Back at the dawn of time (2002), a bunch of male and female cartoonists on the women-in-comics web forum Sequential Tart started talking about porn. The consensus, as contributor Carla Speed McNeil put it later: "Most porn, especially in comics, is lame. So what do you do if you don't like what's out there? Get busy."
And they did. The result was Smut Peddler: a black-and-white, stapled minicomic full of beautifully-drawn porn — mostly, but not entirely, by women.
There were three editions produced before the minicomic went dormant. Now, cartoonist C. Spike Trotman, of the webcomic Templar, Arizona, has resurrected Smut Peddler by way of Kickstarter as a 350-page anthology, again mostly by women. It's available as a digital download ($15), but trust me, you're going to want to hold this glorious printed book ($30) in your hot, sweaty hands. The porn here is explicit, character-driven, and polymorphically perverse — stories include male/male, male/female, female/robot, and female/demon pairings, as well as any manner of threesomes, orgies, and genderqueer combos.
The thing that makes this book so radioactively hot, however, is the sheer quality of the comics, which are all lovingly drawn by some of the best in the business today. Standouts include a story by E.K. Weaver in which a character from her excellent webcomic gets the shit exuberantly fucked out of him by a hot punk and her strapon; Jess Fink's Depression-era tale of a pair of street swindlers and their unsuspecting, but receptive, mark; and the crown jewel, by Spike herself, an absolutely mindblowing retelling of the most famous and perverse sex act in history — the conception of Jesus Christ.
SMUT PEDDLER :: 350 pages :: $30 hardcopy, $15 digital ::ironcircus.com
S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached atsrosenbaum@thephoenix.com
