"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!

This volume is the first of two featuring comics adaptations from the literary erotica canon along with supplemental and contextual material. And, as Antonio Crepax observed in the Crepax Archives, "[The cartoonist, ] covered by the authority of classics, ventures into territories of eroticism that up to now he had only dared to touch."

Author: Guido Crepax
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Published: 12/13/2022
Series: Complete Crepax
Pages: 328
Weight: 4.75lbs
Size: 13.10h x 9.90w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781683965664

About the Author
Crepax, Guido: - Guido Crepax was born in Milan, Italy, in 1933. After acquiring a degree in architecture, he worked on award-winning advertising campaigns for such corporations as Shell and Dunlop. He went on to become one of Italy's most important cartoonists, most famous for his psychedelic and erotic Valentina stories. Some of her exploits were adapted into a TV series and a film. He died in 2003.Beltramini, Micol Arianna: - Writer and translator Micol Arianna Beltramini achieved success with the bestseller 101 Things to Do in Milan at Least Once in a Lifetime (Newton Compton 2008). After publishing two novels, she devoted herself to comics, editing a series for Edizioni BD, Psycho Pop, and editing and writing some of the stories that appear in Viva Valentina! (Edizioni BD 2016), the first collection of short stories about the character not written and drawn by Guido Crepax.