By Denise Liu
Comtesse
Aude Picault (w + a), Les Requins Marteaux, 2010.
Read if you like: period costume, wordless graphic novels, erotic fiction, French fiction.
What is it exactly about porn that makes it seem repulsive? Is it necessarily vulgar and is it always misogynistic? Okay, these might appear to be some really stupid questions but bear with me, MONDO readers – I know that at least half of you are just as degenerate as myself (and that it’s safe to presume that most of our staff have stashes high enough to become another nightstand, amirite?)
Such questions can be very polarizing, in the way that for some personalities the answer is a clear-cut “heck yeah!” or a definite “heck no!” For the sake of our discussion, let’s begin by loosely defining porn (print format) as any literature that graphically or textually concentrates on the activity of erotic, sexual acts to affect arousal. Yes, that is a pretty broad description but I’d like to think that 1) there are a lot of works out there that could qualify as softcore, despite not being marketed or intended as such, and 2) if writing Peanuts fanfic makes you happy in freaky ways, then so be it. In writing this review (I’ll get to the book eventually, I swear) a few questions had to be addressed, but at the centre of them all was: why does it feel as though I’ve been dared to write a piece about porn? It’s just another graphic novel, right? Read the rest of this entry »
