Erotic Comics and Digital Media: How Blogs Revived a Censored Genre

If erotic comics remain absent from supermarkets and train station newsstands, it is not for lack of readers: it is because the law of July 16, 1949 and its monitoring commission continue to impose responsibility on the entire industry, including publishers, distributors, and sellers. A department head who fears for their job does not take the risk, and the album disappears from the shelves before even being placed there.

The system provides for three levels of prohibition: the first limits sales to minors, the second adds a ban on display, and the third prohibits all advertising and delivers the commercial death blow. Elvifrance, king of adult pocket comics in the 1970s, accumulated 747 prohibition orders in twenty-two years of existence, including 36 of level 3, before closing in 1992.

And the machine has not stopped turning with the century: in 1988, a Minister of the Interior invites the press to an exhibition of horror where banned comics are prominently featured, and in 1996 the manga "Video Girl Aï" from Tonkam is withdrawn from sale. The result is a genre sold under the counter, hidden in bookstores, and authors who often sign with a pseudonym to avoid frightening their readers of classic albums.

At the beginning of the 2000s, the last bastions fall: La Poudre aux Rêves stops in 2004, Bédé Adult' and Bédé X throw in the towel in 2005, leaving most stories unfinished.

The revival of erotic comics has a date and a name: 2006, with the arrival of a new generation of authors working in the virtual realm, led by Arthur de Pins. This illustrator, who signed the strip of Arthur's adventures in the now-defunct magazine Max, enters the pages of Fluide Glacial with "Péchés mignons" (Sweet Sins), and everything changes tempo.

What strikes one then is the graphic gesture itself: a drawing entirely created on the computer, characters with soft curves, large expressive eyes, very far from the torrid realism inherited from Italian pocket comics. The technique fits perfectly with the tone of the monthly "d'humour et de bandessinée" and dispels the distrust of a readership that did not buy risqué comics.

Collected in a first album in 2006, these gags achieve immediate success. The shockwave is such that a collective of authors, Coiffeurs pour Dames, draws direct inspiration from it to imagine the adventures of Supersex in "Péchés capitaux" (Capital Sins).

Nota bene: the expression "generation of the virtual" does not refer here to authors who publish solely online, but to illustrators trained in graphic tablets and screen distribution, who arrive at paper with a style, rhythm, and humor shaped by these tools.

Blogs by illustrators have become the main laboratory for naughty creation: online, erotic images are developing quickly, more discreetly than on paper, and the best regularly coexists with the worst. The selection mechanism is simple and purely quantitative: it is the frequency of visits that drives publishers to spot the best blog creators and offer them the chance to take the step into album publishing.

The range of what is published this way is wide. From the slightly naughty confessions of Pénélope Bagieu, whose "Joséphine" is published by Gawsewitch, to the much hotter exchanges of Gally and Obion, the blog serves as a testing ground: the author tests a tone, a boldness, a character, and measures the readers' reactions in real time.

The publisher's interest does not stop at spotting talent. An author from the web arrives with an already established community, thus bringing a fresh readership to adult comics, which is significant during a market crisis.

This back-and-forth between screen and paper also produces its own subjects: Aurélia Aurita, revealed by "Fraise et chocolat" (Strawberry and Chocolate) where she candidly recounts her intimacy with her illustrator partner, published "Buzz-moi" (Buzz Me) in 2009, an uncompromising assessment of the reactions provoked by her work.

"Love Blog" is the symbol of this conquest of paper by the virtual: published by Delcourt in 2010, the album features the heated exchanges between two authors, Gally and Obion, through their blogs. The setup is the very subject of the book: two illustrators responding to each other from a distance, page by page, in a rising temperature that would not have existed without the network.

The publisher's choice is not anecdotal. Delcourt, a house more identified with heroic fantasy and graphic novels, discovered an erotic vein with "Filles perdues" by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, then with the collective "Premières fois" orchestrated by Sibylline in April 2008, before the best-seller "Happy sex" by Zep.

In this vein, "Love Blog" is no longer a marginal curiosity but an accepted creation, published by a generalist publisher that simultaneously launched the Erotix collection dedicated to the classics of the genre starting in 2009. The virtual has not replaced the album: it has provided it with material, authors, and an audience.

Compared to a classic comic book, a project born on the web costs much less to produce: creating a classic narrative, with its long pagination, its backgrounds and its color work, requires infinitely more resources than a collection drawn from pages already designed and tested online. This is one of the economic levers behind the revival of erotic comics.

Two reasons combine. First, the pages already exist, often created directly on the computer, like Arthur de Pins' drawing for his "Péchés mignons" (Sweet Sins): the publisher does not invest months of production on a gamble. Second, the short format, the gag, the strip, the standalone sequence, lends itself to compilation into an album without requiring the construction of a long narrative.

This streamlined model explains why cautious publishers have dared to return to a field considered risky. It also changes the profile of the authors: younger, more liberated, able to feed a personal page alongside other commissions, they enter the catalog without going through the long learning process of traditional albums.

The downside exists, of course: a collection of pages born online does not replace a long-term erotic fiction, a genre that remains rare since the cessation of collections like that of the Marquis at Glénat in 1996.

Fluide Glacial understood before others that the Internet was a breeding ground: the monthly magazine recruits from the regulars of the web, artists who are eager to leave the coldness of the image on screen for the warmth of paper. At the origin of the revival with "Péchés mignons" (Sweet Sins), the publisher has not rested on this success.

The list of cheeky albums published in the wake of this shows: "Amuse-bouche" (Appetizer) and "Duo", two collective works dedicated to carnal pleasures, "Madame désire ?" (Does Madame Desire?) by Grégory Mardon, a hot and offbeat story, "Linda Glamouze" by Camille Burger, "Péchés capitaux" (Capital Sins) and its Supersex signed Coiffeurs pour Dames, "Toutoute première fois" (Every First Time) by Krasinsky, or "Sex crimes" by Thiriet and Robin.

The highlight comes in the fall of 2010 with the launch of Fluide Glamour, a cheeky quarterly renamed Fluide.G after the contestation of the magazine Glamour. It features in-house authors and web recruits: Anne Rouquette, Dupuy and Berbérian with Clara Vermeille, Margaux Mottin, Véronique Cazot and Madeleine Martin, Sibylline and Vince, not to mention Arthur de Pins.

The positioning is claimed to be chic and shocking, but not shocking: eroticism is conveyed through humor, rounded lines and an intimate tone, allowing the title to exist on newsstands without awakening the censors.

Between digital erotic comics and print erotic comics, the movement observed since 2006 goes in one direction: both authors and readers are leaving the coldness of the image on screen for the warmth of paper. The blog serves as a showcase and a laboratory, while the album remains the object that one keeps.

Publishers have understood this well and have focused on material quality. In 2009, Éditions Petit à Petit launched a collection of large luxurious volumes, nearly 200 pages, adapting texts from our literature into comics: "Erotic Poems of French Literature," "Ribald Tales by Maupassant," "Kâma Sûtra in Comics." It's difficult to convey that on a screen.

The same logic applies to Dynamite, which takes care in presenting its catalog, or to Delcourt with Erotix, a collection launched in 2009 to reissue classics of the genre that have long been out of print, from Crepax's "Emmanuelle" to G. Levis's "Liz and Beth," including Frollo's "Casino" and Buzzelli's "Sam Bot."

In other words, digital has played the role of discovery and distribution, but the recognition of an erotic comic author still goes through the album, with its paper, its colors, and its place on a bookshelf.

Diglee, Leslie Plée, Margaux Mottin, Madeleine Martin, Véronique Cazot: these are female illustrators from the web who animate the sexy special editions of Fluide.G, and they are now one of the driving forces of the genre. All of them first built an audience on the Internet before being spotted and published.

Their contribution is not just a matter of signature. Véronique Cazot and Madeleine Martin sign "And you, when are you getting started?", a title that says enough about the tone: the intimate told from the inside, with humor, very far from the fantasized heroines of the pockets of the seventies. Anne Rouquette completes this team in the quarterly publication.

The way had been opened by Aurélia Aurita, who with "Strawberry and Chocolate" recounts her daily love life with rawness and tenderness, freshness and honesty, and whose work has shaken a readership surprised by the maturity of such a young author.

Other creators occupy the field elsewhere: Karo, with a devilishly exciting style, illustrates "Arthur and Janet" with Jean-Luc Cornette at Drugstore in 2008, Aude Picault signs unpublished stories in the BDcul collection from Requins Marteaux, and Sibylline orchestrates "First Times" at Delcourt. Impudence and the evocation of sexual intimacy are no longer the exclusive domain of men.

When the kiosks emptied, it was mail order that kept erotic comics afloat: La Musardine, thanks to its subsidiary Dynamite run by Bernard Joubert, continued to publish risqué works with impressive regularity, supported by a dynamic mail order department. A direct circuit, with no department head to convince and no risk of withdrawal from stores.

Dynamite, led by Christian Marmonnier, has built an increasingly rich catalog mixing French, Italian, Spanish, and American creators: Roberto Baldazzini with "Casa HowHard" and "Beba", Giovanna Casotto, Igor and his "Chambre 121", Noé, Erich von Götha with "Janice" and "Twenty", and Kevin Taylor.

The company has also reached out to generalists. In 2011, La Musardine and Drugstore/Glénat teamed up to launch a comic book version of the Osez collection, whose practical sexuality guides have been bestsellers since 2004. Adapted by Tonia Savage, the first two albums, "Osez les secrets d'une experte du sexe pour rendre un homme fou de désir" (Dare the Secrets of a Sex Expert to Drive a Man Wild with Desire) and "Osez le Kama Sutra" (Dare the Kama Sutra), are illustrated by Eve E, Aya, and Karo.

The moral of the story: a solid alternative circuit is better than a timid large distribution, and it is often this that allows a genre to survive the lean years.

Censorship of erotic comics is receding in bookstores: authors, publishers, and especially booksellers no longer hesitate to unearth works long left forgotten, convinced that the censors, fearing ridicule, will not be aggressive. The real test took place at the end of 2007, when Delcourt translated after much hesitation "Lost Girls" by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie: contrary to the predictions of the naysayers, the book was marketed without the slightest problem.

The following events confirmed the trend. "Happy Sex" by Zep offers the genre its first bestseller in a long time, Casterman launches "Babydoll Diary" under the KSTR label, the Requins Marteaux reconnect with the spirit of pockets through their BDcul collection, and new publishers like Tabou or Ange are entering the field.

However, one must be cautious of triumphalism. The 1949 law remains in effect, a commission continues to give its opinion on publications, and the responsibility weighing on the entire industry explains why erotic comics remain absent from large retail stores and train stations. The interpretation is more flexible, but it has not disappeared.

The real question is not whether the genre will survive, but whether it will eventually be sold like others. For the reader, the course of action is simple: order from specialists, ask their bookseller for titles, and not wait for supermarket shelves to do this work.