Guido Crepax (1933 - 2003)
Related: Valentina - fetish art - Italian comics - adult comics
Gallery: Guido Crepax Google gallery
Illustration by Guido Crepax
image sourced here.Baba Yaga (1973) - Corrado Farina [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Guido Crepax's Valentina was adapted for film in 1973. Valentina is played by Isabelle De Funés. The film also stars sometime sex symbol Carroll Baker (Baby Doll, The Sweet Body of Deboray). The film was called Baba Yaga, the name of a character from Slavic mythology. [Nov 2006]
Biography
Guido Crepax (July 15, 1933 - July 31, 2003) was an Italian comics artist. He is most famous for his character Valentina, created in 1965 and very representative of the spirit of the sixties. The Valentina series of books and strips became noted for Crepax's sophisticated drawing, and for the psychedelic, dreamlike storylines, generally involving a strong dose of erotism. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_Crepax [Apr 2005]Recurring themes
Recurring themes were those of victimized girls, sadomasochism and violence. It is not surprising that Guido Crepax illustrated classic erotic stories like De Sade's 'Justine', Pauline Réage's 'Histoire d'O' and Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus in Furs'. 'so if I have drawn whips, chains, bonds of every kind," he said, 'even if I have reproduced in my pictures the most audacious bold erotic perversions, I in fact hate violence and lack of respect towards oneself and to others, and all forms of excess. the extraordinary things that my poor young girls in love undergo - valentina, and bianca, anita and justine, emmanuelle and madame O - have nothing to do with the treatises on sexual psychopathology. they are only visionary exercises, imaginary madness transferred onto paper, deliriums, desires ruled by a purely cerebral mechanism... what interests me more than anything else is that the game never becomes obscene, that it is never trapped by vulgarity'. -- http://www.designboom.com/portrait/crepax.html
Weaver of innocent plots
We are reminded that the progression from Valentina! (1965 - ) through Bianca (1968/71), Anita (1979), to ever more sophisticated Valentina, and eventually to Story of O (1973, 1974 & 1984/5) Emmanuelle (1978), Sade's Justine (1979), and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1983) was inevitable. This "weaver of innocent plots" is indeed, as Frediani describes Crepax, "a hunter of butterflies". Crepax points out, "From the point of view of eroticism it's the atmosphere, the situation, which gives the scene its eroticism." Valentina, Bianca, O are the victims of the most barbaric treatment always amidst splendid and baroque backgrounds. Pursued through labyrinthian perils, raped, whipped, and entangled in all manner of bizarre Heath-Robinson-like torture machines, they always emerge, however, Pheonix-like from their ordeals. Stefan via http://www.storyofo.co.uk/ItsCrepax.html [Jun 2005]
Studied by notable theoretician and semiologist Roland Barthes
Crepax, best known for his strip "Valentina" and other adult oriented stories, was also a seminal creator involved in Heavy Metal magazine. His work was studied by notable theoretician and semiologist Roland Barthes, who described comics as a "great metaphor for life." --Jason Brice
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