Sexy comic books in Spanish pulled from Denver libraries

Oh NO!

Quiero mas repisas por favor.

Okay okay okay. I have no idea if this radio talk show schmuck speaks Spanish or not, but these things have been around for ages, years, perhaps even decades. Yes, actually they have been around for decades.

Niesa Editores, the biggest publisher of these comicas, churns these things out faster than a coked up Jack Chick. (Technically, a fotonovela is a type of comic that uses photographs instead of drawings with the standard word balloons. I’m told that such things are fairly popular in Europe too.) For those not in the know, these comics are Mexico’s answer to Japanese manga. They have an American look and influence to their art, but there’s still something very Mexican about the content and the style. In brief, they usually feature four types of stories:

1.) Violent westerns
2.) Violent crime stories
3.) Histories (Which can also be very violent.)
4.) Religious stories (Which, amazingly, are also pretty damn violent.)

The biggest difference is in the sexual content. The westerns and the crime stories tend to have a lot of sexual content. So much so that the covers usually feature two things: someone getting the living hell beat out of them and at least one half naked female.

In short, the covers aren’t that much different from American comics.

For instance, I’m looking at one right now that’s part of the popular El Libro Vaquero series. Obviously, this is a violent western genre and it’s cover shows a western saloon scene with a Native American getting the business end of a bullwhip while a redheaded woman, clad only in a teddy and fishnet stockings, looks on.

You know, I don’t know how many people here would read these things, but I’ve got three things to say about their “explicit content.”

First off, the only difference between these comicas and those Longarm, Gunsmith, and Slocum western paperbacks is that the comicas have pictures. The plots are just about as good as, say, a standard porn movie or perhaps a kung fu flick from the late 1970s. They’re damn near hilarious, even the Hispanics think so.

Second, this uproar reminds me of the whole “hidden sex scene” thing in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. We, as Americans, really get into a snit over the dumbest things. We raise hell when we find something in a game showcasing two badly computer modeled collections of pixels vaguely resembling humans having what can only be described as “softcore” sex. However the other parts of the game; killing cops, using prostitutes, slaughtering innocents, and stealing cars, well those things are okay. In other words, my character can shoot a hooker in the face, but it’d be wrong to screw her.

It’s a comic, for god’s sake. The man is bitching about poorly to fairly drawn pictures of people engaging in one, maybe two or three at the most, panels of sexual activity while the rest of the comic features death, destruction, racism, murder, cruelty to animals, and wholesale slaughter. Seems that we, as Americans, have our values turned around. Two (or sometimes more) people engaging in the most pleasurable activity known to man is evil and wicked. Meanwhile the killing isn’t as bad.

Finally, has this guy ever read the second League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel? This comic allows us into the more private lives of Allan Quatermain and Wilhelmina as we watch an old man and an undead Victorian get busy not once, but twice. Now if we’re going to talk disturbing, there ya go.

Someone needs to stop telling me what’s good for me.