REVIEW: Queer History Sparkles in Smut Peddler: Sordid Past

Cover to Sordid Past, which reads "Smut Peddler Presents." Featuring a seated, blonde young man with his shirt half off, partially pushed off by a standing man with a vest, cravat, and long dark hair. A light brown skinned woman is at the blonde's front, leaning into his chest. Their hair is tousled by the wind and their clothes look vaguely historical.

All the Smut Peddler comics compile sex-positive, more or less queer- and trans-positive, very NSFW comics. They’re big anthologies, full-color, with glossy production values, and they’ve already got a following, which they very much deserve: this sixth installment in the series hits in every way. I can’t think of an NSFW comic that I’d recommend to more people.

Smut Peddler Presents: Sordid Past (Smut Peddler #6)

Andrea Purcell (editor), Anderjak, Lucy Bellwood, Dapperpunch, Tzor Edery, Otava Heikkilä, Erica Henderson, Jessi Jordan, Lyndsay McSeveney, Harriet Moulton, Kit Seaton, E.K. Weaver, WithATouchOfSin, Rowan Woodcock (creators)
Iron Circus Comics
February 2022

Cover to Sordid Past, featuring a seated, blonde young man with his shirt half off, partially pushed off by a standing man with a vest, cravat, and long dark hair. A light brown skinned woman is at the blonde's front, a gun in her hand as she leans into his chest. Their hair is tousled by the wind and their clothes look vaguely historical, a ship bobs in the ocean in the distance behind the trio.

Fourteen contributors present hot, consensual sexual situations from historical periods that are Not The Present: the oldest depicts sex rituals in ancient Sumer, the most recent a friends-to-lovers scenario in what looks like the 1970s or 1980s Britain. Both are T4T (trans people getting it on with other non-cis people), as are perhaps half the other stories here. In the world of Sordid Past — which is to say, in its very queer history — trans people of some kind Have Always Been Here. It’s hot. It’s delightful.

It’s also visually varied, in terms of who we see and — especially — how we see them, what styles the creators present (most creators here both write and draw, though a few practice division of labour). “Golden Age,” one of my favorites, takes its nerdy T-shirt-clad heroes to the early days of video arcades: Mabel and Dona, arcade co-owners, discover a game that looks just like Space Invaders, get sucked into the game, and transform from clean-lined, realistic, medium-build adults into super-suited, Speed-Racer-ish pilots in a dynamically drawn outer space. Then they do it again with (though no real-life brand names appear) Asteroids, and with Donkey Kong, and finally “Javelin,” a serial-numbers-filed-off version of the 1982 arcade game Joust, where players tilted at each other with lances while riding flying ostriches in space.

But Asterjak’s not done. What begins as a hot, sweet nostalgia trip for Gen Xers becomes, at that point, something more innovative, and even hotter: private parts and arms and legs and helmets and robotic ostrich necks and sex toys fuse and intertwine and tumble over each other in a succession of blue-and-orange panels that culminate in a full-page spread. Asterjak takes the sexual subtext in so many video games and just makes it text, and then makes it art, right down to the game-ending screen message: “NICE SPEARING! ENTER THY NAME.” (Of course, the “spear” involved is a trans girl’s lady parts: I’m not sure I’ve seen this particular trans Sapphic aesthetic ever handled, as it were, so well.)

I could go on at a similar length (see what I did there?) about more than half of these stories — this volume is just that good — for being well-paced, alert to historical detail, and never in a hurry to get to the sex, though of course they always do get to the sex. Sordid Past also gets to the god stuff: “The Fifth Hour,” by the comics creator known as WithATouchOfSin, plays expertly with the flat perspectives of ancient Egyptian art, and then with shadowy, sexy full-body shots, as it explores an assignation involving a priest of Anubis. “Wearing the mask helps, in a way,” the priest explains, showing both her dark, full nipples. “If I can’t be a man when I want to, being Anubis is the next best thing.” (Her femme lover has other surprises in store.)

Three panels of a comic set in ancient Egypt. A Black woman in a gold necklace holds a bowl with smoke rising from it, each panel a different angle on her face. She stands next to a guard wearing a mask of Anubis.

Ritual sex and antiquity’s 2D aesthetic also figure in Tzor Edery’s volume-opening “Blessed by Baal,” in which two ancient Assyrians (both of whom we might call trans today) hook up after an orgy and bring the rain.

If you want more three-dimensional bodies at play, try Harriet Moulton’s “Forged Steel,” which brings a carefully shaded, cartoony aesthetic to its first half, in which a blacksmith’s demure assistant turns out to be the blacksmith herself (or possibly himself — you can read this hot smith as butch, if you like, or as trans). Moulton’s tale then opens out into eleven panels of naked goings-on, inviting us into a bedroom and practically pinning us down (yes, that’s praise).

Similarly hot, clean-lined and cartoonish is Rowan Woodcock’s “A Queer Sort of Creature,” which opens in black and white because (we realize) we are seeing a silent movie. That movie’s Edwardian horror tale becomes the set-up for Woodcock’s real subject, the dressing, or rather the undressing room.

Five panels from Sordid Past, beginning with a woman in a pink coat and matching hat poking the nose of a tall white man who is embracing his brown-skinned, bespecled lover. The woman says, "You're a hopeless pushover," then points the brown man wearing glasses with, "And you!" She kisses him, startling him, and puts her hand on his face. The other man looks smug as she says, "You owe me some sweet-talk."

All three lead actors — a mop-haired pale dude, a suave, bespectacled, mustached dark-skinned man, and a happily bossy, fair-skinned lady in a flapper hat — end up on the couch, exploring the combinatorial possibilities of their lady-parts and man-parts. Again, it’s hot, especially as Woodcock varies shape and panel focus, from faces to feet to whole bodies to parts, though the great payoff comes after the sex scene ends:, with all three of our actors happily curled up, eyes closed, the two men asleep on the smiling woman’s breasts.

Those full-color stories use just as many words as they need; they want, like Joseph Conrad, “above all to make us see.” Kit Seaton’s half-tone “Hypnerotomachia,” set in Renaissance Italy, looks a bit like a Prince Valiant comic and reads, till the clothes come off, like a Chris Claremont joint: the characters talk and talk until they don’t have to talk anymore, and the comic morphs into a pink-and-green, sex-with-skeletons fever dream. The great Erica Henderson’s Renaissance threesome story, with its modern frame tale (set in an art school), comes off as less ambitious, and less chatty, but almost as much fun.

Seaton, Henderson, Woodcock, Asterjak, and other creators here stand out for their appealing pictures of sex, and their well-handled plots leading to the sex before and afterwards, but they stand out in other ways too: each of them tells a story about the making of visual art. Sex comics — because they have to focus on bodies, and on joyful creation — turn out to make good incubators for claims about art, about beauty, about comics, and their visual-narrative rivals.

If the whole book has an argument — beyond “consent is essential, queer sex is great, trans people are hot” — it seems to argue that comics itself is sexy, because comics show bodies coming together at particular moments in time. Thus the couple we follow in “Blessed by Baal” affirm that trans people belong in fertility rituals; their sex ceremony also frames the drawing, and the hand-lettering, of comics as a fertility ritual in itself. The gender unmaskings and the (tasteful, affirming) trans reveals in several stories made me wonder whether there might be something potentially trans about comics itself, since in hand-drawn comics you can have the body you draw, not the body you’re given at birth. All the trans girls who grew up with video games, inhabiting the bodies of our characters onscreen, can investigate that experience once more in the meta-gaming, meta-comics, meta-sex (and simply hot sex) in Anderjak’s “Golden Age.”

And the volume-closing, delightfully Art Nouveau-styled “Offbeat,” by Dapperpunch and Momo L., sets its depiction of sex between lovely, and loving, older men amid illustrations of gramophone music, Edwardian and Georgian men’s couture, sculptural poses (“I have been blessed with a Heracles of my own”) and even a parlour’s interior decoration — by the time Victor and Harold lie, sated, in each others’ arms, on their excellent couch, “everything is still a mess! and it’s almost supper time!” Music, sculpture, fashion, design — come together into an ars erotica, a historically queer delight for all the NSFW sense, and comics — the most versatile of the narrative arts: it can show us anything! — might be the queen of them all.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Close
Menu
WP Twitter Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com