Cimiteria N. 31: Porcobello, published in July 1978

The last time we met Cimiteria, she was fighting gnomes with a gnome corpse.



Now she's trying to escape from the gnome caves with Quasimodo, but they run into the Loch Ness Monster.



And what's worse, it's a pet of the gnomes, and the gnome king orders it to eat Cimiteria and Quasimodo alive.



"No, kill him!" Cimiteria commands, pointing at the King.



The king didn't see this coming and starts to stutter. A big mistake!



He gets eaten, and our heroine escapes.



The rest of the story tells about Cimiteria's fight against a pee-pee and doo-doo lover called Porcobello, mercifully I will skip that part to talk to you about Quasimodo. In Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Quasimodo was a hunchback who fell in love with the beautiful gypsy girl Esmeralda, but *SPOILER ALERT* she never loved him back, thanks to his ugliness. After Esmeralda was hanged, Quasimodo died embracing her corpse. A depressing thought, but of course if Esmeralda would've been undead like Cimiteria, things could've been so very different.



In this fumetti series Quasimodo is a deformed gravedigger, who aids in Cimiteria's resurrection and later becomes her lover. While they look like night and day on the outside, inside they are like night and night, two freaks disconnected from all things normal. The relationship isn't very balanced, Cimiteria always has the upper hand, but Quasimodo is nobody's bitch, either, if things don't go his way, he will sabotage almost anything to get what he wants. And yet these two psychos care about each other more than they'd probably like to admit. While the first 30 episodes of Cimiteria had less horror elements than I remembered, I just adore the interaction between these two characters. The greatest love story ever told.



(That's a fake penis, by the way, Cimiteria is planning to go to the Isle of Man, a very gay place according to this fumetti. That's another story that I will mercifully skip...)