The Complete Crepax: Erotic Stories, Part II: Volume 8

This volume of Fantagraphics' ambitious series reprinting all of Guido Crepax’s most significant comics is the second of two volumes featuring Crepax’s comics adaptations from the literary erotica canon. This volume contains Crepax’s longest graphic novel ― “Story of O.” A woman finds fulfillment when she subsumes her identity by sexually submitting to a secret society. Crepax sumptuously draws every strike of the whip and taps into the sensuality of body modification in his adaptation of this groundbreaking work. Also included is his short story “The Unexpected Exchange,” filled with the sensual delights you have come to expect from Crepax: lingerie, bisexuality, the 1920s, and the most symbolically drawn train you’ve ever seen outside of a Hitchcock film. As the Crepax Archives observes, “The cartoonist, licensed by the authority of classics, ventures deeply into territories of eroticism that up to now he had only dared to touch.” In addition to the usual accompanying essays putting Crepax’s stories into historical and cultural context, this volume also features Nouveau Roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s (The Voyeur, Last Year at Marienbad) introduction to Story of O.

Guido Crepax was born in Milan, Italy, in 1933. After acquiring a degree in architecture, he worked on award-winning advertising campaigns for such corporations as Shell and Dunlop. He went on to become one of Italy’s most important cartoonists, most famous for his psychedelic and erotic Valentina stories. Some of her exploits were adapted into a TV series and a film. He died in 2003.

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) was an influential French writer and filmmaker associated with the Nouveau Roman movement in novels such as Le Voyeur and La Jalousie. His film collaborations, such as Last Year at Marienbad (with Alain Resnais), won prizes and Academy Award nominations.

Writer and translator Micol Arianna Beltramini achieved success with the bestseller 101 Things to Do in Milan at Least Once in a Lifetime (Newton Compton 2008). After publishing two novels, she devoted herself to comics, editing a series for Edizioni BD, Psycho Pop, and editing and writing some of the stories that appear in Viva Valentina! (Edizioni BD 2016), the first collection of short stories about the character not written and drawn by Guido Crepax.