Italian kings of strips (and strippers)

Before leaving NYC I spent a couple of ... minutes observing a fascinating phenomenon I was unaware of, one of paramount anthropological value nonetheless: the crowd of tweens and teens slouching along the aisles of Barnes and Noble (Lincoln center branch) flipping through the pages of mangas. All the mangas those shelves can carry. All the mangas their hands can muster. Avid, pudgy, sweaty fingers and all.

I made a mental note: to further explore the power of sex as sociological denominator for the young and innocents, in this moment in this place - possible subject for a book. And once in Italy I found myself in rapture at the local version of B&N (Librerie Feltrinelli): but of course, OUR kings of strips and strippers, how could I have forgotten when I too was a slouching (never sweaty tho) set of vertebrae and fingers, learning the way of the fumetto erotico?

Thus the change of my icon on AIM to



and a suggestion for all my readers: to abso-fuckin-lutely check out, if they haven't yet

1) Guido Crepax: his Valentina is the national standard for comics hotness, cosmic, regal, ruthless hotness. AND *** Crepax began to work as a graphic artist and an advertisement illustrator, producing also covers for jazz LPs, including Gerry Mulligan, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong!!! ***

From Wikipedia:
"...Valentina's stories are a weird mix of oneiric, science fiction, fantasy, espionage and (especially later) erotic themes. They met a large success in Italy and abroad, especially in France..."

2) Milo Manara: his ladies make you wanna have sex on the spot (ops, maybe we don't need further encouraging?), they're like... always wet, stripping, masturbating. A lot of miseducation of Ducati goes back to those strips. "Il Gioco" (the game), m-mmmm. He who could draw silicone lips when no one had even invented plastic surgery. Those lips, parting, the tip of those tongues, flashing behind sets of perfect teeth.

From Wikipedia:
"...Like his compatriot Tinto Brass, he evidently has a fixation with the female buttocks. Many of his comics have themes of bondage, domination and humiliation, voyeurism, the supernatural, and the sexual tension beneath various aspects of Italian society. The works vary in their explicitness, but the general mood is playful rather than misogynistic..."

3) Hugo Pratt: Corto Maltese, his masterpiece. For the historic research, the trait, the squinting of those blue eyes, lost in horizons, aboriginal, metaphysical horizons. Trivia: Milo Manara was a pupil and late collaborator of his. Trivia: Crepax's Neutron (Valentina's beau) was protagonist of a long solo graphic novel published in the magazine Corto Maltese. Don't you love it when artists cross paths? It's like jazz: small/big combos like magmatic cells exchanging particles by osmosis.

Wiki, again:
"...Due to his rather mixed family ancestry, Corto had learned snippets of things like kabbalism and lots of history. Many of his stories are placed in real historical eras and deal with real events: the 1755 war between French and British colonists in Ticonderoga, colonial wars in Africa and both World Wars, for example. Pratt did exhaustive research for factual and visual details, and some characters are real historical figures or closely based on them, like Corto's main opponent, Rasputin..."

4) Diabolik, well, the ideal man for all of us Eva Kants (trivia: a bunch of male designers behind it, yet it's the brainchild of two ... sisters!) >>> see image above, Diabolik and Eva.

Read them. You'll like them. With all of your brain, and all of your senses.