Thursday 21 June 2012

Red Sophia

Cerebus #10, June/July 1979
Art by Dave Sim
DAVE SIM:
(from an interview at The A.V. Club, 31 March 2004)
Red Sonja was the hot comic book at the time, beautifully written, penciled, inked, and lettered by Frank Thorne about a female Conan-type who wouldn't surrender sexually to any man unless he defeated her in battle. When I did my parody, Red Sophia, I extrapolated that this poor, magnificent warrior woman was probably getting unbelievably horny waiting for someone to come along who could beat her. It does seem more resonant today now that the "ballsier" feminists, much to their consternation, seem to be having difficulty finding men who are interested in - or capable of - going mano a mano with them. At the time, it just seemed a funnier, racier version of the real thing. When Red Sophia whips off her chain-mail bikini top and says "What do you think of these?" and Cerebus deadpans, "They'd probably heal nicely if you'd stop wearing the chain-mail bikini." I just hoped that it would sell enough copies that I could keep going. It wasn't until two years in, when I switched to the monthly schedule and chose to attempt to do 300 issues, that that stopped being the primary motivation and switched to "How do you fill 300 issues of a comic book with something besides just sight gags and wordplay?"

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Being a huge fan of clever wordplay and even more clever sexual wordplay (and sight gags), this is one of my two favorite such gags in the entire series (well, 3, really, as the second one is kind of a two-parter...):

Can you just *imagine* why Cerebus doesn't just *launch* himself at those gorgeous mammaries in this scene...

Yuk!

And then the two-parter is in the early goings of C&S I, wherein Cerebus is told to dress up as the Prime Minister, redux, (being dragged out of bed with the afore-mentioned Sophia), and has to tuck his tail into the "monkey suit", only to have it "sproing" out in front of Mrs. Tynsdale-Clyde.

LOL, indeed.

But, then, an issue or two later, Mrs. Tynsdale-Clyde is seen as describing it to her friend, again over tea, as being. . .

yay long.

Laughed?

And laughed, and laughed, and laughed?

I thought I'd die.

Anyway, thanks for posting up the third funniest sexual innuendo in the canon...