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                        LOST GIRLS AND ZIZIS

                                                   by Melinda Gebbie

                                  (from the book Innappropriate Behaviour-Serpent's Tail-UK,2002)

                                                    (EXTRAÍDO DO LIVRO "COMPORTAMENTO INAPROPRIADO" )

In April 1985 I was invited by solicitors in London to attend a hearing regarding a vice raid on Knockabout Comics. I was visiting Cambridge at the time, from San Francisco. It seems an old title of mine harking back almost ten years, was now involved in one Knockabout's semi-annual police grabs.

            The comic in dispute was Fresca Zizis. It depicted three women astride a giant green comedy penis. The title was taken from a strange-but-true graphic spot illo done several years before for a fly-by-night TV news station. This company was so low budget they couldn't afford more than one camera to cover local happenings, so instead they hired three guys and me to sit in a tiny room and draw the news as it happened.

            My comic was named after an 'international' bit of reportage concerning one Italian pastry maker caught out selling obscene baked goods, replete in detail, on a Sunday. Above the meringue-topped penis was the hand-written pronouncement ‘Fresca Zizis’ - the Italian for 'Fresh Cocks'. Prosecution was swift, if not sensible.

            My comic had sold in trickles to a perplexed American Audience but had never been subject to censure of any kind, to my knowledge. I was pleasantly surprised to think a comic my publisher had considered an unsaleable piece of arty wank, fit only for the French, was now about to enter the portals of Pernicious Pantheist Pulpdom - the Saturnine chamber of the Unforgiven, where it might lay for ten or eleven months or years till someone caught up with the creators and let the stuff back in again, this time sanctioned as Artistic Vision.                                                                    (a comic by Melinda )

Arriving at Horseferrry Road Courthouse, eight years after the first publication of Fresca Zizis, I spied another woman from our Californian handful of Nasty Wimmin. Joyce Farmer was lighting a fag under the 'no smoking' sign. I still have he snap of her under the No photographs sign. She was there for her book, Tits and Clits.

The first geezer on the stand was the arresting vice officer, who was not the sharpest peanut in the turd. He admitted to taking personal property from the publisher's private office, apparently unaware that he had perpetrated an illegal act. Because of this fact, our venerable (we're talking 80 years old, to look at him) magistrate let Knockabout off the hook with only a few slaps. Many titles bit the bullet that day. The judge had only been handed the material - a big stack of comics - about half an hour before the hearing itself.

            He had to make a decision that looked snappy to the members of his home team. He had the wrinkles. He had the moves. He had the gavel in his withered paw. He was a coiled, if rusted, spring, aching to strike.

            According to our solicitor, he was also Richard Branson's father. The same geezer who used to have Fresca Zizis in the racks of his music superstore just a hew weeks earlier, I was told.  Could Justice have a kind of Mom and Pop, Dad and Son thing going on? Son decide to show Dad who's boss and the Dad neatly turns the tables, showing that counter-culture is OK to dream about but at the end of the day a chap's got to make a respectable living in a legitimate trade.                                                     (comic by Melinda)

            I was unexpectedly asked to participate in the proceedings by taking the stand to defend my work. I began somewhat shakily. 'You honour, this comic contains autobiographical material. The stories are about real people and relationships. The themes are adult. They deal with the cruelty of lovers, the excesses of youth, the states of depression and dreams in documentary form. They are meant as a form of communication about my life: a warning and a comfort to those who venture out too deep; that although my life has often been out of control, I have survived and so can others. If you find my work obscene then you must also judge the people within it be obscene,  for it is a chronicle of a life lived, not a work of the imagination.'

            Thanking me for my 'well-considered comments', Judge B went on in a plummy voice to tell me that before I had spoken he had been prepared to judge Fresca Zizis a work of pure obscenity. 'Now, however, I shall look through the work seriously before considering judgement. Court will reconvene on Friday.'

            Flushed with victory, our apple-cheeked solicitor coughed up for champers all round. The following Friday all comics brought to court were summarily decreed illegal, obscene, and all copies of my book were ordered to be burned and from then on, illegal to posses.

            How cool is that? I had only been in this country a few months and had already been judged a social pariah. This was not news to me, however. I'd been accused of two-dimensional licentiousness (dirty pictures on paper) going way back. On my snowglobe-perfect home town, aged seventeen,  I had created a furore with a simple line drawing of Cupid and Psyche. 'Drawers - I did not!' read the headline in our local paper, when I was asked to defend my reason in forgetting to include well-delineated pants for Cupid for our High School Sweethearts dance poster.

            ‘Change it or you won't be allowed in,’ said the Dance Committee. A few teachers’ letters championed my brave decision, including one from a fervid supply teacher who penned the following in support of my budding sexual depravity:

             Oh rosy woman

             How could you know

             The double face of Janus

         Would inflect the glow

             Of natural desire                                                               

And still the bow                                                                     Alan Moore and Melinda

            Of Cupid's fire.

In 1976 the Wimmen's Comix Collective, which had been publishing Wimmen's Comix for Last Gasp Publishing in San Francisco, decided to vary the subject matter from mostly humorous auto-biographical short stories to a much moiré radical single issue attempt. I had been involved with Wimmen's Comix for three years, having joined the collective from the second issue. It was just about this only comic in the underground being produced by women in community where the male/female cartooning ratio was sixty men to six women.

            Artist/writers like Justin Green (Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary), Bill Griffiths (Zippy the Pinhead), Jay Kinney (Anarchy/Young Lust), S. Clay Wilson (The Checkered Demon), Gilbert Shelton (The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) produced rude funny stuff.

            An indefatigable Robert Crumb (Fritz the Cat) in tandem with other artist/writers like Art Spiegelman (later of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, a tale of Nazi atrocities told by mice about the 'katzen') produced a wonderful but short-lived anthology called Arcade.

            In light of the many taboos being stormed by our male counterparts, we women seemed to be producing rather sickly fare of household tales by comparison. It was a wonder Wimmen's Comix existed because, at that point, our publisher seemed to think he was being magnanimous by bothering to dedicate our efforts to ink at all.

             There was a sexual revolution going on, and we had yet to declare ourselves to battle. As far as we know, no pornography by women existed, so Wet Satin was our attempt to enter the so far on-sided fray.

(Cobweb, the AM´´s ABC title drawn by Melinda)

Clothed in mild and feminine cover, Wet Satin went looking for a publisher. Dennis Kitchen's Kitchen Sink Press had found a printer in the mid-west to produce Bizarre Sex #7 - which featured a giant vulva engulfing the Empire State Building. This was a first peep at a formerly forbidden part of the female anatomy, and was the first UG comic to be sold wrapped in a white outer cover. Surprisingly the printer received an award for bravery in publishing for his efforts, and this from an American mid west famous for its prudishness and Bible-slapping ethics.

We - Dot Butcher, Joey Epstein, Lee Marrs, Shelby Samson, Sharon Rudahl and Trina Robbins felt that Wet Satin was a shoe-in. There was certainly nothing on the cover to offend: a wind-blown blonde on a skateboard scoots past a fit young Marlon Brando, eating a banana. Everyone knows you judge a book by its cover. Among titles like Leather Nun, Amputee Love, Slow Death, Felch and Captain Piss Gums, surely Wet Satin could be the subtle women's alternative erotic comic. After all, the brief had been to write and draw a little story based around one's most intense sex fantasy - as long as it was genuine, it was copasetic.

            Joey penned '50 ways to Cleave your Lover', set to the Paul Simon lyrics but enhanced by a tinge of vengeful bloodlust. Other stories contained traced of bondage, Indian lore and a unicorn.

            My contribution was Cockpit.

            It contained my then-favourite things: The French Revolution, Joan of Arc, Charenton Asylum and a melancholic sense of unreality enhanced by cruel bondage gear - all set within the confines of a Cinderella-style plot.

            A young girl (me) is treated badly by her stepmother and sisty uglers, and is not allowed to go to the ball because she is subject to violent and unattractive fits. Rather than waste a ball-gown on her, which would no doubt be soiled by midnight, the clan leaves her at home. At the height of the evening's festivities she arrives clad in straps, buckles (no clothes) and gains the attention of the Napoleonic elite. She is approached and bites the cock off one reveller, then shits on another. She then has a fit and is promptly hauled off to Charenton. Her new companions include the blind, the lame, the infirm, the dangerous and the elderly, all co-existing in a world of filth, pain, confusion, degradation and chaos. Amidst this, our heroine, Clara, experiences a sexual epiphany and becomes a sister of sexual mercy, attending to the penises of the needy. The only glitch s that she must not be penetrated. One inmate goes too far and Clara immediately experiences a fall from grace.

            Feeling spiritually sullied she is sure that she is no longer a holy vessel fort the healing flame of sexual mercy and in a paroxysm of guilt and anger, drinks from a bucket of lye and expires.

            I thought it was a really horny fantasy. It was certainly a genuine one.

            At any rate, Mr Bravery in Printing, back in Ohio has received our complete book and is totally outraged. He deemed Wet Satin the most disgusting thing he has ever seen in his whole publishing career and sent it back to us in a plain brown wrapper. Last Gasp printed it by default and, as usual, the sales were minimal.

            A few pornographic lithos, paintings and gallery sows later, I am now living in a England. Thins brings me up to Lost Girls, begun in 1989 as an eight-page idea for comic which failed to live. Lost Girls is the mutual love-child of mainstream comics veteran Alan Moore, and myself. Thought up over several consecutive brain-storming sessions, it grew and grew from a one-shot to a monster. From my original desire to work with three female characters, Alan partnered his desire to come up with a fresh erotic idea for Peter Pan, and so mad e the gargantuan but beautifully simple leap to in

            He calculated that, had the three actually met in real time, their age difference might work out quite satisfyingly. In the year 1913 Alice would be say, in her late 50s, Wendy 35 and Dorothy in her early 20s. The three ages of women tied up neatly in a pink bow. Next, where and how do they meet?

            Well, since 1914 was the starting year of the First World War, what better place than Europe? What could draw them together? Rest, relaxation, rehabilitation, perhaps? How about the beautiful surroundings of Lake Constance, near the Swiss border? A sanatorium where Alice can get away from troubling memories, Wendy can escape briefly from the confines of a loveless marriage and Dorothy can attempt to unravel a haunting secret's mighty pull.

            It came together magnificently, like a chandelier lying broken and fragmented that has been drawn gracefully back up into the air, its twinkling teardrops reuniting with each tiny hook to form a tiered symphony of rainbow-fractured sparklings.

            The hotel was designed from the meeting of Viennese modern and European Art Nouveau. Each character has a past and a function, from Rolf, the Austrian soldier, to the concierge, to Alice's mirror itself. Each character has an art style that announces her own past. Dorothy's is pale-layered crayon, always using Autumn colours. Alice's childhood is dreamy, watery, using Easter colours and Wendy's is full of night shadows and shocking revelations, half hidden in the dark.

            That's just a bit of the art of it. The three-volume, hardcover slipcase 250-odd-page full-colour part. The reason I'm talking about it here is because Lost Girls is also a pornography. From the vehicle of the White Book, found in each hotel room in a dresser drawer, to the sheer erotic infusion into everyday objects like a shoe, a pillow, a cup, a sunset-filled pond, Lost Girls inhabits a world only the most sublimely optimistic dreamer could ever imagine. It is more than a pornography; more than a pretty piece of imagination. Full of cultural references, mostly made through the use of the White Book, we see the hidden side of many famous writers and artists.

Pastiched painstakingly from original styles of writing of Colette, partnered with the 'unseen before ' art of Aubrey Beardsely, Oscar Wilde and Egon Shiele and the more forbidden arts such as Franz von Bayrtos, Gerda Wegener and Rabelais, Lost Girls is a self-referential treatise on pornography itself.

            In chapter ten, the three women arrive in Paris for the soon to be infamous debut of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. This was an evening that would be well documented in Parisian newspapers - not as a cultural event but as a riot. Ballet had always been the most genteel of entertainments. Such confections could be depended upon to reflect the most rarefied of social sentiments. They were melodic, graceful and replete with twinkling costumes.

Stravinsky brought a savage, unrelenting rhythm to this arena. The subject matter was a pantheist rite centered around the sacrifice of a beautiful and terrified virgin.

            I photographed a faithfully choreographed and costumed performance of the ballet from television. From over a hundred shots put the central story together into a split-screen panel set up the stage performance covered the top two-thirds of the page and in the bottom panel showed the audience from the stage. Including Dorothy, Wendy and Alice in the plush red seats.

            As the music began its hammerlike staccato beat, the audience found themselves rising in a trance. Some fled the theatre, screaming as they pushed and shoved their way out. Fights broke out between the maddened theatre lovers. One newspaper reported that a man in an almost hypnotic rage began pounding the bald head of the gentleman seated in front of him in time to the music.

            Surrounded by absolute pandemonium, the girls become erotically enmeshed in the strange, turgid nuances of the music and its effect on the audience. Entangled in the absolute protection of darkness and utter chaos, they are free to express their highly charged response to it all in a lavish display of lovemaking. This happens in the first third of the book.

            Going from the illegal in literature to the mainstream, our next port of call is the Tomorrow Stories and a character devised, once more, by myself and Alan Moore. Cobweb hit the stand about a year ago. Her most arresting feature is that beneath her transparent lilac frock there seems to be no visible means of protection from wither the passing zephyr or the goggling eyeball. Cobweb's MO is more elastic than Plastic Man. She has appeared in many guises: a crime-fighter, a child-detective, a space explorer, jungle girl and even a surrealist woman formed purely in collage a la max Ernst.

            In each eight-page story, Cobweb enters a different style, era and idiom. Out of nine stories so far produced, seven have not been censored. The most extreme case resulted in Cobweb's being thrown out of Tomorrow Stories # 8. The story, Brighter than you think, was based on biographical material partially reprinted in Fortean Times concerning the life of jack Whiteside Parsons. Parsons, in his short and breathtaking life as a rocket scientist and practising occultist, had a brief but dramatic friendship with the then science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who famously went on to found Scientology - a favourite cult of Hollywood folk. It is an organisation fond of litigation. The reference in our story dealt with 'an alleged' liaison between Hubbard and Parsons' then wife, Betty.

            In order to avoid court costs, DC Comics sold Brighter Than You Think to Top Shelf Comics for a dollar. They later discovered their company had previously published their own version of Parsons' life anyway.

            Cobweb's more laughable censure concerned the display of nude steel engravings in naughty poses which, in the end, got covered in butterflies.

And all because the lady loves to draw smut. It's not like it's a field everyone else is aching to get involved in. Since England first began to have gallery shows there have been only about three devoted to the realm of the sexual imagination. Even though vulgar sods like Hogarth were immensely popular among the hoi poloi. A couple of hundred years on and the incendiary becomes the palatable. I'm not worried. I've never really courted fame, the bitch of notoriety. I've only ever drawn and painted the subjects that bring joy to my life.

It seems that for every truly creative act there's an overwhelming response by people so terrified of the burden of their own humanity that someone capable of inner dialogue with their deepest self must be some kind of Devil.

            My Uncle Bud once told me he thought it was a shame that I had to draw dirty pictures for a living. Tell you what, it beats the fuck out of engineering, Bud!       

© Melinda Gebbie                                                                                    

Inappropriate Behaviour - satanism, girls with guns, bestiality, scatology and deviance from the new girl order, edited by Jessica Berens and Kerri Sharp, with contributions from Annabel Chong, Tura Satana and Penny Birch.

Melinda Gebbie lives in a three-sided folly constructed in the shape of a corset, which is finished in ruby glass panels. She has been producing pornographic stories and art for a quarter of a century, both in America and Britain. Earlier titles such as Young Lust, Anarcy Comix, Wimmen's Comix, Wet Satin, Slow Death and Fresca Zizis, were published in San Francisco. The Seven Ages of Women and 1963, Tomorrow Stories and Lost Girls were produced in Britain.