Sex in Ink

Top 10 carnal comics

By Shawn Conner

Lost Girls, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
The ultimate in erotic comics, the 16-years-in-the-making Lost Girls is lush, steamy, thoughtful and lovingly produced.

Birdland, Volumes 1 and 2, Gilbert Hernandez
It's a fun, free-for-all frolic of bodily fluids, pendulous breasts, stupendous erections and Latin expressions of ecstasy.

Click! and Butterscotch, Milo Manara
Two of the master's best-known works. In Click!, the rather unpleasant but beautiful Claudia becomes an insatiable cauldron of lust at the most inappropriate times because of an implant and a remote control. In Butterscotch, an invisible man gives off the scent of, yep, butterscotch as he makes the rounds of changing rooms on the Riviera.

The Spider Garden, Michael Manning
In this series, Manning imagines and draws what would be impossible in the real world. His exquisite, detailed art depicts a world filled with transvestites, hermaphrodites, obscene technology, otherworldly horse demons, serpent women and more tied together in a complex plot.

Dirty Stories, Volumes 1-3
This anthology title collects outrageous short pieces by top comic artists like Rick Altergott, Renée French, Ivan Brunetti and Roberta Gregory.

Mandragora, Paolo Serpieri
The Heavy Metal website promises this volume is the "most lascivious" in the series starring Serpieri's sci-fi vixen Druuna. If you love big, round butts running from aliens on far-off planets, this is as good a place as any to start.

Little Ego, Vittorio Giardino
In this beautifully drawn homage to Winsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, Giardino's heroine explores a dreamscape of erotic possibilities.

The Complete Crumb Comics and R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions, Robert Crumb
No sex-in-comics list would be complete without the man who first unleashed his depraved fantasies of the flesh in print for the world to see. Volume 6 of Fantagraphics' reprint collection The Complete Crumb Comics features the infamous Joe Blow strip, while Volume 7 includes classic underground sex comics like Horny Harriet Hotpants. Taschen's R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions collects Crumb's "most intimately revealing comic strips and single page drawings" but comes with a hefty $700 price tag.

Spent, Joe Matt
The autobiographical cartoonist's most recent collection is anything but sexy. But the story of one man's descent into video porn addiction delivers irony and humor along with its painful honesty and pathos.

Best Erotic Comics 2008, Greta Christina (Editor)
An excellent, up-to-date primer on what's being done in erotic comics, the work by top alternative names like Daniel Clowes, Gilbert Hernandez and Phoebe Gloeckner shares covers with artists like Michael Manning (The Spider Garden) in stories ranging from kinky to vanilla and featuring straight, lesbian and gay themes.