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Jacula – from shock comic to glam rock

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It’s 1974, you’re a Dutch glam rock band and you want to be different: what do you do? You take your inspiration from the pulpiest of pulp comics and create a hit out of it:



Jacula was originally a Italian fumetti comics series, published from 1969 to 1982, translated into Dutch from 1973 to 1978. Fumettie are cheap, pocket sized black and white comics printed on the worst grade of paper. Cheap and disposable entertainment, full of lurid sex and violence, made by anonymous and interchangeable writers and artists, with nothing to recommend them. Jacula is a bog standard example. Set in the 19th century, Jacula is the “queen of vampires” and travels all over the world, fighting other vampires and getting involved in horror situations, with of course at least one or two sex scenes per story. While over time there has been a re-appreciation of the fumetti, with the realisation that at least some of those anonymous creators were genuinely good at their work, I can’t say Jacula would excite anybody, at least not the issues published in Dutch. The stories are plodding, the artwork is pedestrian and there’s little to shock, no edgier than a Hammer Horror movie.

A selection of gory and sexy Jacula covers

It probably sold thanks to its covers. Always better than the interior artwork, with a big helping of bare tits and the occassional bloke’s arse, lots of blood and horror, they’re doing a good job selling the much more staid interior. Maybe that’s what inspired Dutch glam rock band Lemming to create songs of it and from Lucifera, a similar series. Not bad songs either. They fit in well with that groovy age of seventies horror, that also included the fumetti that inspired them, as well as the various low budget horror movies filmed cheaply in central Europe. Watching this clip now gives me an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. These sort of cheap shlock comics are no longer being published in the Netherlands and even in Italy itself seems to be mostly gone. As for the band, they released one album in 1975, disbanded sometime in the seventies, reunited in 2002 and released one more album in 2008.

Poor… Tired… And Depressed on Planet Earth — Evan Dorkin’s Hectic Planet

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This is it. From Hectic Planet: Checkered Past this is the most Gen X comics panel ever created:

Hectic Planet: when you are so poor you cannot afford a glass of Nesquick

When you’re so poor, tired and alienated that the only thing you can think of to bring a little light in your life is a shitty overpriced chocolate milk substitute drink and you can’t even afford that. Welcome to Reagan’s America, except this is 2074 and what you’re reading is supposed to be a light hearted space opera sci-fi comic about underground Pirate Corps sticking it to the man. Instead it’s a series about twentysomething slackers with no jobs, no money, no future, living from day to day adrift in a world with no use for them. They survive on a diet of insipid pop culture references, underground zine culture and ska. Mix Clerks with Repo Man and 2-Tone and you sorta get what Hectic Planet was about.

Hectic Planet: the covers of the collected editions

Hectic Planet was Evan Dorkin’s first series and it shows. The beginning is a bit rough but can see his art improving as the series progresses. Everything that he would later put in Milk & Cheese or Dork! is already here in an embryonic form. The density of the writing and art, the pop culture trivia, the background of quiet ennui & depression that’s present throughout brought on by the knowledge that there’s no place for you in the real world nor do you want one: this is perhaps the most Gen X comic ever created. Written in the late eighties, it anticipates the pop culture of the nineties, the depression after the false dawn of Reaganomics failed to turn into a mushroom cloud and a whole generation had to get used to the idea that they would have to become adults after all.

The Black Cat teaches judo (14)

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The Black Cat teaches judo tricks from Black Cat 13

Of course it looks so easy on paper, just grab that mook by his shoulders, step on his toes and throw him on the ground. Whether you’re able to do that coming out of the pub at 12 when some aggro git starts harassing you is another matter entirely. Setting that aside, I would love to see a good, modern take on Black Cat: red headed Hollywood starlet who fights crime out of boredom in her spare time and throws guys twice her weight around? Step on me twitter would be ecstatic!