, and in the cosmic scheme of things, or indeed any scheme of things, it is utterly trivial.
9. Tie-breaker: Originally, I was going to have my tie-breaker be the same one I used in the Buffy Season Seven Prediction Pool: how many major characters will die in the last episode? But J.K. Rowling has already announced that two major characters will die in the last book, thus completely screwing up my tie-breaker. 
Thanks, bitch.
Therefore, the tie-breaker question instead will be: Which two major characters will die in Book Seven?
(If there’s a tie, and both/all winners get the tie-breaker right, then all will win, and all will have prizes.)
Prize: I’m not actually going to do this as a pool this time — it was too much hassle with the Buffy pool. This is just a straight-out contest. The winner, if they live in the Bay Area and are someone I personally know, will receive one (1) homemade chocolate pie, personally delivered to your door. With whipped cream, if I can find my hand-held electric mixer. If the winner doesn’t live in the Bay Area or is someone I don’t know, they will receive, in the mail, 1 (one) batch of my homemade chocolate crinkle cookies.
And now, to get you started, here is my list. Again, I don’t know why I’m subjecting myself to this public humiliation, as my track record on these pop-culture predictions has consistently sucked. But I’ve always promised myself to be fearless in my writing, and that includes being unafraid to make a fool of myself in public over pointless pop-culture trivia.
So here goes.
1. Snape will turn out to be a good guy after all, and it will turn out that he murdered Dumbledore on Dumbledore’s own orders.
2. In his search for Horcruxes, Harry will encounter Snape also trying to find and destroy Horcruxes, and the two of them will have to cooperate to destroy them (or at least one of them).
3. Snape will die heroically attempting to defeat Voldemort. (Unofficial prediction: One of the Horcruxes will be in Snape himself, and he’ll kill himself to destroy it. That one doesn’t count, though — if it turns out to be right, I get nothing but glory.)
4. Dumbledore’s portrait will begin to speak, and will give Harry advice.
5. Harry will NOT die — or if he does, it’ll be some weird temporary “visiting the land of the dead” thing. He won’t be dead at the end of the book.
Tie-breaker: Snape and Voldemort will die in the last book.
Okay, fine. So three out of my five predictions involve Snape. Plus my tie-breaker. So what’s your point? At least one of them wasn’t “Snape will have a torrid affair with a 45-year-old atheist sex writer from America.” I have SOME pride.
So those are my predictions. What are yours?
And we’re back to the heavy topics. No, it’s not sex. It’s not atheism. It’s not the relative merits of “Harry Potter” versus “Lord of the Rings.”
It’s grammar.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been deeply buried in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I plan to blog about it as soon as I finish it — but one of his tangents reminded me about a rant I’ve been wanting to make about the third person singular pronoun. In the section where he talks about the consciousness-raising potential of Darwin, he makes an analogy to the consciousness-raising potential of non-sexist language:
“Gendered pronouns notoriously are the front line of such consciousness-raising. He or she must ask himself or herself whether his or her sense of style could ever allow himself or herself to write like this. But if we can just get over the clunking infelicity of the language, it raises our consciousness to the sensitivities of half the human race. Man, mankind, the Rights of Man, all men are created equal, one man one vote — English too often seems to exclude woman. When I was young, it never occurred to me that women might feel slighted by a phrase like ‘the future of man’. During the intervening decades, we have all had our consciousness raised.”
This sums up neatly, I think, both the sexist insult of using “he/him/his” as the generic third person singular personal pronoun — and the clumsiness of trying to be both politically and grammatically correct by using “he or she.” (Douglas Hofstadter also does some excellent writing about this in Metamagical Themas — including a mind-blowing essay in which he uses “whites” as the generic term for people instead of “men.”)
So what do we do instead?
Many people have invented gender-neutral pronouns to replace “he or she,” “him or her,” “his or hers,” etc. And not one of these pronouns has caught on. The problem (according to Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, anyway) is that, while we invent new words all the time and at an astonishing pace, it’s nearly impossible to invent replacements for words that perform complicated and largely unconscious grammatical placeholder functions. Those words get learned very young, they’re deeply rooted in our brain, and trying to replace them is like trying to uproot an oak tree with a toothpick. They evolve very slowly, if at all, and the most we can do is to shuffle them around a bit.
Simple nouns and verbs and adjectives? Absolutely. We make them up on a daily basis. Pronouns and articles? Not so much.
And “it” doesn’t work. We clearly see “it” as referring to objects, and using it to refer to people is, well, de-personalizing. Dehumanizing, even. Like in Silence of the Lambs: “It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again.”
Which is why I’m advocating the singular “they.”
It’s not a made-up word, so it has much more potential to be adopted. In fact, in its current usage (third person plural), both its literal meaning and its grammatical placeholding functions are extremely close to the meaning/function I’m advocating — so close that expanding its meaning/function would be relatively painless.
In fact, not only can it be used this way — it’s already being used this way. In casual conversation, anyway.
And this, I think, is the best argument going for it. No other gender-neutral third person singular personal pronoun has made anywhere near as much headway as the singular “they.” Not only can it be used this way — it is being used this way. You can’t say that about any other alternative.
I think the singular “they” is the best solution we have. And I think we should move towards incorporating it — in casual conversation, but also (gradually) in more and more formal usage as well. I’m not saying we should get rid of “he” and “she” — gendered pronouns are useful, too. But when we want a third person singular pronoun to refer to a person whose gender is unknown, I think “they” is going to be our best bet.
Now, the big argument against the singular “they” is that it’s ungrammatical. “They” means third person plural, the argument goes, not third person singular, and that’s the end of it.
But I have two counter-arguments to that. One is the argument from precedent. We already use “you” to mean both second person singular and second person plural. And we do so with minimal confusion. Our grammar is obviously capable of using the same pronoun for singular and plural — there’s nothing in the structure of our language to disallow it.
In fact, “you” wasn’t always both the plural form of the second person pronoun — it used to be the second person plural only, with the now-archaic “thou” taking the second person singular. Clearly our grammar is capable, not just of having one pronoun for both singular and plural, but of allowing for a switch from one to the other. (A quick shout-out to Cecil Adams of “The Straight Dope,” for pointing out the plural-singular shift of “you” in a discussion of this very issue.) The singular “they” also has centuries of literary precedent, including Shakespeare, Thackeray, Austen, the King James Bible, and others.
The second — and probably more controversial — argument is my general descriptivist approach to language. To say that a word or usage isn’t correct because it isn’t grammatical is, in my opinion, circular reasoning. It’s grammatical if it’s generally accepted as such by everybody who uses the language  as long as it doesn’t violate the basic structure of the language (and I believe the abovementioned precedent proves that the singular “they” does not). Grammatical is as grammatical does. Language changes — in fact, change is essential to the way language works — and usages that were considered incorrect 100 years ago now are now accepted without argument by even the most passionate prescriptivist. (And vice versa.)
(BTW, if you’re unfamiliar with the arcane lingo of linguistic squabbles and don’t know what the hell “descriptivist” and “prescriptivist” mean, Wikipedia has an excellent entry on the subject. Short version: Prescriptivists tend to think people should use language according to rules set out in grammar books, and are more likely to resist changes in language; descriptivists tend to think grammar books should describe the rules of language as it’s used, and are more likely to embrace changes in language. The difference is often described as if it were between two clearly opposing camps, but in fact it’s more of a shades-of-gray spectrum.)
Now, while I am a fairly ardent descriptivist, I’m not a hard-line one. I understand that, while language has to change in order to work, it also has to have some consistency in order to work. If we don’t agree on what words mean (not to mention the structures we put them together with), then the language just becomes nonsense. And while I think it’s silly to resist changes in the language just on principle, I think it is worth debating whether any given change is necessary, desirable, comprehensible, and graceful.
But I think the singular “they” is all of the above. It’s needed, it’s wanted, it’s simple, and it works. And the more it gets used, the less awkward it will sound, and the more quickly it’ll be accepted as standard usage.
So let’s use it.
I just got tagged with this, and found it pretty entertaining, so I’m passing it along. I am now tagging Charlie Anders, Jill Nagle, and Carol Queen. Play if you think it’d be fun, don’t if you don’t. This is not a chain letter, bad luck will not follow you if you break the chain of this silly game. (And if any of the rest of you think it’d be fun to play, please do!)
It’s a blog game. I’m supposed to pick three bloggers I know and ask them to:
1) Pick up the book that you are nearest to with 123 or more pages. (According to early versions: Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.)
2) Turn to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth full sentence in that page.
4) Copy that and the next two sentences that follow.
5) Tag three more bloggers to do the same.
I got tagged by Iamcuriousblue, and got this result:
The closest book to me was a graphic novel, and page 123 did not have five full sentences. So I started counting with the first full sentence on that page and went to the fifth sentence after that, which took me to Page 125.
“And if eroticism needs the extraordinary, the new, then your innovations are a threat… some day all the variations will have been played out!”
“Your fears are vain, my friend, since eroticism is not inherited… it’s a personal adventure!”
“At this point you are seeing the second law of erotica… the need for asymmetry!”
It’s from the graphic novel “Emmanuelle, Bianca, and Venus in Furs,” by Guido Crepax. The really entertaining part: I was at work when I got tagged. This book really was the closest to me on my desk. Sometimes I love my job.
(Note: This news has now been updated.)
Last Gasp is seeking submissions for an anthology of adult comics, Best Erotic Comics 2008 (the first in a planned 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.
*****
Thus begins the call for submissions for my brand-new book project, “Best Erotic Comics 2008.” (The complete call for submissions is on my Website, but I’m also including it at the end of this post.) If you’ve talked to me in the last couple/few months and I’ve said I had a potential new book project in the works but was cagey about the details… this is it.
I am dying of excitement. I am so proud of this project — and am having so much fun with it — that I could just fall into hysterics at any time.
And here’s why I’m doing it.
If you’ve been paying attention, you know that the last 20 years or so have seen a tremendous blossoming in the world of comics and graphic novels.
And if you’ve been paying attention, you know that those same 20 years have seen a similarly fabulous blossoming in the world of erotica, especially erotic writing and photography.
But erotic comics have not been getting their props. Adult comics are very much ghettoized in the comics world, shunted off to the side with the expectation that its readers want jerk-off material and nothing more. As a result, the work has suffered, in the same way that stigmatized, low-expectation, commerce-driven art forms and genres have always suffered.
There’s good work being done, though. There are adult comic artists doing work with excellent literary and artistic merit. There are serious art/literary comic artists and graphic novelists creating some wildly hot and dirty scenes in their work. And Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s impossibly beautiful Lost Girls (drool, drool — but that’s a post for another day) has made the potential for this field — and for the fusion of its literary/art side and its dirty side — unmistakably clear.
The time is clearly ripe for a blossoming in the field of adult comics. With the “Best Erotic Comics” series, I want to help foster that growth. I want to spotlight the good work that’s currently being done — and I want to encourage comic artists to do more of it.
So if you’re a comics fan and you have suggestions for work you think should be included in this book, please look over the call for submissions, and send me your suggestions/nominations. If you have friends/colleagues/etc. who are comic artists, please pass the call for submissions along to them. And if you’re a comic artist, for the love of God, check out the call for submissions, and send me your work.
*****
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
Best Erotic Comics 2008, to be published by Last Gasp
Last Gasp is seeking submissions for an anthology of adult comics, “Best Erotic Comics 2008” (the first in a planned 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. Work should be in English or wordless. Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2006. The pay starts at $20 a page, depending on length and other considerations.
The editor of the anthology 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 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 30, 2006.
If you have any questions, please contact [email protected].
My friend Kanani and I were talking about books last weekend, and one of the topics on the table was the fact that, even though we’re both voracious readers, neither of us reads very many novels any more. (Not contemporary ones, anyway.) This brought up an idea/rant I’ve been wanting to blog about for some time — a response to people who complain about the fact that almost nobody reads serious novels anymore, and who bewail the impending doom of literary fiction.
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This is going to make me sound like a Philistine. But I think that living in the late 20th/early 21st century and griping about the fact that nobody reads novels anymore… well, it’s a bit like living in the early 19th century and griping about the fact that nobody reads sermons or epic poetry, because they’re all reading those darned newfangled novels.
We are living, right now, in a time of tremendous blossoming in the field of non-fiction. There is just an enormous amount of amazing non-fiction out there right now — compelling, insightful, allusive, funny, petrifying, inspiring, and beautifully written. (BTW, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most exciting and interesting cinematic form right now is the documentary…)
And we’re extraordinarily lucky to be living in a time when an entirely new literary form is blossoming like mad — the graphic novel.
Yes, yes, I know. Graphic novels aren’t all that new, and comics as an art form have been around for a while. By the same token, the novel had been around for a while by the early 19th century as well — and I’d still peg that as the time when the form really began to come into its own. At the risk of sounding like an SAT question, I would argue that the last 20 years or so is to comics and graphic novels what the early-to-mid 19th century was to the novel: not the time when it was born, but the time when it began to really flourish and take hold as a serious — and seriously recognized — art form. (Art Spiegelman is to the graphic novel as Jane Austen is to the novel? Okay, I’ll stop now.)
Of course, fiction hasn’t just been losing readers to non-fiction and graphic novels. It’s also been losing readers to TV and video games and the Internet. I get that. (Although I’ve seen some interesting defenses of video games as a new and valid art form..) And of course, something dear and precious would be lost if the novel dwindled away completely… just as I’m sure something precious was lost when epic poetry began to fade.
My point is this: If one creative form is in fact diminishing in impact and importance, that’s certainly sad if you’re attached to that form. But it doesn’t mean that creativity itself is disappearing. Creativity seems to be hard-wired into the human brain, and as long as we’re around, I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
Someone I never knew died on August 27, and I sat at my computer at work yesterday writing an obituary and trying not to cry.
In case you’re not familiar with her, Tee Corinne was one of the earliest pioneers of the modern lesbian and women’s erotica movements — in photography, writing, and art. She’s probably best known for the “Cunt Coloring Book,” but I mostly knew her from her photography. She was one of the first women to create sexual images and writing for women, from a woman’s point of view, outside the male-driven porn machinery — and to do it publicly and shamelessly.
And by “one of the first,” I don’t mean she was doing it before it was cool. I mean she was doing it before it was being done. Her doing it is one of the things that made it possible for the rest of us to do it. She paved the way. She made a space.
I never met Tee Corinne. But she’s one of the people who made my life easier.
No, strike that. She’s one of the people who made my life possible. I’m not a pioneer — I’m an early adapter, but I’m not a pioneer — and I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn’t have had the nerve to step into those woods if there hadn’t been Tee and people like her cutting through the brush and stamping out a trail first.
I feel bad that I never took the time to write her while she was alive and thank her. So I want to do that now — not just Tee, but all the people who’ve made talking about sex, and making art about sex, and providing/getting accurate information about sex, that much easier. I always get pissy when young sex writers/artists act like it’s always been this easy and don’t acknowledge the debt of gratitude they have towards the people who came before them. So I want to say thank you now.
I want to say thank you, not only to Tee Corinne, but to Joani Blank and Betty Dodson, to Pat Califia and Honey Lee Cottrell, to Felice Newman and Frederique Delacoste, to Priscilla Alexander and Scarlot Harlot, to Michael Rosen and Mark I. Chester, to Layne Wincklebleck and Kat Sunlove, to the founders of San Francisco Sex Information, to Nina Hartley and Annie Sprinkle, to Isadora Allman and Susie Bright. And I know there are more. I know I’m forgetting some people, and for that I apologize. If you think you should have been on this list, you probably should have.
To all of you I want to say: I am not an ungrateful child. I am more grateful than I could possibly say.
