Aarin vs Erotica: Part 1

I’m a progressive-minded guy. I run a mature-genre webcomic that celebrates/criticizes pornography. I follow ‘adult’ webcomics and have reviewed two with explicit content. This shit is within my rounds. I follow them because they’re fun and funny. Real porn is another animal best kept private (who am I kidding) :P

So I don’t hate or disrespect the genre. Pron comics are as old as the webcomic medium, and you can trace their roots to indie-print, 19-fucking-60’s and beyond. Fact is, no matter what the media is, erotica/pornography has always been step-by-step with it. Cave-paintings, Roman tiles, etchings, photography, motion pictures, I’m not telling you shit you don’t know.

But as I validate pron-comix, I criticize them heavily along the same standards I hold to any story: art, characterization, plot, and delivery of the motherfucking premise. If your shit is about BDSM slave girls, that doesn’t excuse lazy panels, cliché roleplaying, or failure to broaden your audience. If there’s torture/mutilation, I’m fucking out. If there’s vomit/shit-play/bestiality, I’m fucking out.

Porn comickers, consider your goddamn audience. Why’s it all have to be fetish bullshit? Do I really find a bloodied spread-eagle cheerleader being drowned all that sexy? No. I want to shoot the artist in the fucking face (have shotgun, need address).

But besides that, if it looks like shit, no one cares about your labias, nipples, ball-gags, hog-ties, nor your shitty written textual lead-ups. While your 16-year-old viewers just want ‘action,’ you want a believable execution on premise, just like any Cinimax porn. It creates the fantasy and fulfills your purpose. That’s the reason for the elaborate sets in any pro/dollar pron mag/video.

It’s really like talking to a fucking wall, but:

Here we go: Elle, and all the Others (NSFW, ya think?)

E&O is about some lame virgin-type that gets visited by this elf-chick that barely stars in the current chapters. Her role and the comic’s premise? A unremovable collar for Thomas that makes him irresistible to women, even his mom (don’t worry, they don’t go there, beyond the joke). Elle is training Tom for a life of sexual servitude, and this be her method.

It’s as much base comedy as flat-out porn, though the comic does go through arcs of XXX-explicit content. It’s useless as a comedy alone, and useless as porn alone, but put together, it’s pretty solid sexual humor.

It started B&W, but as it’s developed, the current full-color art still isn’t serious; it’s campy/cartoony with just enough detail and expressiveness to fulfill the genre’s this-is-a-penis-vagina-penetration standards. Odd combo. The artist seems comfortable with nudity/genitalia, which isn’t always the case with pron. Often proportions get severely distorted, and I’m not just talking about 36-JJ tits (I hate those). E&O keeps it simple, if a bit under-stated. Basically, it dosen’t try to hard too go beyond itself, which is a plus for any genre.

The writing, like with many porn webcomix, is not by a native English-speaker. Sam credits his copyeditors (that’s nice!) but the dialogue voice stills get strained (especially early on). Considering 75% of the comic is plot/character-based, it’s a point of contention, but nothing outstanding. If I didn’t know this was French-Canadian, I’d have chalked it up as another rookie writer.

The plot itself? The character Tom shows a skilled progression from unknowing, to resistant, to a conscionable whatcha-gunna-do participant in Elle’s designs. Besides locking himself away, he doesn’t have many options. There’s trigger-point humanity in his breakdowns against shyness, sexual repression, and social consequence. On a deeper level it’s pretty smart, especially for a porn serial. The most fun part is that it’s still building cadence. There are consequences in E&O, and they are developing. Tom is always a chapter away from a total shit-storm by my reckoning. I can’t help but chuckle as he’s constantly manipulated by his would-be-preditors.

Hosted by ComicGenesis, the server seems to go down multiple times a week, which is fucking annoying. My biggest word of advice would be to buy some real hosting that doesn’t crash 5x a week. CG, Drunkduck, I’ve no idea why people use them. Once you get more than 10 regular readers you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.

The rewards for a free, color, weekly porn comic? A solid top 50 spot on TWCL and probably decent donations for wallpapers. It’s a legit avenue, even if it does take a ranking I’d rather see held by better artists/writers/stories. It’s the world we live in. Enjoy it or ignore it, erotica isn’t going anywhere–it’s actually getting better.

E&O isn’t something I’d recommend to the world at large, but it’s been fun the last few months, doesn’t get scary-fetish, and is probably top-tier as far as pron comics go. Maybe I do hate the genre if this is damn near the best. Whatever. In my mind: porn is porn and comix are comix.