When you are that proud of the plot of your porn comic, everybody should read it, so you bring out a general audience version.
Staying within the proud tradition of Malibu and its zillions confusing imprints and related comics companies, this is Aircel’s first issue of the “general audiences” version of Leather & Lace. The man responsible for it is Barry Blair, who wrote and drew roughly a zillion different series for Aircel and related companies, most on the same level as this one/ Leather & Lace would run for a whopping 25 issues, the first eight of which got a “general audiences” release with the porn excised. Presumably they stopped doing them because everybody who’d want to buy the series would rather get the porn version. Even this “clean” version is dodgy enough with its nippleage that you probably don’t want your kids to read it.
To start with the obvious: the porn scenes are not worth the additional $0.55 it would’ve cost to buy the adults only version. The blonde on the cover is assaulted and double teamed by twin twinks in lizard bodysuits for a bit of oral, the other girl is also attacked by a bloke who is very grateful when she’s starts beating him up and finally, the villain of the piece gets a blowjob in his office from one of his floozies. That’s it. The “clean” version mostly just skips these scenes, although that second one is replaced by a page of the ninja looking girl crawling through ventilation vents instead. Very heterosexual even if the cover does hint at a bit of sexual attraction between the two leads.
The plot is simple. Pamela, the blonde, is visiting a certain night club to find her sister, who disappeared from there some time ago. Chris meanwhile, together with her twink partner Billy, is just aiming to rob the place. The two meet just in time for Chris to save Pamela from being drugged and disappeared like her sister was and escape the club together. The story ends with the club’s owner and villain swearing that he will get “these two bimbos” while Pamela and Chris relax, both in their undies, at Chris’ hideout, thinking about how to bring him down. Very eighties B-movie territory.
I got this in the random back issue boxes of my local comic shop because it looked interesting, mostly for the reasons you think it would. Blair’s storytelling and artwork is decent enough that reading this isn’t a chore. Barry Blair was an interesting fellow, who sadly died in 2010. Aircel actually started out as his own company before Malibu acquired it. It had actually started as an insulation company (!) owned by a friend of his. Blair had already been self publishing Elflord and other comics before he started Aircel, for which he was so prolific at one point every title they published was written & drawn by him. Most of these had similar levels of sex and violence as Leather & Lace had. Very much pulp entertainment, with his best remembered work probably being Gun Fury, a Punisher parody that got some critical attention at the time. This issue however is the only work of his I ever saw myself.
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