The link is Noah. Below is me.
xoxoxoxoxoxo
When I was in high school I found a comic shop that carried Dark Horse Manga (1997, not this newfangled post-tankobon stuff). I picked up Johji Manabe’s Drakuun immediately and became a fan. The thing about Drakuun is that Karula is sexy and even nude (and even HAVING SEX!!!) but at completely different times than when she is killing people with her sword. Karula the warrior and Karula the lover are two different times of day.
I love looking at sexy drawings of women.
Obviously Karula’s armor design is more flesh-revealing than it needs to be but reading this comic was a step in a progressive direction for me.
For years I found myself reading comics about women fighters that came in various degrees of intelligence and quality. I’ve been all over the spectrum of opinions and I always return to square one. Sexuality is usually a contextual problem within comics and pop culture.
Decapitated women exist in different contexts. Literally, the abuse of women characters; visually, not depicting the head or face, thus reducing women to objects—bodies lacking personality; and figuratively, the lack of inclusion of a sense of internal life and agency that male characters tend to possess as a matter of course.
Drakuun is absolutely a cheesecake comic with aspirations to titillate its audience in between pulse-raising fight scenes. However when it comes to the bedroom scenes, the narrative is still centered on Karula. Her sex scenes are about her as a character, her life, her changes, her desires and each such scene teaches the reader something about Karula or reinforces an aspect of the character’s story seen previously.
Sex as an event that brings people closer together exploded in my head when I read this comic. There is the mechanical act, there is the implicit trust and vulnerability and there is the way people talk, or think about other things, or link current sex with past partners.
Usually, when people talk about the subject of “sex in comics,” they have an opinion about DC or worse, something to say about Robert Crumb and Tijuana Bibles. No thanks to either. I’ll be thinking about Manabe, a cheesecake artist who cares about his characters.
