“Crepax’s audacious visual techniques, which combine sensual linework, fluid storytelling, and innovative panel breakdowns, strongly influenced both his contemporaries and subsequent generations of comics artists, and they look as strikingly bold today as they did a half-century ago.”
Volume 1: Dracula, Frankenstein, And Other Horror Stories
Italy’s Guido Crepax is one of the most acclaimed cartoonists in the world. In the 1960s and ’70s, he created and chronicled the adventures of Valentina, arguably the strongest and most independent female character in European comics up until that time, and legitimized the erotic genre. Crepax: Dracula, Frankenstein, and Other Horror Stories features, in addition to the artist’s unique take on the eponymous literary works by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, a half dozen Valentina stories, several never before published, and influenced by the French New Wave.
This book collects short comics in which the famed erotic Eurocartoonist takes on the classic Universal monsters, and much more.
Volume 2: The Time Eater and Other Stories
Spanning the 1960s—1980s, this science-fiction-themed second volume of our complete Guido Crepax library features, in addition to adventuress Valentina, two more of the famed Italian erotic artist’s heroines. Marianna is a mysterious friend of Valentina’s (or is she? And why do they look so alike?). Belinda is a motorcycle-driving, pop art action star inspired by then-contemporary characters like Barbarella. In The Time Eater, Valentina meets a curious couple in an asylum, encounters strange creatures on a photo assignment, is caught in a Rube-Goldberg-like death trap, and much more.
Volume 3: Evil Spells
The third volume of Fantagraphics’ monumental collection of Guido Crepax’s comics collects the “Baba Yaga” storyline, which recasts the witch of folklore (it was adapted for the screen in 1973 starring Carroll Baker as the middle-aged, lesbian villainess). Under Baba Yaga’s influence, a doll, Annette, comes to life; Valentina and her lover, Philip, are forced to act out the fairy tale Bluebeard; and Philip must fight the witch in her lair. Evil Spells also features the famed Italian cartoonist’s sinuous adaptations of several literary masterpieces: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and a giallo genre take on Edgar Allan Poe.
(Exceptionally large heavy items which WILL incur additional postage costs if ordered via AbeBooks or from overseas.) #160322