September Sucks: Karate Girl #1

*** NSFW ***

A superhero porn parody in comic book form

"Beware the Cumpire”

Writer and Illustrator - Motoki

Editor – Ryder Windham

Published – Groth & Thompson

April 1992

If there exists an ideal independent underground comic book company, Fantagraphics probably fits that title. That publishing house is responsible for encouraging and producting such great works as Love and Rockets, Castle Waiting, and Usagi Yojimbo.  All of those books took great risk to produce. These are books that the majors would never touch. To me, that fits the soul of what an independent underground publisher should ideally do: stray away from the superhero segment and make books about something else.

Fantagraphics did just that. In 1992 they strayed so far afield that they created their own Adults-only comic book line under the Eros Comics imprint. And while books like Omaha the Cat Dancer got their start in this line, validating its existence, there were also lesser known titles such as this one…Karate Girl.

I’m going to be frank with you, this book is porn, pure and simple. And like porn, many of you will be offended by its content. If you are one of those types, I URGE you to stop now and walk away. Written, drawn and lettered by “Motoki,” Karate Girl is exactly like watching a dirty movie, so be warned if you decide to press on.

I didn’t know that when I picked it up, so maybe I’m overcompensating with my warnings because I don’t want any of you taken by surprise the way I was. I thought that the cover looked like good Crapbox fodder given the simplified art style. I wasn’t put off by the skimpy clothing as there are PLENTY of 90’s books in the stacks here that have just as sexist cover art with those same “Barbies in leotards” looks. It looked like many other Crapbox finds.

Then I got home and opened the interior splash page to find this:

Um…wait! Her bush is uncovered. First unbidden thought that shot across my brow. Followed quickly by “WTF am I reading?”

If only I had stopped there…

But I didn’t. Years of Crapbox pulls had made me jaded. And when on the next page certain characters seemed to parody other, highly popular Marvel characters I wasn’t dissuaded. In fact, I was kind of reassured that this wouldn't be all that bad. I’ve seen that before too.

I did note that certain lines appeared to be poorly edited and I will admit to being completely guilty of reading these lines in “pigeon English” due to the name of our writer/artist. “This is job for Lady America.” Heh…I’m possibly racist for that. 

Anyway, our thin as a tissue paper plot starts out like this: Lady America, her sidekick Becky and agents of The Buckler all chart a possible alien spacecraft as it crash lands on Earth. Arriving on the spot they find this…peculiar ship that is shaped like another P-word entirely. 

A hatch opens and a butterfly flies out and then the ship explodes leaving them with no clue what has just made its way to our planet.

Meanwhile, our protagonist Karate Girl is in her civilian identity of Yuki Masamune making her way through the seedy backstreets of the city. She’s a foreigner who is living with an American family named Mr. and Mrs. White. Currently our nameless lead character (we find out her name seven pages in) is about to run afoul of some rapists, because what big city isn’t completed without some rapists.

Little upskirt there…no big deal, right? That’s what I thought too. Also her elbowing thug two allows her to change into her Karate Girl outfit, so get ready for some butt thrashing.

Okay, a little nipply there, but still standard superhero stuff, right? Nothing spectacular and at least the narrative is easy to follow. Also the art is pretty much standard for a b&w comic. We turn the page and that “standard story” goes right out the window. 

That’s because these same punks run smack dab into this hot little number, a horny Vampirella stand-in who talks like she walked in off the lot of a porno. Please cover any children’s eyes that are within 50’ of your monitor.

**Warning: Graphic sex scenes are artfully displayed in this comic**

So the “cumpire” takes out both guy’s huge schlongs and proceeds to perform fellatio on both of the *ahem* gentlemen.  Complete with the unnecessary “Sploch! Sploch!” sound effects. Giving good head isn’t all our Cumpire can do, however. She also electrifies the poor gents to the spot and forces them to, in her words, “Let me drink your sperm…till you die!” I suppose there are worse ways to go?

The next morning, our superheroine is eating breakfast when this news broadcast comes on…

“…but no clue is found.” No clue. Not anymore clue have a been found.

This spurs Yuki into action, so she rushes to her room and takes off all her clothes. 

We learn a little backstory from this exposition: Karate girl is from Japan, her mission is to “fight everything evil”, and she was sent to the US by her teacher Sennin from Japan because it is so crime free. Also we learn she shaves all the way down.

Meanwhile, the Cumpire is getting sloppy with three guys in an alley (which begs the question why do horny guys hang out in alleys? Is it in hopes this kind of thing would happen? I don’t hang out in enough alleys to know.) when Karate girl happens to be swinging by…

Okay, I’m going to point things out here because the story is getting way too sexified. In the fourth panel, the word balloon makes it look like her vagina is actually talking. Had the balloon been placed further up the picture like it was coming from the direction of where the Cumpire’s mouth was, I would have been fine, but no. No. I am forever reading that like her pussy is saying “Yes! Yes! I like it!”

Warning to fellow males, never put your pecker in a talking pussy. Just word to the wise.

In a scene that worries me a bit because I don't know how closely Google monitors these pages (it is ART, not photographs!), the men double team her while the third gets oral and then they are back to two men getting oral while she has sex with the third and … am I the only one grossed out by that? I mean, that can’t be sanitary. Ever. 

Anyway…THE STORY! ON WITH THE STORY!

Karate Girl finds the foursome playing the Karma Sutra’s greatest hits and…in typical porno fashion…watching them starts to get her turned on.

But while she’s trying to decide if she should start wanking it to these proceedings…the Cumpire STRIKES!

So Wolverine hair there has been literally sucked dry. As his crumpled body falls to the ground, the Cumpire turns to the African American guy.

Before Karate Girl can do anything, he’s now all shriveled up too. I love the guy on bottom’s “H…Help!” Dude, you’d never have this problem if you learned to keep your pecker in your pants.

Karate Girl *ahem* causes the Cumpire to?...dismount?...from her victim and then they start to scuffle. That’s when the Cumpire releases another of her hidden powers.

Yup! I called that one. She can make people super-horney. That last line about “love juice” is hilarious. But just as Yuki is stating how her “mound is hot and swelling” while the Cumpire eggs her on so she can kill her with ecstasy…

Yes! It is Lady America and Becky.

Karate Girl, in the immortal words of The Bowler “Maybe you should put some shorts on or something, if you want to keep fighting evil today?” Or as Lady America says…

Heh, what a subtle dig. “Enjoying yourself?” Anyway, the two agents of The Buckler take our alien jizz guzzler back to their secret base EVEN THOUGH Karate Girl warns them to kill her. 

Once there, Dick and Duke take over watching the trussed-up alien while Lady America and Becky go “rest”. And of course even though they are stand-ins for Nick Fury and Dum-Dum Dugan, Dick and Duke end up being rapey assholes who become so obsessed with hot alien sex that they…well, you’ll see in a moment.I suspect you know where it will go.

(note the talking pussy again)

But first I have to tell you that “rest” for Lady America and Becky means lesbian sex. Because of course it does. But even Adult Crapbox posts have an upper limit for the amount of naked sex pictures I will throw in and I’ve just about reached it.

I will say that the dialogue is some of the most forced and awkward I’ve ever encountered. Who could write “My pussy drips too much! And my panty is wet and stained with love juice,” with a straight face? There are several more mentions of “love juice” and opening a certain orifice as wide as possible so one could look inside and one occurrence of “piss out” which I don’t even wanna contemplate…ew!

Wasn’t this book about superheroes? With a killer supervillain?

Like the book itself suddenly remembers, the two Buckler agents “guarding” the Cumpire reach their final climax and an alarm sounds, interrupting the female superhero pair.

They come rushing into the prisoner holding area only to find the dead agents. It prompts Lady America, also known as Stella, to tell Becky they must “find her out!” and that she is to “Find her and kill!!”

But while searching, the Cumpire sneaks into position in her butterfly form and knocks Lady America out with her orgasm power. 

Then she pulls the same trick on Becky. Oh no!

Oh my! Frankly, I’m beyond words. The poor grammar and visuals have rendered me speechless. Not to mention that word balloon again points to a pussy that is now saying “Woof! Do anything!” What the fuck do I say about that? I don't know how to comment on this and I'm laughing so much that I can't breath.

THANKFULLY! Karate Girl shows up and saves the day.

She knocks out the Cumpire and is just about to kill her when the poor murdering alien starts to cry, gaining her sympathies long enough for her to listen to her tale of woe.

And life on that planet was far different from ours…

I…those are penis shaped plants. They have veins. And scrots that all bunch together at the base. So these girls just lay around all day sucking plant penis. I mean, it makes about as much sense as anything else here, I suppose. Thank god her planet blew up. A few of those plants and there would be no use for men anymore. 

Can we wrap this up now. Please? 

So Karate Girl’s brilliant idea is to turn the Cumpire into a paid prostitute so she can survive. But won't she end up killing her Johns?...I guess that's a question for another day.

To sum up…I do not know where to start. I will state that this was the most difficult issue I've ever had to review. I mean, from the standpoint of decency, this book is pure smut. It is a porno made into a comic book. Same threadbare plot. Same silly language and dialogue. Same cardboard cutout characters who are all perpetually horny and non-discriminating. All of it.

I’m not a prude by any stretch of the imagination and I believe the comic book market is broad enough to encompass all kinds of genres including this one. I am, however, sensitive to what other people think. Sex is a highly personal and charged issue. What I can read objectively and feel fine with talking about will likely be outside of polite conversation for many others.

However, this is art. By that I mean the entirety of the book and not just the pictures. Conveying a story in a visual medium counts as creating art. Even this story, which serves to do little other than titillate and amuse, is a form of art.

If you want a true objective option of it, I’d state that I was entertained by it. It is silly and stupid, but somewhere between the Engrish phraseology and the superhero parody with heavy doses of porn, I started to laugh along with the book. I’m glad I had the opportunity to read it, even though I would never pull another issue of the title out of the bargain bin.

If you decided this book was worth seeking out, that choice is totally up to you. I make no judgment if you do.

TV/Movie Tie-Ins, Part XI: A Game of Thrones #1-5

Winter is coming…just very, very slowly

 

SPOILERS for season one. But you should know that…right?

I became a huge George R. R. Martin fan because of Roger Zelazny.

Zelazny is a science fiction and fantasy author and a pretty good one. Don't take my word for it! Take the fact that he won three Nebula awards (out of 14 nominations) and six Hugo awards (also out of 14 nominations.)

I encountered Zelazny when I was in high school, through a work of his called "Creatures of Light and Darkness." It was a thin paperback that told the tale of the Egyptian pantheon fighting it out in the far flung future, the main duel coming down between Thoth and a malevolent entity called the Thing That Cries in The Night. I sat enraptured after reading it. I know it was at that moment that I became a fan of Zelazny's work.

And like any fan, I sought out his stuff.

In his short story collections, Zelazny would leave forwards and afterwards to each story. In one such story, he mentioned when his good friend George R. R. Martin, having read the story that preceded the blurb, stated that Zelazny would win a Hugo for it. And Martin was right.

During my college years, I bumped into a fellow at the local comic shop who insured Martin would be more than just a name for me. He spoke of Marvel's "New Universe" titles (Patience, we'll get to them later) and how they were just a rip-off of Martin's "Wild Card" series. 

 

Wild Cards was a series of superhero novels written in anthology format by Martin and various author friends of his. Martin served as editor and setup the framework of this universe, allowing others to come in and write stories that used it as their setting. Zelazny was one of the contributors. 

I was still on my Zelazny kick at the time. So I snatched up all six of the Wild Card books available back then as soon as I could. 

Great stuff, by the way. Especially Martin's stories, which revolved around a telekinetic superhero known as The Turtle whose power could be disrupted if he lost concentration, so he fashioned an armored shell out of a VW Bug with cameras and electronics. Using that as a flying platform, he swooped around a decimated New York fighting crime.

Neat, inventive stuff.

When A Game of Thrones came out I heard all the buzz. Knowing Martin as I did by then, I made blind recommends to all my friends, buying the books but not reading them and shelving them for myself. 

I admit to an odd book habit: I try NOT to read any series that is finite in length until the final book is out. I hate getting into a book series only to then move to the next book of a different series. I get confused at who these characters are when I come back. I like to immerse myself in them and their universe.

After the third book came out and people who I recommended the books to kept coming back thanking me and telling me how good they were…I broke down and read them. All of them. And as soon as the next came out, I read that one too. It became a thing for me.

Martin has a masterpiece on his hands.

He just needs to finish it. His pacing is a bit slow in the last book, but whatever. I will forgive one whole book in a series this good. Even at its slow points, I couldn't put the book down. But it lacks an ending. It lacks those last two books. And he's had us hanging on for more than three years now.

If it had just been the books, the effect A Game of Thrones had would be limited to a small subset of people. But then HBO took a gamble on a series…and the whole thing exploded in popularity.

The secret was sex. Not that the books shied away from showing sex. It is without a doubt the most graphic of any true fantasy novel series I've yet to encounter. And by "true fantasy" I mean as opposed to a romance or erotica set in a fantasy world.

For more on the TV series, check out the Honest Trailer for seasons one through three HERE. For an outstanding podcast hosted by some great folks, give Liberty Street Geek's Dean and Jessica a try. They only have season 5 up due to a computer issue, but their commentary is concise, entertaining and chock full of great insight.

Characters in Martin's epic lived in a way that felt authentic. Part of those lives included lots and lots of naked bedroom romps. So their inclusion in the HBO series was a given. HBO however decided to up the stakes for that first season a bit.

Got a character that likes to sleep around a bit? Introduce him by showing him bedding two naked prostitutes in his very first scene. Got a hot frightened princess who is vulnerable? Show her bathing naked before being given away to a barbarian horse lord. Need to introduce the idea of brother-sister incest? Show them doing it doggie style in full view of a kid and make it as graphic as possible without turning this into a porno. Something takes place in a brothel? Cue LOTS of topless, sexy women to just walk around, because..."brothel."

HBO took every chance it could to play up the sexual elements in the novel that first season.

And guess what? It worked. The series became THE watercooler show and has continued to be so even though subsequent seasons haven't been as graphic.

Well played, HBO. 

But all silver linings have their dark clouds and for HBO the devil was in the details. Lots and lots of details. Many, many details. You don't boil a 1,000 page novel down to 10 episodes without cutting a scene here or there. And while I would state the show is pretty faultless in what does make it onscreen, there is a whole quarter of a book per season that doesn't make it on.

Sadly the slow pace of Martin's writing and the exquisite goodness of the show has lead me to watch the entire thing. Now in Season 7, we are about to enter virgin territory…parts of the story that Martin hasn't released…and that means the book will likely get spoiled by the show.

In ways, it already has. Certain sections of the novels have been left out entirely, leading you to believe that this part or that part that you THOUGHT might be important later, are actually just red herrings. Want an example? Theon Greyjoy's sister is off at sea with a bandit captain on a journey that I thought was leading up to a big reveal. Well, their boat might as well sink for as much airtime as the series has given them.

Then there is this, a comic book based upon either the book or the TV show or something in between. It fills the niche for those who can't afford HBO but are too lazy to read, I suppose. Or for those who are buying every collectible around the show that marketing can produce.

What do I make of it? The art is decent and the story follows more the television show than the books. It is agonizingly decompressed, which is the modern world for long and drawn out. We don't get to the spectacular 'gotcha' ending of the first EPISODE until mid-way through the third book, meaning that each season's ten episodes would expand out to 25 issues or more, making one season over two years' worth of comics.

At $3.99 a pop, that also amounts to a whopping $100 per season, meaning you could skip the comic book altogether, pay for a subscription to HBO, watch the entire six seasons on HBOgo.com in a year's time, and save yourself somewhere in the range of $450. 

And after that, you could watch The Wire too.

Not to mention you'd be finished in less than the 8+ years it would take you to catch up to where the season is NOW.

It is a completely unnecessary thing. I'll point out the good and bad bits here and return these back to the Crapbox.

It was odd to finish the first issue with no hint of nudity. I'd been so conditioned to think naked flesh whenever GoT is mentioned that it was hard to separate the two in my mind. I got to the end and thought something was missing.

  

What else was missing was good art. Okay, it's not horrible art, but it definitely isn't what I would pick for this series. Most pages look like fan art pieces and on the whole, the book suffers because of this. Characters look like Jon Snow above, rendered with far too much 3-D light and shadow.

Sort of like a children's book...

One with blood, guts, and boobs. 

At least we get to them in issue two. Ned and Cat have a chat in bed and it was so…odd. Mainly because they were talking about everything BUT sex and the topics made you completely forget they were naked.

  

That is the ONE thing that is spot on with these. Whatever bits of George R. R. Martin's book makes it on the page reminds you of how excellent he is at plotting and dialogue. There is just so much good in it that even a shell such as this makes excellent reading.

Character introduction is generally handled well, although I don't remember Tyrion being able to jump around like Yoda at the end of Attack of the Clones. 

  

At least I could understand why HBO introduced him with the hookers. It informed us that Tyrion was 1.) a lover not a fighter, 2.) lonely and 3.) that he shared a close bond with his brother from the interplay between the two of them when he is found.

This makes me think he is an agile fighter, and while Tyrion later proves he can handle himself in a fight, it usually is a hard fought thing, not this devil-may-care, Errol Flynn crap.

This picture of Jon seems also to come from one of those children's books I mentioned earlier. I can't tell if I love it or hate it yet, but I have to throw it out there for everyone to gawk at.

 

The infamous "things I do for love" scene is well played.

But the "Daenerys likes sex now" bit is so rushed that it is almost comical.

No..No..YES! She changed her tune awfully quick. Way to play hard-to-get, Dee.

I don't want to say that I hated every panel of art. There are a few that almost get me swept up in the grandeur of Westeros. Like this panel of Eddard and Robert speaking on the Kings Road.

Almost as majestic as his herald animal. Also there's a bit with Catherine Stark defending Bran that I thought was quite good. Very edge-of-your-seat type stuff.

By issue six, the book appears to have hit its stride with sequences like this bit with loverboy Joffery facing Arya.

But sadly the book is also following the TV show's lead when it comes to including scenes and characters. Gone is the Jenny Poole subplot, which in the books has just barely played out and the lack of her inclusion leads me to believe that there isn't much hope of this being any more than a loose interpretation of the TV show and not the better, more involving novels they are both based off of.

I guess that is one good thing, the books will remain the sole best place to hear this story. If you think the TV show or comic book are great then you really owe it to yourself to check out the source material. Because the story you don't hear is far, far better than the one you do.

Now off you go for Season Seven! Winter is coming, you know?