“Shadow over Darkcliff” (1993) by John Blackburn

Eldritch Fappenings
The following review of LGBTQ+ comic history includes images from selected works that depict cartoon nudity, sex, and violence. Reader discretion is advised.

Marriage and Sex

(1) Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable.
(2) Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.
(3) Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered. A sympathetic understanding of the problems of love is not a license for morbid distortion.
(4) The treatment of live-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.
(5) Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.
(6) Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested.
(7) Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.
—Comic Book Code of 1954

LGBTQ+ characters and themes received little coverage in the comic strips and comic books in the United States before 1954. When looking at the Pre-Code Lovecraftian Horror Comics, there are no characters or themes that jump out as explicitly gay or lesbian, transgender or genderqueer. After the Code was created in 1954, LGBTQ+ representation in commercial comics was implicitly forbidden.

Without access to mainstream publications, LGBTQ+ comics shifted to venues that were not controlled by the Comics Code Authority. Pornographic comics and underground comix formed a creative outlet for LGBTQ+ characters, stories, and creators—at the risk of being charged with obscenity. The late 60s and 70s in particular saw the birth of the underground comic scene, an outlet for readers and artists who wanted comics that were forbidden, transgressive, or mature—featuring themes of realism, sex, violence, drugs, politics, mysticism, and horror, often in some combination.

Tales from the Leather Nun (1973), for example, was an underground nunsploitation anthology comic. One of the episodes, “Tales of the Leather Nun’s Grandmother” by Spain Rodriguez, mixes Lovecraft’s Mythos with hardcore pornography, as Abdul Alhazred’s spells have accidentally turned the Leather Nun’s Grandmother’s vagina into a gateway to the realm of Cthulhu. Thus, one of the earliest appearances of Cthulhu in comics has the eldritch horror getting a face full of spunk.

*Tales from the Leather Nun* (1973); art by Spain Rodriguez

Cthulhu’s facial is a gag, not a homoerotic act. Tales from the Leather Nun isn’t the first LGBTQ+ Lovecraftian comic, just one of the first to begin to transgress in ways that combined sexual themes with Lovecraftian horror. It is difficult to say for sure what was the first LGBTQ+ Lovecraftian comic, if only because we have to look outside of the well-indexed mainstream.

“R. H. B.” (1978) by Andreas and Rivière is a likely candidate, because it focuses on R. H. Barlow, who was gay. However, Barlow’s homosexuality isn’t really the focus of comic, barely mentioned at the end. A later example is the Italian erotic comic Ramba #4 (1989), which features the bisexual Ramba facing down a demon named Azatoth summoned during a voodoo-esque ceremony:

*Ramba #6* (Eros Comix), Marco Bianchini (script) and Fabio Valdambrini (art)

Of course, most of Europe never had an equivalent to the Comics Code Authority, so they had a freer hand to explore such themes. In the United States, works like Ramba appeared in translation in the early 90s, after the CCA had been weakened or ignored by independent publishers. If we can’t quite answer the question of who came first (whether into Cthulhu’s visage or elsewhere), we can at least say there was another notable work that emerged in that period that combined Lovecraftian horror and explicit LGBTQ+ characters and themes.

In the 1970s, comic writer and artist John Blackburn created the character Coley Cochran, a 19-year-old uninhibited bisexual character with a penchant for sex, violence, and the occult and antipathy to prudes and authority figures. In the late 80s/early 90s Blackburn self-published four books of Coley’s sex-drenched adventures, a combination of erotica, character-driven drama, and graphic violence. In the first book, Coley on Voodoo Island (1989), Coley is kidnapped and transformed into a sex god in a voodoo ceremony; this supernatural element would re-emerge periodically throughout Coley’s adventures, such as Breathless (1991), which includes an adventure at a ruined temple titled “Flowers of Evil.”

In the 1990s Fantagraphics picked up the Coley adventures under their Eros Comix imprint, publishing a series of 2-3 issue miniseries, beginning with Return to Voodoo Island (1991). The problem with the Eros Comix series is that they never reprinted Coley’s earlier adventures (except when Blackburn summarized them for reprints), so that new readers come into a series that has already been going on for hundreds of pages.

John Blackburn’s “Shadow over Darkcliff” is the second part of the two-issue series Idol of Flesh (1993), and sees Coley and friends return to the temple ruins of “Flowers of Evil”—but this time featuring a strange cult, led by a man named Garth. While the 32-page episode involves a bit of drama and a good bit of sex, the core story is explicitly Lovecraftian:

*Idol of Flesh* (1992) #2, by John Blackburn

Garth, it turns out, isn’t exactly human and wants Coley for sex and sacrifice. This isn’t the first or the last time Coley would be in this sort of position, the magnetic sexual attraction to both men and women is one of his supernatural traits throughout all of Blackburn’s series, as are scenes of flagellation, bondage, and sexual violence—especially the threat of castration, which appears in Return to Voodoo Island and reappears here. As in “Flowers of Evil,” Coley’s escape from this particular peril is somewhat miraculous—not a great storytelling trick, and one which Blackburn overuses a bit. Not that readers would know that unless they hunted out some of the stories that Fantagraphics did not reprint.

Blackburn would return to Coley and the Cthulhu Mythos in a longer, more involved, and even weirder storyline titled Dagger of Blood (1997), which makes brief reference to Garth and the events of “Shadow over Darkcliff.” Yet it reading the stories in order gives a better sense of the ideas that Blackburn was developing. Coley is presented as this perfect bisexual heartthrob, while characters like Garth and the antagonist of Dagger of Blood are both attracted to and hate Coley because of their own deformed bodies. There is a strong element of body dysmorphia to those characters, really only implicit here and more fully developed (and exploited) in Dagger of Blood, which fixates on genital mutilation.

It feels like Blackburn was working through some things, if only in art and writing, and perhaps only for his own entertainment. Certainly Blackburn was aware of the main focus of his comics—Coley has no shortage of sexual partners on the page, in explicit detail, both men and women—and the mundane drama of trying to keep his lovers happy is a counterweight to the more fantastic elements of Lovecraftian horror, even as the action and horror plots provide some relief from the soap opera.

When you look back at the history of LGBTQ+ characters and themes in comics, Blackburn’s work arriving when and where it did—first in self-published underground comix, and then after the CCA waned in series from an independent press which stressed the erotic angle—makes sense. It took decades after the Stonewall Riots for LGBTQ+ folks to gain greater recognition, acceptance, and basic rights in the United States, and such works were slow to find a place in mainstream comic books and strips. The underground was more willing to accept these nonconforming works with LGBTQ+ characters and to have discussions about subjects like homosexuality, polyamory, bisexuality, kink—and, yes, how the occasional bit of Lovecraftian horror fit into the mix. At the time, homosexuality in the Mythos was limited to stories like Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” (1969), and those were few and far between.

Reading all of John Blackburn’s Coley saga is damn near impossible these days. Fantagraphic’s individual issues and reprint collections are long out of print and command collectors’ prices; the Idol of Flesh comics are reprinted in Coley Running Wild Book One: The Blade and the Whip. Several other adventures by Coley were published or re-printed in the gay comics anthology Meatmen, though there is no complete index for that series as yet.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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Dagger of Blood (1997) by John Blackburn

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected images with cartoon depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.
—Lord Dunsany, “The Raft-Builders”(1915)

Popular fiction, whether it be for pulp magazines, comic books, or pornography, is ephemeral. Precious few authors have the kind of posthumous renaissance that H. P. Lovecraft has experienced. Even those who build up a considerable body of work, or a dedicated following, often sink out of sight once they die. Their works aren’t reprinted. Work goes uncollected, unread, forgotten.

John Blackburn died in 2006. His raft is breaking up.

In 1989, Blackburn self-published his own comic, Coley on Voodoo Island, acting as writer, artist, and letterer. While normally categorized among gay comics, Coley is bisexual, or maybe pansexual: a living sex icon, his very presence tends to attract everyone, regardless of sexuality or gender identity. Some folks might characterize Coley—the ageless, immortal, six-pack-abs voodoo sex god with a large penis, a bottomless libido, and a constant parade of sexual partners—as a form of wish fulfillment. Yet it is wish fulfillment in the same way that Conan the Cimmerian, or Captain America, or the Vampire Lestat are. Coley embodies a pure fantasy, a larger-than-life figure who moves through the world, and in so doing changes it.

The first four issues of Coley’s adventures were self-published by Blackburn; in 1992 Fantagraphics, which was publishing a great number of alternative, independent, and erotic comics, picked up Coley and reprinted the first adventures and then new ones. While a supernatural fantasy element was present from the beginning, the Cthulhu Mythos slid into the mix in 1993 with the two-issue series Idol of Flesh, where Coley runs up against a cult of Shub-Niggurath.

Idol of Flesh #2 (1993)

As an artist, Blackburn puts a lot of work into his hatching; you can see some influence from superhero comics in the often skin-tight clothes and Coley’s heroic proportions, and this sometimes goes for other characters as well. Compositions tend to be focused: the reader’s eye is usually drawn to the center of each panel, each pane, and backgrounds usually fade out to dark hatching during the frequent erotic scenes or conversational back-and-forth. Stylistically very different from Le Pornomicon (2005) by Logan Kowalsky or Insania Tenebris (2020) by Raúlo Cáceres, many readers might fairly judge it to be almost crude by comparison. It might be better to compare Blackburn’s work with underground cartoonists of the ’70s in terms of style and technique.

The plot of the series revolves around Coley, even when he isn’t on the page. The other characters are almost invariably attracted to him, but have to figure out for themselves what that means, what their relationship is about, particularly as Coley—while a loyal friend, and able to fall in love easily with others—has basically zero interest in monogamous relationships, and resists anyone else’s efforts to constrain or define his behavior. This tends to put him at odds with local authority figures, such as the police, religious types, and general bigots—and in a few cases, attracts supernatural forces.

The Cthulhu Mythos intrudes on Coley and his gaggle of associates in the three-issue Dagger of Blood series in 1997. This was the final standalone comic produced featuring Coley, although Fantagraphics would publish three additional omnibus albums titled Coley Running Wild from 1997-2003. Coley’s earlier encounter with the cult of Shub-Niggurath put him on the cultist radar, and he now has to deal with another descendant of the Old Ones.

Dagger of Blood #2

While the story takes many X-rated breaks, the plot takes a turn strongly reminiscent of the post-war Men’s Adventure Pulps of the late 1940s and 50s—though not one that would probably ever have passed the editors of those magazines.

Dagger of Blood #2

Old Nazi mad scientist in a temple of the Old Ones deep inside a jungle probably sounds like an exploitation script treatment even before you add the pornstars, voodoo sex god, flagellation scenes, interracial relationships, body modification, sex changes, and bloody violence…but there is something more interesting at work here.

One of the things that sets Coley apart from the other characters in this series is that he is completely accepting of both his body and his sexuality; it helps that by the standards of the characters in the comic, he’s basically perfect: young, slim, muscled, big genitalia, etc. and he maintains it with seemingly zero effort. By contrast, many of the other characters are not at all happy with their body or their sexuality. The main antagonist Joquatoth is dealing with the effects of his inhuman heritage—and wants to stay human. If he wasn’t deliberately set up as evil, he could be seen as an almost tragic figure, facing issues of body image that parallel those of many transgender folk as they deal with issues like puberty, or strive to achieve a body closer to their gender identity via hormones and surgery.

Blackburn doesn’t explore these issues in anything like depth; the castration scene is a setup for a sub-plot where the genitalia of two characters are swapped: Coley’s lover Lonny gets a vagina, and the mostly lesbian Kit gets his penis. Lonny and Kit’s introspection at these drastic and fantastical changes to their bodies is less than profound…but it’s there.

Dagger of Blood #3

The idea of transsexual or intersex characters that don’t conform strictly to a sex or gender binary are nothing new, not even in Lovecraft’s time. His friend Samuel Loveman wrote “The Hermaphrodite” in 1926, pulp stories like Seabury Quinn’s “Strange Interval” (Weird Tales May 1936) and Lovecraft’s own “The Thing on the Doorstep” (Weird Tales Jan 1937) play with gender-changes, albeit in very non-explicit and largely sexless ways. It takes a certain amount of artistic freedom to actually depict and address some of these issues, and that just wasn’t possible under the editorial and mail censorship of the 1930s, even if there had been writers among Lovecraft’s correspondents and devotees who had desired to address such issues.

Which is one of the things that makes Dagger of Blood stand out. Yes, it’s very blatantly pornography, with a rare page that goes by without nudity or some sexual act; it’s a comic book and not a novel, which places it in that weird intersection of being doubly disposable for being taboo in subject matter and a medium often derided at the time as childish or trash (though that was slowly changing). The Mythos material is slight, being two storylines involving cultists with semi-human leaders. There is a tentacle erotica scene, which might owe something to the popularity of Japanese manga and anime like Toshio Maeda’s La Blue Girl (manga 1989-1992, original video animation 1992-1993).

Dagger of Blood #3

Yet it’s for that exact reason that Dagger of Blood has its charms, and can even address some of these issues of gender, sexuality, relationships, and body image when contemporary Mythos works largely didn’t…because Blackburn didn’t have to subscribe to the same editorial taboos, the social norms and mores that he would if he had been working for Marvel Comics or even Playboy. Working on his own he had more creative freedom to get really weird—and that kind of growth can be important. Even if Blackburn’s Coley opus isn’t destined to stand the test of time, it is one of Dunsany’s rafts set adrift…and who knows what it might inspire, if it does survive a little while longer?

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.
—Lord Dunsany, “The Raft-Builders” (1915)

John Blackburn’s Dagger of Blood #1-3 were published by Eros Comix in 1997; they were collected in Coley Running Wild, Book Three: Hardthrob (2003).

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).