London, 1925. This lovely young lady is quite surprised when the antique shop she's visiting suddenly turns into a rocky cave. Her name is never mentioned, but let's dub her April Fool.
The shopkeeper proceeds to strip the flesh from her bones with the help of his demons.
Miraculously she survives the ordeal, it doesn't even hurt. The shop turns back to normal, and the keeper explains that her death is only temporary at the moment, but will become painfully permanent within a week, unless she finds a virgin and rips her flesh off.
The strange thing is, other people don't seem to notice that she's now a living skeleton. It makes her suspect that she has only been drugged and should go home to sleep off this horrible hallucination.
But when she tries to eat at home, food keeps falling through her jaw, revealing the ugly truth.
Seven nights later she goes desperately for a walk in the park, and notices a guy trying to take his girlfriend's virtue.
The girl escapes crying, but after April has offered the guy some sexual favours...
...he comes clean and tells the address of the runaway virgin.
Oh, the humanity!
April is pretty happy, though, she got her life and flesh back.
Naturally there's a twist: the shopkeeper was actually Satan himself, and the whole thing was an infernal trap. If she had resisted the temptation to murder, she would've truly returned to normal, but since that is not the case..
...death is back for good. Oh April, you poor Fool!
11 comments:
Nice to have you back Jaakko!
Good stuff too: brutal, outrageous, gory and impeccably drawn to boot. Was wondering whether this little gem might have been inspired by Hellraiser or could it have been the other way round?
Thanks, Headache, it's good to be back.
Inspired by Hellraiser? Somehow I doubt it, I think the more likely inspiration was the divine idea of having a living female skeleton copulate with a man for five pages :-p
Gorgeous!
Lovely artwork. Sad that all those artists never were celebrated like they deserved.
Quite good tale also.
Good to have you back Jaakko
And who says GROOVY isn't educational? I have a strong suspicion now of how "faggot" became an anti-male-homosexual slur in the early decades of the last century in the US (and essentially nowhere Anglophone else, at least not for quite some time), the years of slow Italo-American integration here..."fighetta" not only means literally "little vagina" but also "little pussy" in the sense of "sissy" or "wimp"...and "fighetta" would be pronounced often like "figGET" among Italo-Americans...not too tough to see the vowel-shift as others around them picked the usage up.
Thanks, folks :-)
Todd,
back in the early eighties when yours truly was just a little tween, a couple of Italian kids got transfered to my school, a girl and a boy. Neither of them spoke any Finnish or English, but the boy kept yelling something that sounded like "Pinocchio" to practically everyone who came close. To us it sounded kinda friendly. Fifteen years later, when I really got into fumetti, I realized that the boy had actually said "finocchio", not so friendly word at all :-D
Another fine example of progressive Italian literature, Jaako. I never tire of these inspirational stories. They always fill me with a sense of wonder. Bless their creators!
Oh Jaakko, isn't there some magical portal somewhere through which we could pass corporally into Fumetti World?
What a hoot that place is! There truly is nothing else like it.
Welcome back, and thank you for this.
that panel of the internal cumshot with a skeleton cracks me up--- awesome stuff.
Thanks, everyone
I'd also like to find a portal to fumetti world, but keep walking through much crappier portals by accident: for the past five days I had to live in a world with annoyingly incompetent vets and no internet. Well, at least I got the internet back, trusting vets is still an issue.
Volevo intervenire con un commento degno di nota, ma… l'articolo mi piace, quindi… GRANDI!!! Continuate così!
cartomanzia tarocchi
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