The Complete Crepax: Dracula, Frankenstein, And Other Horror Stories: Volume 1

by Guido Crepax

Overview

This book collects short comics in which the famed erotic Eurocartoonist takes on the classic Universal monsters, and much more.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781606998908
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	03/21/2016
Series:	The Complete Crepax , #1
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	10.00(w) x 13.10(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

05/23/2016
Erotic comics master Crepax, who died in 2003, never made much of an impact in the U.S. during his lifetime. Like so many bleeding-edge European artists, he was simply operating a few decades ahead of delicate American sensibilities. This deluxe collection leads the charge on introducing the Italian artist, and does it with guns blazing. This first of a planned 10-volume complete set of Crepax reissues offers a beautiful and extremely expansive introduction to the artist's work with little attention to chronology, instead collecting stories from across his long career. His adaptations of the classic horror novels Dracula and Frankenstein get top billing, but the real star of this massive tome is Valentina, Crepax's most beloved creation, an empowered figure of sexual liberation (inspired by silent film actress Louise Brooks) whose adventures operate on an otherworldly plane of reality. Crepax's rough but fluid black-and-white art marries Jazz Age excess with psychedelic science fiction, illustrating stories built on their own oft-confusing dream logic. The tales recall the work of avant-garde film makers such as Alejandro Jodorowsky, presenting sometimes baffling narratives that are idiosyncratically beautiful and well worth exploring. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"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."

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