The Catalan erotic comic warms up Sant Jordi with a legendary trio

BarcelonaThe story begins as tradition dictates. The king begs Saint George: "Defeat the dragon and rescue my daughter." And the brave knight rides off on his white horse. The Search for the Rose (Sextories). But what she finds in the forest isn't the threat she expected. A dragon in the form of a faun has the princess in its arms, but... they're fornicating. Jordi interrupts the scene, surprised and intent on taking the girl, but she refuses to leave. "The Western Knight of Dragons" ends up involved in a threesome and its many possibilities.

Sextories was born in 2011 as an erotic fanzine that championed inclusivity and diversity of sexual orientations, bodies, and practices. Six years ago, it became an erotic comic book publishing house primarily in Spanish, but with the idea that language "was also an oppression we wanted to address," says Oriol Estefanell, a member of the publishing house. Now they find themselves in a financial position that allows them to take risks, and not only have they decided to publish in Catalan a story as celebrated as the legend of Sant Jordi, but they will also distribute the comics in the commercial bookstore circuit. Until now, they could only be found in the web, to the sex shops regulars and at the stalls they set up at fairs like Comic Barcelona this weekend. For Sant Jordi, which is the climax of Catalan books, Sextories will be in Barcelona, ​​​​on Alí Bei Street (18-20).

The "stocadas" of Sant Jordi

As there is not much production of erotic literature or cinema in Catalan (of The hot hikers 25 years ago), the translation has also been mischievous. The work of Sarybomb —an artist who is already publishing the saga Break protocols—was originally in English and Estefanell has taken care of a translation that maintains the chivalric aroma: "We have been able to allow ourselves to use archaic vocabulary because it is a medieval and fantastic story. But in future issues it will be more complicated because, without references, any sexual expression seems artificial, affected."

When it came to finding words, she was directly inspired by reality: "Comics are a very immediate literature, it's like theater, it has to sound realistic. I have done research around me about how Catalan speakers fuck and it hasn't been very fruitful, because many people use Castilian expressions, like "fuck"", he observes. In the comic he has been able to use some subtly humorous expressions like "lies here", "net" and Santjordiesque "stabs". "We're a bit cunning", complains the faun, who has a prodigious forked tongue - he does -. robots, and especially those with contemporary themes, to "reconstruct current sex". but at the same time, erotic comics have almost disappeared due to the difficulty of promoting and distributing them, both physically and online. and digital piracy goes hand in hand with the return to a certain puritanism and the censorship of content that advocates for diversity, for example, the trans fact. Sextories organizes talks, workshops, shows and the So Horny festival at the Can Verdaguer Civic Center to spread a new perspective on sexuality.

The (very brief) history of erotic comics in Catalan

If comics are already a relatively unhegemonic genre, erotic comics are even more of a niche; and in Catalan, they are practically nonexistent. We have to go back a century, to the 1920s and 1930s, to find the "sicaliptic" magazines, a word invented to refer to eroticism—supposedly derived from the Greek wordssykon (fig or vulva) and Aleiptych (cooling or stimulation)–. "It was an eroticism light, a macho point, very much from the time," explains comics scholar Jordi Riera.

The Daddy It was the best known, but there were others, such as The Nandu, The Nandu of Llofriu and The Tuia, all satirical and spicy magazines. "There were also The Fig, which they immediately banned, and then took out The Freckle, which lasted only one issue," explains Jaume Capdevila, Cap, who studied them in Daddy. Satire, eroticism and provocation (1908-1937) (Efadós). In fact, The Daddy It started out as a political magazine, but after several setbacks, "the editor decided that dirty jokes would cause him less trouble than political ones; it was all double entendres with melons and peppers," explains Kap. "It went down that path of satirical erotic drawings, where suggestive women appeared, because it was a time of great repression and censorship. Only during the five years of the Republic was there a true sexual revolution that allowed a certain freedom, and breasts and asses appeared. Seen from today, they are very naive," he continues. The war completely changed the magazine.

After Franco's regime, the tone was very different. "Comics had been an interesting tool for recovering the Catalan language, with children's magazines like Strong Horse and Thirteenwinds, which are driven by seminaries. This means that Catalan comics retain the moralistic charge, while Spanish-language comics are the transgressive ones. underground, linked to the lumpen. The quinqui speak Spanish, and the Spanish-language market swallows everything up," says Kap. In Catalan, there are occasional comics. For example, La Cúpula, which in the 80s and 90s published The Viper, published in Catalan a number of American satirical pornographic comics from the 1930s entitled Dirty comics, with Popeye in action.

Not even the resurgence of the erotic novel in Catalan, first promoted by authors such as Manuel de Pedrolo and Ofelia Dracs in the 1980s, has been translated into comics. "Novels have always been considered for adults, and comics, for years, have been considered a genre for children, and production in Catalan is educational and pedagogical," says Riera. Kap highlights an attempt to create graphic comics in Catalan with the magazine The Arlot, which failed, and the criticism that the publishing house El Llamp received for publishing a 1714 comic strip by El Gat (David Parcerisa) where there was fellatio in The Fossar of Les Moreres.

There have been other erotic scenes sprinkled into comics such as The Adventures of Knight Tirant, by Jaume Fuster and illustrator Sento. And cartoonist Sebas has created several gay-themed comics with explicit sex, some of them in Catalan. There are also some scattered translations, such as The desired man by Ralf König (Glénat). But until now, the production of erotic comics in Catalan had been occasional and anecdotal.