The Vertiginous Abyss

It’s an odd feeling, there I’ve been getting the “best” half dozen (subjectively speaking) DC titles and thus showing refined “taste”. So wadda they go and do??? Go and give those titles their own imprint thaz what. Now I just get (nearly) all the Vertigo titles… pah!! Ah well, at least I should do them some justice and mention them here…

Animal Man
Once a superhero, then he died, then he came back as a demon-type creature from a stegosaurus egg, then he was born again as a human. Now his wife’s in New York avoiding rape and getting pulled in as a hooker. Errrmmm… I guess we aren’t in Toto anymore Kansas.

Doom Patrol
Wow. This one has a really original basic theme. Group of people with super-powers go round defeating the bad guys. Well, it’s actually a tad more original than that. One of the team is “Danny the Street”, who’s a… errrm… street. The group base themselves on the street and try to do good. Things don’t work out quite as they should though, as most of the “team” seem to be psycho’s. Recently the head of the group died, after killing one of the main characters. Something weird I guess, but a little too superhero for my liking.

Death: The High Cost Of Living
Ahhh… this is more like it. Less of the superheroes and more of the cute-if-blackly-dressed babes in skimpy tops. However, this babe (Didi) is really the personification of death. Once a century, she gets to spend a day on Earth mingling with the mortals without taking life… and this is what this three issue mini-series is about. Only one more issue to go, but it’s good stuff so buy it. P.S. as a follow-up tale to the TC cover someone had tattooed a while back… TC has a scoop on getting people to have secret Death tattoos… Honest, it’s not our fault that we know a load of weirdos.

Sandman
What is there to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times… How about “Don’t buy the current story-line ‘cos the artworks crap”? Next issue may actually have an artist again instead of someone who does a wonderful impression of a 5 year-old with a crayon, so have a look as it may be back to the good old days.

Sandman Mystery Theatre
Gosh! What now? A new title? Well, yes actually. In fact it’s sort of as return to the olden days of “Golden Age” Sandman – before he went all creepy and Endless, when he was just a bloke in funny clothes that was into spraying stuff at bad guys. So far, so bad. Now for the good news… It’s written by Matt Wagner, and seems to have a huge lack of superheroes! Yippee!

Shade – the changing (wo)man
Well, there was this alien called Shade, then he changed into a woman (growing bits & losing bits & all that), then he realized he was dead, and so tried to recreate himself, this didn’t work, so he went away and came back in the head of an empty body that was wandering around a lunatic asylum. Meanwhile, his girlfriend had shacked up with one of her (girl) friends and was staying in a nearby hotel. The girlfriend got captured by a psychopath who uses pain to get into his “garden” and Shade’s giving his girlfiend’s friend a quicky. Errmmm… but that’s not quite what’s going on or summat. Maybe the next issue will explain it (and maybe I ought to have the comics I’m “reviewing” on hand so I know what I’m waffling about).

Enigma
Another new title! Tada! This one’s an eight issue mini-series. Weird art and a weird plot. It’s got something to do with a superhero known as the Enigma (very appropriate considering how enigmatic he’s been in the first two issues!) and a chap who goes around with a straw sucking peoples brains out through their noses. The chap with the straw is somehow related to a cute little lizard that people keep finding… but buggered if I know what’s going on. Not that I’m thinking of giving it up… there’s only six more issues, and it can’t get more confusing.

John Constantine – Hellblazer
So, he’s defeated lung cancer & demons at a stroke, he’s shacked up with an Irish bird, and now he’s getting up the nose of a bunch of National Front types who have plans for the archangel Gabriel. Signs of a return to good old-fashioned blood & guts horror for JC here. I’m actually quite looking forward to the next issue of this at the moment.. we’ll just have to see how it develops.

Swamp Thing
You’ve heard it all before, so I won’t waste time & space on it here. Suck it & see, it may be just your thang.

That’s it… well, that’s the titles that are currently in the Vertigo line-up. They’re all that bit off the wall, and they’re all worth a look. The only thing that I find myself wondering is just how will they decide which titles are Vertigo worthy, and which are just plain old DC ? The obvious things are that the current Vertigo titles are vaguely outside the standard “DC Universe” – not many of the characters have much by way of cross-overs (well, excluding John Constantine, but he generally just pops up in Swamp Thing anyway), and the few occasions that the standard DC characters have popped in it’s been a pretty blatant ploy to boost sales. Hopefully those cross-overs will now be a thing of the past… hopefully. Let’s wait and see.

Back to the (sur)real world…

Spawn
Tod McFarlane has finally called in the heavy mob to write for him. Not that Spawn necessarily needed much assistance, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens. The up-coming special guest writers are… Alan Moore (for issue 8 – out now!); Neil Gaiman (9); Dave Sim (10); and Frank Miller (11). Each of these issues will also have a “poster” by someone-or-other… actually just a glossy centre-spread (roughly A4 size), but I’m sure someone’ll be overjoyed at their presence.

Twisted Image – Loompanics collection
Good selection of Ace Backwords’ strips. Including quite a lot of funny ones. Includes some of his more “underground” (i.e. crude lewd and generally rude… but still funny) work. Well worth a look, but the chances of spotting it around are low. Then again, I spotted it so why shouldn’t you!

Enchanter
This is finally coming out in full after having been abandoned by Eclipse after 3 issues. The basic story-line is pretty standard fantasy stuff – elves and a big bad evil critter and all that. However, the artwork is good, and the story showed promise in it’s initial issues. Hopefully it’ll get to finish this time!

Necroscope
Oooh… this is fun, innit? Brian Lumley original story about Vampires & psychic powers and drowned women. I haven’t read any of the books, and don’t think I’d really like to – but the comic definitely works… or so I reckon.

Sap Tunes.
Cool shit. Just a couple of weird black and white tales per issue with cool art & a load of style! Probably completely unsuitable for TC readers…

Ren & Stimpy
As raved about by Jim, and now in their own comeek book… The weird humour of Krisfaluci lives on, even if the animated version has had his plug pulled… and the comic has a completely different author! The comic keeps faith with the original series – Powdered Toast Man, the Space Yak and Muddy Mudskipper Meals all feature and it’s even got adverts for Log in it. What more can we ask. Happy, happy, joy, joy!

Faust – The Movie
Errrm… this is more Jim’s area… apparently Stuart “Reanimator” Gordon is looking at making a movie out of the sickest, most violent comic-book of the past few years. Ahhhh… what a blissful idea… However, if the comics can’t get through Customs, what’s the chance of the film not getting chopped to shreds by the BBFC. Faust vs. the BBFC, maybe that’d make a good sequel… hehehehehehe…

Jeff Koons & others. Anthony d’Offay gallery – October 1992.

Modern art is, to a large extent, an area of minimal interest to me. Splodges of paint, concrete blocks and the pretentious ramblings of art critics are not my cup of tea, perhaps because I prefer an aesthetic beauty sadly lacking from much modern art, most of which is about as pleasing to the eye as a mis-inserted contact lens.

However, the prospect of seeing some of Jeff Koons’ work was sufficient to drag me, dressed in a suit and tie to make it clear I was a connoisseur rather than a perv, into a gallery just off New Bond Street. Embarrassment meant I had to endure the rest of the exhibition first, but this did let me play ‘pin-the-bollocks-on-the-artwork’, trying to match the hyperbole of the press release to the actual pieces. That showroom dummy with added genitalia, has it “plunged beneath the surface to explore the demons of sexual abuse and erotic nightmares that underlie the foundations of a contemporary woman’s self identity”? Or maybe it “reflects the strange combination of eroticism, self-degredation (sic) and everyday practicality that can infuse even the most ordinary episode of housework”.

About the only piece of any appeal at all was a 3D paper-and-ink figure of a woman hanging herself, suspended from the ceiling. It did at least have a nice “let’s throw ourselves in the abyss” sort of quality, and looked as if someone had spent more than five minutes creating it, though I confess having to resist a temptation to look up the figure’s skirt.

Then, literally in the final corner, I saw two very large – maybe eight foot by ten – photographic quality screenprints of Koons and Cicciolina. Had they appeared in a magazine rather than hanging on a gallery wall, both would have been pounced upon with glee by the Obscene Publications Squad, One was entitled ‘Jeff on Top, Pulling Out’, the other ‘Butt Red’. Neither really require much more elaboration, except perhaps that the latter had Cicciolina in a fetching set of lacy red lingerie.

But is anal sex art? Personally, I have doubts. Porn works on a personal level, not as an object of artistic veneration, and displayed, shorn of context in a gallery (rather than a bedroom?), it loses much of whatever power it might otherwise have had. Definitely Schwing Factor Zero.

To a certain degree, Jeff Koons can be accused of exploiting Cicciolina; few people had heard of him before his relationship with her began. And who is the real pop artist? Koons’ work starts at 65 grand, while Cicciolina’s “art” is available – at least, in more civilized countries than this one – for a few quid. But it does have one positive feature; after you’ve been confronted by eighty square foot of Italian MP getting screwed up the ass, it makes the fuss over Madonna’s book (Zzzzz…) seem pretty small beer!

It probably sums up much of the difference between Italy and Britain that, in the recent general elections, candidates here included a terminally wet Olympic champion and a TV presenter whose jumpers are more interesting than he is, while Italy not only had Mussolini’s grand-daughter (fascist, but cute!), but also a serious challenge from the twin queens of Italian pornography, Ilona Staller (a.k.a. La Cicciolina) and Moana Pozzi.

Cicciolina was born in Budapest, the daughter of an official in the Ministry of the Interior and a midwife. Even in her teenage days, she was already a model with Hungary’s top agency, but her course towards international stardom really took off when she moved to Italy. There, she became host of a talk show called ‘Radio Luna’, which caused a national scandal with it’s “frank” approach, though this was nothing compared to her TV appearance in 1978, when her breasts became the first (of many) to be seen bared on Italian TV.

It was the following year that she entered politics, and her fame spread outside Italy, thanks to the international coverage of her campaigns, and her habit of pulling a crowd by shrugging herself out of whatever strapless dress she happened to be barely wearing. In a turn-up that warmed the hearts of all those who view politics as hell, she was elected the election before last, and the next time I saw her was on Jonathan Ross’s show, complete with an interpreter and a soft toy, repeating the dress-shrugging trick on national TV.

Odd corners of the British media have reported on Ilona’s progress since, but the stories were never the same twice. She went to the event marking the departure of the first (or was it the last?) Russian tanks from Hungary (Czechoslovakia?), and released a symbolic bird (of some species or other). About the only fact the accounts gleefully agreed on, was that a tank rapidly reduced the creature to a feathered, bloody pancake. It all adds to the myth that is Cicciolina, a myth that has seen her barred from the States as “undesirable”, the subject of a top 30 record in Britain – I treasure the memory of several hundred PWEI fans sweeping onto a Northern Line train, chanting ‘Cicciolina, Cicciolina, C-C-C-Cicciolina’ – and the centre of an enormous industry in Italy: books, comics and magazines, from the explicit to, well, the even more explicit.

Then there was her relationship with pop artist Jeff Koons – double life- size sculptures of him and Cicciolina making love (Koons’ “blue period”?), flanked by enormous photographic studies of the pair, were exhibited at such illustrious shows as the Venice Bienalle. The couple married and claimed – life imitating art imitating life – to make love seven times a day, interspersed with breaks to watch ‘Bambi’. But Jeff wanted her to give up the more public expressions of her sexuality (such as the bits involving pythons), and Ilona was having none of it: “Cicciolina belongs to the nation”, she declared. So, amid a frenzied blast of media hype, it all ended. Or did it? They were breaking up. Then they’d got back together. Then they were splitting again. Then they were trying for a baby, and lo, she was pregnant. Then she wasn’t.

Moana Pozzi is the lesser known of the two, at least internationally, but she was given the lead position on the Partito dell’ Amore (‘Party of Love’) ticket after Cicciolina’s on-off marriage and pregnancy initially ruled her out. Moana was born in Genoa in 1960, the daughter of a nuclear physicist, from a well-off, Catholic family – at least reputedly, as biographical details for both her and Cicciolina are seen through a haze of disinformation. But they’re not really important!

Like Cicciolina, she possesses a charisma capable of charming support out of the most unlikely places, including Umberto Eco, author of ‘The Name of the Rose’, and also a a reporter from a respectable British Sunday paper, who found her “pleasant, amusing, articulate and highly intelligent”, none of which are traits normally associated with the porn industry, In addition, she is also undeniably cute, an improvement on Ms.Staller whom no-one could really describe as a classic beauty.

“People are looking at us, to start with I am sure, because our approach is different and stimulating, and then they get interested because they like what we have to say”, said Moana, and her campaign meetings certainly sound more interesting than Neil Kinnock or John Major sitting behind a desk, wittering on about interest rates. “I sing a little bit, then I do a strip and an erotic dance…then I address the audience, I talk politics. I take a question-and-answer session and promote the party …The audiences love it, we can never get enough of them in through the door”. Should someone at the Beeb decide, in a moment of madness, to screen this sort of thing, I imagine it would get far better ratings than any British party conference.

Unfortunately, neither candidate made it to parliament in the election earlier this year. Though this might have seemed wise given the current state of the Italian economy, one wonders what might have happened – perhaps the Lira wouldn’t have nose-dived, maybe the country’s credit rating wouldn’t have been slashed, had Moana ‘n’ Ilona been there. Sex-as-political-statement may have last been popular in the 60’s, but whether in parliament or out of it, Staller and Pozzi are doing their damnedest to keep the Summer of Love alive – and their way is far more fun than anything involving wimpy designer drugs and crap haircuts!

The Ed.

Moana Pozzi filmography

* = porn, + = with Cicciolina

• 1981 La Compagna di Viaggio
  I Miracoloni
  Delitto Carnale(soft-core version of a porn movie)
  Valentina Ragazza in Calore *
  Erotic Flash *a.k.a. Erotica Flasha
  Viva La Foca
  Moana La Pantera Blonda (soft-core, porn added later)
• 1982 Borotalco
  Vieni Avanti Cretino
• 1983 La Vita Continua
  Vacanze di Natale
• 1984 Dagobert
  A Tu Per Tu
• 1985 Ginger E Fred (Fellini!)
  Doppio Misto
  I Pompieri
• 1986 Fantastica Moana *
• 1987 Moana, La Bella Di Giorno *
  Moana La Scandalosa *
• 1988 Provocazione
  Diva Futura L’Avventura Nell’Amore + (and directed by C.)
  Una Calda Femina Da Letto *
• 1989 Ecstacy
  Super Vogliose Di Maschi * +
  Senza Respiro * + (porn footage collection)
  Inside Napoli *
  Vogliose Ed Insaziabili Per Stalloni Superdotati * +
  I Vizi Transessuali di Moana *
  Moana, I Trans E La Tettona *
• 1990 Cicciolina E Moana Ai Mondiali * +
  Le Calde Labra Bagnate Di Moana *
  Malibu Gorilla *
  La Casa Del Piacere *
  Moana L’Insaziabile *
• 1991 Le Donne Di Mandingo * +
  Tutte Le Provocazione Di Moana *
  La Professoressa Di Leziona Anali *
  Sole E Sesso A Malibu *
  Una Signora Per Bene *
  Sotto Il Vestito Nienti * (No relation with the Carlo Vanzina giallo)
  Buco Profondo *

This filmog should be pretty complete and correct. The only problem is that a bunch of movie have been released for selling in news-stands, and often titles are created just to fool people who get an old movie under a new title. Also available are soft version of her porn movies and compilations of sex scenes mixed with those of other Italian porn stars such as Cicciolina, Miss Pomodoro, Lilli Carati, Karine Schubert, etc.

Max Della Mora

Bedtime Stories (A. Van Dike & J.Matheus)

Ilona Staller, Patricia Basso, Giancarlo Marinangeli (MIA, £9.79)

It’s kinda surprising it’s taken so long for anyone to attempt to release any of Cicciolina’s movies in this country. Although some of her films were available before she became famous i.e. Yellow Emmanuelle, there’s only one currently available – by coincidence, it was released as the above piece was being researched, so it seemed like a good idea to review it!

Accompanied by some of the worst music I’ve heard – ever, anywhere – it has Cicciolina as a talk show host with the radio equivalent of an 0898 service. One of her listeners, Ricky, meets her and, in the words of the blurb, “they embark on a series of sensual, erotic adventures in an attempt to work out what really turns them on”. Or, put another way, see Cicciolina rolling in mud. See Cicciolina walking mostly naked through Rome. See Cicciolina sing. Apologies if this review is beginning to sound like a Dick and Jane reader.

The film doesn’t actually look that cut, though it has an annoying tendency for scenes to end just as they get interesting (on the other hand, this did mean my low boredom threshold for porn was never breached). I assume it was originally created as soft-core, and appears to be spliced together footage from different movies (and different eras, as Cicciolina’s “look” jumps wildly about), with linking scenes to give the semblance of a plot. But the absence of much coherent narrative works in it’s favour, giving it a dreamlike quality, and it has some amusing moments, for example the population’s reaction to her Rome walk, and an inventive use of marmalade.

Pity the release is rather shoddy, managing to mis-spell her name, both on the box and in the credits. The sound quality is bad enough to make the dialogue frequently inaudible and the pan-and-scanning is annoying, though I suppose letterboxed Ilona Staller would be too much to hope for! Still, what with the additional novelty in the concept of an English language Cicciolina film, it kept me interested for 84 minutes and somewhat against my will, I found myself actually liking this Europorn version of ‘Pump Up the Volume’. C+.