Colleen Coover’s “Girly porno comic” Small Favors was first published by Eros Comix in the early 2000s. I had heard of it, of course, but by the time I was interested in getting it, it was already out of print, woops.  So, although I’ve known about and seen some of Small Favors for years, I hadn’t ever had a chance to read all of it.

2017 has already been an amazing year for lesbian comics and Yuri manga. We have comic essays and romances that aren’t exploitative or annoying (and romances that are exploitative or annoying) but we were missing some good old-fashioned porn. Well…that’s been taken care of now.  Small Favors: The Definitive Girly Porno Collection is exactly what it says in the title. 

Annie is a young woman who enjoy masturbation. A lot. So much that the Queen of her Conscience feels Annie is wasting her life. She sets Nibbil, her own daughter, to inhibit Annie. Unfortunately, Nibbil is just as interested in sex as Annie and together they sex it up in a variety of ways. As the story develops, Annie and Nibbil add a friend, Sage, to their fun and eventually get to include Annie’s neighbor and another emissary from the Queen.

The art is very competent and tends to lean toward fun over anything else. Backgrounds and characters are rendered in simple black and white line work, with hand-drawn shadows and backgrounds. A very “western” looking comic. The later chapters include a full-color story, sketches, character studies and mini-comics. This collection includes all the published chapters of Small Favors and a previously unpublished chapter. It also has a delightful Foreword by Kelly Sue DeConnick.

This is a very sex-positive book. If there is a moral, it’ “Sex is fun, we should all have more sex.” And the sex is also very explicit and creative. Nibbil’s natural size is that of a small figurine, which allows her to enjoy Annie very up close. She can also take on a human sized form. But along with being sex-positive, this comic is also love-positive. Nibbil and Annie love each other, but that doesn’t mean they have sex exclusively with each other. Their friends are welcome to join in.

Ratings: 

Art – 8
Story – 7 It’s porn, so a set-up each chapter, rather than a “story” per se.
Characters – 8 All likeable, which is good, because we spend a lot of very intimate time with them.
Service – 100 It’s women having sex. Sometimes group sex.
Yuri – 9 It’s women in love who are not lesbians, per se.

Overall – 8

If you’re in the mood for some fairly explicit lesbian sex in a variety of places, poses, positions, costumes and with a varying number of participants, you will enjoy the heck out of Small Favors.

Having fun at a comic show is a matter of making fun for yourself. If you like celebrity and media premieres, the big Comic-Con shows are a good bet. If you like spending time with comic artists you like, smaller shows are the way to go. And if you, like me, rejoice in explosions of creativity in independent comics, then shows that celebrate people who make, read and love comics are  a lot of fun. Of all the shows I attend, Comitia, TCAF, MoCCA and Queers & Comics are the ones that I enjoy the most. Not because I don’t love a three-ring media circus or 10,000 vendors all crammed into a huge space, but because of the sheer energy of creativity.

Today I am enjoying the final day of the Toronto Comics Arts Festival in Toronto and thought it a great day to speak of a comic I picked up at the MoCCA Fest in NYC,  sponsored by the Society of Illustrators after they acquired the titular Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. 

This year I went primarily to see a lot of people I already knew and throw money at them. I picked up the print version of Power & Magic there and literally spent my last few buck on today’s acquisition. 

Ellen Lindner’s The Black Feather Falls, is the Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery comic with a team of women leads that I needed. 

Tina Swift is an American living in 1920s London, in hopes of avoiding familial pressure to marry and  to get herself a career. Tina is working as a shopgirl, but hopes to become a newspaper reporter. When she attempts to see a man about a newspaper job, she encounters a dead man on the street, next to which a black feather has fallen.  Also strangely, she cannot find the man with whom she was supposed to meet at the paper. Instead she encounters his snarky, somewhat bitter secretary, Miss MacInteer. 

The absence of MacInteer’s boss and the black feather, launch Swift and MacInteer into a massive mystery that involves strangely insular islands off the coast of Scotland and the London underworld. The two women come to rely on and trust one another and, in the end turn up to be a great team of reporters…and detectives.

There isn’t any relationship developing between Swift and MacInteer in this story. The book itself is rated appropriate for all ages, and lacks significant violence or sex. That said, don’t underestimate the power of fandelusion. I could easily see them having an ill-advised fling. ^_^

But, more importantly, a team of adventuress-detectives have been born and I know I need more of those!

Ratings:

Art – 7 Not sophisticated, but fun
Story – 8 We all need a little female detective teamwork from time to time
Characters – 8 They rub each other the wrong way, but make a good team, just the way they should
Yuri – 0 for real, 2 inside my head
Service – 0

Overall – 8

So if you too enjoy a spot of original comics story-telling and all the 1920’s detective pairs you can get, you’ll want to take a look at The Black Feather Falls. 

Kim & Kim, Volume 1: This Glamorous, High-Flying Rock Star Life by Magdalene Visaggio, Eva Cabrera, Claudia Aquirre, Zaak Saam and Katy Rex, is a much-needed entry in the “cool-protagonists-who-do-whatever-the-fuck-for-money” category of space gonzo comics. Primarily because the”cool-protagonists-who-do-whatever-the-fuck-for-money” in this case are Kim Q, a trans woman rocker, with a penchant for accelerating towards a problem, rather than away from it, and Kim A, a former necromancer, turned “whatever-the-fuck-for-money”-type bounty hunters. (Surely we have noticed that “bounty hunter” has become the catch-all category for ne’er-do-wells in pretty much all forms of fiction, including reality TV.)

The Kims are smart, fun, and like all their bounty hunter brethren of the future, chronically short on cash. Their “easy” jobs never work out, the good jobs always become bad jobs and Kim Q’s father is an oligarch who hates the fact that he has a daughter. In other words, it’s all chaos, all the time.

Like all good bounty hunter/private eyes/independent contractor stories from Marcus Didius Falco to V.I. Warshawski, the bad guy is badder than we expected (and has a stupid name,) the other bad guy is less bad than we expected, the REAL bad guy is really horrible and the other bad guy is related to us, as are some of the good guys and that long-dead relative who is very cool, but not really that dead, either. And because it’s a science fantasy comic, there are tentacles and sandworms and alien bars and a broken-down van ship. You know the drill.

But like all stories of it’s kind, it has one thing that is absolutely critical to whether it works – is it fun? Yes, Kim & Kim, Volume 1: This Glamorous, High-Flying Rock Star Life is fun. It’s also got a pleasantly queer outlook on life, in which Kim and Kim cheerfully slash Kim’s former partners now rivals, and Kim has that aunt who, it turns out had a female partner. Kim and Kim describe themselves as “mostly platonic soul mates.”

Ratings:

Art – 7 Cartoony, but it works
Characters – 7 Both Kim and Kim are fun, one-note characters
Story – 7 Chaos and screaming
Service – Nope*
Yuri – 2 Djuna & Mina and Kim & Kim ish

Overall – 7

*No service of the salacious kind, but as the foreword by Imogen Binnie points out, having a fun, badass trans lead still is rare enough to get a mention. (The foreword, btw, is excellent and worth reading.)

And so I welcome it to my shelves and looks forward to Volume 2. And, hopefully, a resolution to this arc so we never ever have to utter the name El Scorcho again.