Debuting this week at EYE WEEKLY's Toronto Notes, our new interview column Areas of My Expertise. We'll be speaking to Torontonians about their special obsessions, habits and collections.
This week, we spoke to Christopher Butcher, the manager of The Beguiling comic book store and the co-founder of the Toronto Comics Arts Festival, about pornographic comics and manga, of which The Beguiling has a sizable and wide-ranging collection.
Until Sunday, The Beguiling will also be selling their manga wares — some smutty, some otherwise — at the Anime North 2008 convention at the Toronto Congress Centre.
EYE WEEKLY: How long has The Beguiling sold pornographic comics?
Christopher Butcher: Porn is where The Beguiling made its name. Toronto has more comic books stores than most big cities, but when our store opened in 1987, we were the only people in town who carried porn — or smut as I should technically call it, because smut is more fun and porn is illegal.
EYE: What were your vanguard smut titles?
Originally we had books like Bettie Page and Tijuana Bibles, which are some of the earliest dirty comics ever drawn. Tijuana Bibles took well-known characters like Dick Tracy or Betty Boop and put them in sexy situations — just crude drawings of comic strip characters fucking. They're supposed to be funny, but they're pretty titillating as well.
One of the best early proper smut comics was Birdland by Gilbert Hernandez, the guy who created Love & Rockets. Hernandez just wanted to do an adult comic book that was fun and sexy. Birdland has lots of fucking and whatnot, but it still reads like a regular Gilbert Hernandez book. It just has a different focus.
There's also Small Favors by Colleen Coover, which is a girly smut comic about two female characters. It's drawn by a woman, and it's maybe the last great fun porn comic. Coleeen has done all different kinds of comics, but this time she wanted to talk about sex. Like a lot of sex books, it's published by Eros, a division of the comics publisher Fantagraphics.
They also put out this book called Coley Running Wild, which was one of the first mainstream sex comics with any kind of gay content, because the main character was bisexual. He'd have men, women, both at the same time — that sort of thing.
Ralf König, who's German, is probably the most popular gay cartoonist in the world. Everywhere outside of North America, he's got ten or twenty books out. And he's read by both gay and straight people, because he's funny – he writes relationship dramas. Occasionally his characters have sex, but outside of North America people seem to be okay with that.
EYE: Has the wide availability of internet pornography affected your sales? These days, the demand for smutty stuff, especially fetish material, is generally sated by the internet. Our sales are still high, but they're not what they used to be. People keep their kinks to themselves. Most of the customers we get for smut aren't part of the computer generation — they don't know how to get what they want on the internet.
Instead, to take their place, there's this whole new wave of smut comics, called Yaoi. Yaoi are Japanese manga about male-male relationships, but they're written and drawn by women, for women. They're the number one growth category for manga here in North America, and women here and even some gay men have really been jumping on board. You get everything from really sweet slice-of-life stuff to more risque material.
Antique Bakery is about three gay guys who run a French bakery in Japan together. There's a lot of humming and hawing but no real sex as such. It's all fun and tongue in cheek. All Nippon Air Line is a little racier. It's about an airline that only has beautiful boys working as stewards, and occasionally you get to have sex with them. The joke is in the title — note the acronym.
EYE: So is there manga porn for gay men, as opposed to straight women?
When I was in Japan, I found these comics called baru, which is bear porn. Right away you can see the difference in the look of the characters (see picture, right). The baru culture is huge in the gay scene in Japan — you either look like a slightly-built, very clean hairless guy, or you're part of the bear culture, with a short hair cuts and a beard or moustache. In one book I have, there's a story about a kid who sees his dad having illicit gay sex with another man, and he starts watching, and he's shocked and dismayed, and it's kind of insane.
There's also another category of porn called furry porn — like this comic Beef Jam. It's about a tiger that turns into a hot guy and then has sex with another hot guy, and sometimes the other guy is also part-tiger when they do it. So that's hot.
Probably the most famous gay manga illustrator is Gengoroh Tagame. He draws this erotic-grotesque stuff — with pain and humiliation and torture and rope-binding and stuff like that — as well as the bear material. Last year, I wrote an article mentioning bear smut for Xtra!, and afterwards we got tons of phone calls asking us if we stocked bear porn, although there's actually nothing available in North America. You can order it online at Rainbow Shoppers, but then you run the risk of getting in trouble with Canadian customs. They're just horrible, horrible censors.
EYE: Most of the manga comics I've read seem to be pretty directly aimed at straight men. Japan obviously also has heterosexual porn. Comics for young men out of high school are called seinen. You graduate out of Naruto and Dragonball and start reading books like Futari Ecchi (Step Up Love Story), which is about a newlywed couple learning about having sex together for the first time. It's a really big deal. In North America, the book was published with a different name, The Manga Sutra, as if it was the definitive comic book guide to having sex. But in Japan it's just a simple story about two people.
EYE: Are the comics ever censored? In North America, seinen generally have an 18+ rating, but in Japan there's no age restrictions on manga. In seinen, you can show boobs, butts, and you can clearly imply that couples are having sex, but it's not porn porn. It's still illegal to show pubic hair and genitalia in comics, so they'll use this mosaic tiling effect, or black it over, or draw a little squiggle over it the penis. Usually, artists draw all the genitalia and then the censoring is applied digitally afterwards. Then, when they books are translated for a North American audience, everything gets put back in.
When Eros first started publishing erotic manga around fifteen years ago, they would actually re-hire the original artists to go back and make the comics dirtier — to actually draw in all the little folds of the vagina or the little details on the penis.
Generally, though, comic smut has always been problematic in North America, because people assume that if something's illustrated, it must be for children.
There's a series published by DC Comics called Tenjho Tenge by Ito Ogure, which is basically about a school where buxom girls fight using crazy martial arts. The original Japanese version has a lot of ripped skirts and panty shots and bare breasts. But the North American version was heavily censored by DC. It's still a about buxom girls punching each other, and there's still lots of panty shots, but they'll put a sound effect over the picture so you can't see someone's boob. It's just the most puritan base garbage. They don't respect the material, and they don't really respect the person who created this work of art – I mean, they're a superhero publisher, and they don't understand manga to begin with, They could have shrink-wrapped the story and put a mature readers sticker on it, but they didn't want to, because they wanted the sales.
EYE: What's more important, the narrative or the sex? In most yaoi, the focus is on the relationships and narrative as much as the sex. The idea is that in reading about a male-male relationship, a woman can project herself to be either the submissive or the dominant partner in the book. So if you're in a submissive relationship with another man, you get to step outside yourself, but still maintain your heterosexuality, because there's plenty of hot naked guys having sex to look at. All Nippon Air Line, for example, is rated 16+. There's implied intercourse, but it's covered up. In the 18+ books, you do get to see the penises and insertion and whatnot. But people read them because they like good stories, too. Yaoi are like the American romance comics of the 1960s and 70s, but sometimes they end in hot hot filthy sex.
EYE: So does the story take precedence over possible masturbatory value?
No, no, this is all porn for masturbation — but the narrative is what makes it fit for masturbation. Even in the most straightforward heterosexual porn, it's the narrative that makes the story interesting. The most popular series right now is an anthology called Comic AG. The art is nice — they obviously know how to draw people fucking in an attractive way — but each story has its own kink. One is about domination and submission, one is about borderline incest, and so forth. But it's that story that actually draws people into the comics, as opposed to watching a fuck film, where the story is just a base pretext to watch people fucking on screen. In a way, that's where comics smut succeeds as opposed to video smut. It can be a little more cerebral.
EYE: How do you shelve your porn comics at The Beguiling? We're not shy about smut. It's right in the bins next to our other comics. If we get a new issue of AG, it gets put on the rack next to the other new issues, because it's all comics. I mean, if there's a great big cock on the cover, or boobs, or whatever, we'll cover it up. The thing is, kids don't have a problem being exposed to boobs, they don't care about that stuff. It's more that the kids' parents don't want to have to see their kids being exposed to boobs.
For the most part, though, we take a Catholic approach to our racking and stocking. Comics are comics. If it's a comic book, we're gonna keep it in stock. And the adult stuff is really just the ultimate extension of that.
If you'd like to talk to EYE WEEKLY about your collections or obsessions, email us with the header "An Area of My Expertise."