Collecting more than 500 pages of the influential Italian cartoonist’s most famous adaptations of the erotic literary canon in a beautiful slipcased box set.In Vol. 7, “Story of a Story” (1981) stars Milanese photographer Valentina. Finding herself home alone, she cheekily decides to fantasize about Georges Bataille’s infamous novella The Story of the Eye — with a twist: she’s playing all the roles! In the stories “Emmanuelle” (1978) and “Emmanuelle: The Anti-Virgin” (1990), Crepax follows the titular heroine on her sensual journey as the polyamorous wife of a French diplomat in Thailand. While the character is best known as the star of a series of pornographic movies, most notably the 1974 film starring Sylvia Kristel, she originated in a banned 1959 novel by Marayat Rollet-Andriane (pen name Emmanuelle Arsan), a Thai French woman. Emmanuelle has a sexual encounter on a plane, plays a steamy game of squash with a countess, falls for a woman named Bee, and has an intense experience at a temple, among the many other transgressive exploits Crepax details from the novel. And, in an innovation of Crepax’s own — she crosses paths with King Kong!Vol. 8 contains Crepax’s longest graphic novel — “Story of O.” A woman finds fulfillment when she subsumes her identity by sexually submitting to a secret society. Crepax sumptuously draws every strike of the whip and taps into the sensuality of body modification in his adaptation of this groundbreaking work. Also included is his short story “The Unexpected Exchange,” filled with the sensual delights you have come to expect from Crepax: lingerie, bisexuality, the 1920s, and the most symbolically drawn train you’ve ever seen outside of a Hitchcock film. In addition to the usual accompanying essays putting Crepax’s stories into historical and cultural context, this volume also features Nouveau Roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s (The Voyeur, Last Year at Marienbad) introduction to Story of O.
