UNDERGROUND AND ADULT COMICS 653
Danzig’s Verotik line of comics off ered characters ranging from demonesses to zombie
hookers in a heady mix of horror and sex.
Th e fi rst publisher specializing in graphic novels, the New York based NBM, began
publishing European albums in English in 1976. Th e Eurotica imprint brought the erotic
work of Milo Manara, Georges Pichard, and other Europeans to American audiences.
Th e Amerotica imprint has had limited off erings, but did publish Michael Manning’s
S&M hit Th e Spider Garden. NBM also issued trade paperback collections of works
such as Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s “Omaha,” the Cat Dancer, a soap opera with
anthropomorphic characters engaged in abundant and graphically depicted sex. Omaha
fi rst appeared in a strip in the 1978 anthology Vootie, became a series issued sporadi-
cally by a variety of publishers, and the fi nale of the story was serialized in NBM’s erotic
anthology Sizzle beginning in 2006.
Japanese comics (manga) with a sexual aspect had been around for decades, but
comic books referred to as ecchi, for the milder form, and hentai, for the more perverse
works, became something of a phenomenon in Japan during the 1970s. For some time
only the most dedicated manga fans outside Japan knew about these comics, but as
scans became available online erotic manga gained a following worldwide. Th e Inter-
net has allowed for a proliferation of readily available sex comics. Content ranges from
those sites like Dirty Comics that off er single character titles, such as Chicas, created
by a single cartoonist, to online “publishers” like Adult Comics that off er half a dozen
diff erent titles by a variety of creators to Comixxx Archive with hundreds of comics,
some original and some scanned from print comics. On the darker side there are the
extreme S&M comics off ered on sites like DOComics, which began as a marketing tool
for the printed fetish comics of Gary Roberts, Tempelton, and others, but like many
online comics sites, has begun selling only electronic PDF versions of the comics.
Even mainstream creators began to push the boundaries and fi nd varying degrees
of freedom from the constraints of the Comics Code. Following the popularity of
Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian, which debuted in 1970, fantasy comics emerged as a
popular genre. Fantasy comics always contained an erotic element that ranged from
chain mail bikinis in traditional format publications, to full frontal nudity, in magazine
format. Marvel’s Red Sonja was mildly titillating, but artist Frank Th orne left the Red
Sonja book to create his own warrior woman, Ghita, who was prone to lose her chain-
mail bikini and fi ght topless or nude. During the 1980s he did a Li’l Abner parody,
Moonshine McJuggs, for Playboy and created a couple of hardcore erotic series, Th e Iron
Devil and Th e Devil’s Angel.
Mature content in the mainstream has been most evident at DC Comics. When DC
began the Vertigo imprint the titles were crafted not merely for adult readers, but for
sophisticated readers. Sex and violence were plentiful in some of the titles, but it never
seemed gratuitous. Th e protagonists in Preacher have hearty sexual appetites and the vil-
lains engage in a wide range of sexual deviance. Th e Extremist presents an adventure set
in a highly fi ctionalized version of San Francisco’s fetish scene. However, it was the moral
dilemmas, fascinating characters, and clever storytelling that attracted readers to these and
