Horror Porn Comics
In many ways, the United States is a Puritan country. It’s not always obvious to those of us who live here; after all, we do have plenty of smut. But we don’t miss what we don’t know we’re missing. And one of the things that we’ve been missing since the early 1950s is porn in our comic books. For more than half a century the Comics Code Authority kept American comic books free of anything even remotely sexual.
There were, of course, lots of horror comics. But horror is curiously muted when the werewolf never rips the pretty girl’s dress off before he eats her. And is the monster who leaps out of the bushes really a fully-featured monster, if he can do violence, but carries no weight of sexual menace? Seriously, how realistic is it that in American horror comics, every helpless heroine chained in a dank basement got to keep her clothes on? Sexy horror — horror porn, if you will — is a complete comic book genre that essentially never got a chance to exist in the United States, “thanks” to the Comics Code.
Fortunately, it’s a big world out there. Our European brethren have their own regulatory systems, and I’ll never know all the rules they struggle to comply with (or, perhaps, to circumvent). But I can tell you about one horror porn comic book imprint that’s well worth seeking out. (You can find quite a few scans in various places online, if you dig hard enough.) The imprint is “Terrificolor” by Elvifrance — a French publisher and translator of, usually, full color pornographic Italian horror fumetti comics. And the Terrificolor publications emphatically do not have any problems mixing porn into their horror comics!
I mentioned a monster who leaps out of bushes. That wasn’t a hypothetical example. Here we have a “Little Blonde Riding Hood” (complete with a basket of goodies for grandma) whose misfortune it is to meet a hooded goon with really terrible impulse control:
Her lacy black underthings don’t long survive:
Her entire ordeal is rendered in about 14 panels, which may explain her thousand-yard stare:
The Terrificolor imprints run to a lot of standard horror-comic tropes as well, less “masked man leaping out of bushes on a sunny day” and more “twisted hunchback with a rat-filled torture dungeon”. But at least these hunchbacks understand that rats are a lot more terrifying if you deprive your victims of the minimal protection clothing might provide:
In this next panel, Our Heroine is praying. Since I can’t share the entire comic with you, I’ll give you this much spoiler: her prayers are unavailing. It does not end well for her.
In fact — and I’m not sharing the final panels involving this unfortunate lady, because my own personal definition of “porn” does not run to gore — she gets substantially chewed by those rats. That’s a problem, or it may be a problem for you, with horror porn; there’s gonna be gore. As a freedom of speech, free-expression radical, I fully support and have no problem with people making and publishing this kind of porn. But I don’t actually want to view it in detail or republish it at any length under my byline. I can’t find the “sexy” in blood and entrails. So you have been warned and disclaimed: don’t go looking for Terrificolor scans unless you’re willing to deal with a bit of that!
