Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

/ Alex Good

Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

I still have the first appearance of Druuna in North America, an issue of Heavy Metal magazine that came out in 1986. More specifically, and regrettably, it’s a copy of that issue as it hit the newsstands in Canada, with several pages removed by state censors. Canada was very tight about sexy stuff back in the day.

Heavy Metal (a magazine that I believe has stopped print publication) had a reputation for publishing adult-themed SF comics, but even so Druuna pushed the boundaries. The brainchild of Italian writer and illustrator Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, Druuna was a raven-haired bombshell pin-up living in a weird post-apocalyptic urban wasteland where people are mutating into tentacle monsters at the hands of a disease called Evil. It’s a dystopian world where everyone, even the mutants, is driven by sexual lust. Which is a fate of affairs that Druuna is both a victim of and that she exploits as she tries to save herself and her lover Shastar (who is now far gone with the disease).

In terms not only of the plot but the world-building the results are hard to keep straight. From Wikipedia: “During the more than thirty years of publication of Druuna’s adventures in Morbus Gravis, the plot has evolved through several stages, differentiated with numerous jumps in the storyline, with some attendant inconsistencies.” That’s putting it mildly. I was never sure what exactly what was going on, and I don’t think Sepieri was either. That said, I always thought there was more to it than just a futuristic setting for a string of hardcore sex scenes, many of which involved threatened or actual rape. There’s a dream (or nightmare) logic to the proceedings, and in the blurring of technology, sex, and body horror I think Serpieri saw a ways into our future. Druuna could be thought of as a virtual reality porn program that has gone viral in the worst way, blurring the line between love, lust, and sex addiction in ways that have come to seem more and more relevant. Druuna is both the ultimate object of sexual desire and someone who is turned on by that objectification, a male fantasy but also a transcendent figure who reigns over her fallen world of mechanical desires.

This is the ‘80s epic of SF T&A, and right from the start, with Druuna lolling in bed for three pages like a post-apocalyptic odalisque, you know where you are in terms of genre if not in the cosmos or space-time continuum. And forty years later it still works. It’s a comic that’s stuck with me, like being haunted by a sexy ghost. And I’m not going to complain about that.

Graphicalex

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