< comics/x >
PERVERSO!by Rich Tommaso
($4.95,
Alternative Comics.
Mature Readers)
Reviewed by Mike HunterRich Tommaso's
Perverso! covers the troubles of Roy, a porn photographer. A beautifully cartooned character: slight of build, with receding hairline, slopingly chinless jaw. Oiled-down hair with pencil-thin mustache making him look very "period." (The book's apparently set in the late '40s or early '50s.) And who, for all his fondness for porn, troubled marriage, and the seaminess of his work, still comes across as a nice, sweet-tempered guy.
The same agreeable, even slightly melancholy quality extends to the book itself. There is XXX-plicit imagery within, yet Tommaso's focus on Roy's richly-realized personality and ambiguity about his work, and the plot itself, somehow - for this reader at least - removes any sense of exploitation from the book. The story concerns Roy's being asked to shoot a new model who, though she looks about ten years old, has the paperwork to prove she's 29. After photographing her, Roy narrates, "I left the studio feeling like a child pornographer..." and struggles mightly to resist becoming turned on by little girls. Even this "perverso" has a line he wishes not to cross...
Perverso! has one of Tommaso's characteristic strikingly original front covers, in this case reminiscent of one of those "adult toys" you won't find in the
Previews catalog. His art is crisp, blacks well placed, visual storytelling fluid, panels deftly composed. The inside back cover and back feature full-page cartoons, enhanced with wash, in the style of those in old "girlie" magazines.
[ Link to this review ]
