Dirty Words: Pop Goes the Adult Comic Book—”The Adventures of Jodelle” (Fantagraphics) by Guy Peellaert

Pop, it’s a versatile word. It’s where the weasel goes. It’s the death knell of a balloon. It’s your casual father. It’s also the sound of semen as it frees itself from the aroused tip of an erect penis. It’s a messy word, a sexy word and, of course, a word that has inspired artists.

First rearing its slick head in the mid-1950s, Pop Art didn’t infect the masses or almost a decade, when it exploded every mainstream expression from fashion to entertainment. Around the same time that “Batman” flashed primary-colored Bam and Wham starbursts on your TV set, in France one of the first adult comic books was being printed. 

The brainchild of Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, “The Adventures of Jodelle” was published in 1966 in the controversial French magazine Hara-Kiri. Scripted by Pierre Bartier and drawn by Peellaert in a bold Day-Glo style that took from Pop Art’s love of commercial ephemera and filtered that through a psychedelic lens to create a style that was influential. You can see his line in the rock posters coming from the Summer of Love in San Francisco to the Beatle’s “Yellow Submarine.”

Like the era he came to graphically define, Peellaert rejected inhibitions and embraced taboo in his hardcore satiric comic strip. In fact, his characters were ripped from the headlines, only those headlines were printed in the personal newspaper of Peellaert’s obsessions. 

Jodelle, for example, was inspired by the French singer Sylvie Vartan, one of the most productive and tough-sounding of the ye-ye artists, a beat-happy pop music of the early 1960s France. “I used Sylvia Vartan because she exuded an erotic quality that could be read on more than one level, and I went ahead and submitted a page, just a single page, to the publisher Eric Losfeld, because he was the one who’d just published ‘Barbarella,’ although I didn’t much care for it at the time; I found the drawings old-fashioned.”

Other lookalikes include Emperor Augustus, the Beatles, Pope Paul VI, James Bond, Marquis de Sade and even Jesus Christ. 

“The Adventures of Jodelle” have been collected in a beautiful large edition from Fantagraphics, with ample supplemental materials to further delve into the diverse artistic productivity of Peellaert. But it’s the fluid sexy line and vibrant pulsating color palette of the comics themselves that are the real stars of this book. 

We have to agree with Fantagraphic’s press material, which states that “every page of this fascinating saga features a flood of topical references and in-jokes, operating playfully on the border that separated so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Peellaert drew from the most exciting stimuli of his time, subjecting them to his powerful formal innovations: Pop Art, extreme fashions, strident advertising, shock graphics and cinematic techniques all collided in virtuoso compositions of extreme sophistication, whose inspirations ranged from classical paintings to Gottlieb pinball machines.”

Set in a Roman-like modern empire of mod-dressed gals and cool guys, the spy story is hot from the get-go and gets hotter as you go deeper into it. Orgies with the Beatles are in full breast-exposed heat by the fourth page. Women as slipping in and out of togas, whipping a horse-drawn automobile, riding motorboats in backless bathing suits, nakedly machine-gunning down musclebound goons, stabbing scantily clad ladies while wearing tight dresses slit to their hips, there are even nude women wearing plates of steak frite and hot fudge sundae. This is fantasy run amok. 

Peellaert went on to explored even more outer-regions of comic book sexploitation with “Pravada,” which premiered in 1968, with its main character looking very much like the sexy French singer Francoise Hardy. Peellaert is nothing if not consistent with his turn-ons. These were only the opening salvo to his most successful comic, “Rock Dreams,” where he illustrated commentary by rock journalist Nik Cohn. It supposedly sold a million copies in the early 1970s.

Most people know Peellaert indirectly. He is the artist responsible for such iconic album covers as “Diamond Dogs” by David Bowie (complete with man-dog genitalia) and “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” by the Rolling Stones, as well as designing the original movie poster for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” But none of those collaborations offer the depth of fetishistic pleasure, the artistic freedom and visual cornucopia overflowing from the bright pages of “The Adventures of Jodelle.”

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