{"id":245850,"date":"2025-12-17T15:04:40","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T13:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/?p=245850"},"modified":"2025-12-18T16:37:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T14:37:30","slug":"weird-mix-of-erotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/weird-mix-of-erotism\/","title":{"rendered":"Weird mix of erotism"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Apostolos Kotsampasis<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Milan fog veils Valentina Rosselli\u2019s Hasselblad as it captures black-and-white photographs that pierce the 1960s like a dream. She is a cultivated, powerful woman, with refined taste in art and fashion, left-wing political ideas, and an intense sexual curiosity. A photographer, she drifts through galleries and salons. Her life is a catalogue of Yves Saint Laurent imitations and Freudian deviations.<\/em><\/p>\n

Guido Crepax conceived Valentina in 1965, inspired by Louise Brooks\u2019s style in silent films\u2014that sharp, androgynous haircut recalling Lulu in Pandora\u2019s Box<\/em> (1929) – with all that surface elegance masking the void beneath.<\/p>\n

Initially, though a secondary character to the comic hero Neutron, Valentina became the sole protagonist of the series in 1967. The characters around her orbit like forgotten brands: Philip Rembrandt, aka Neutron, her partner, an art critic with useless superpowers, who critiques her poses while she binds him in leather daydreams. Their son, Mattia, arrives later, a prop in her surreal family life. Dialogue? Rare, fragmentary, like advertising slogans – \u201cI dream of you in chains,\u201d she murmurs, or \u201cThe past is a fetish\u201d – echoing a dose of Kafkaesque absurdity; conversations dissolve into psychedelic panels where words turn into whips and shadows.<\/p>\n

Intricate lines carve erotic tableaux; frames shatter like mirror shards; cinematic zooms borrowed from Fellini and Bergman\u2014all rendered in strict monochrome\u2014define Crepax\u2019s style. His influences accumulate: the distortions of Surrealism, the anatomy of the Renaissance twisted into S&M poses, the glossy detachment of pop art. No warmth – only cold precision; pages turn like fashion catalogues, with S&M bindings and time travel. Over time, Crepax abandoned the science-fiction or detective themes of his early period, introducing a complex, strange blend of eroticism, hallucinations, and dreams, whose components included bisexuality, autoeroticism, and sadomasochism.<\/p>\n

Valentina shattered the \u201cchildish\u201d fa\u00e7ade of comics of her era, giving birth to adult erotic literature in Europe and influencing graphic novels all the way to the fashion of Vogue<\/em>. She quickly became a cornerstone of European counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her impact – a quiet revolution – saw women wielding cameras and desires, leaving men as accessories in the endless, languid parade of fantasy.<\/p>\n

In 1996, Valentina\u2019s story came to an end, but the bob haircut remains – iconic, empty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Apostolos Kotsampasis The Milan fog veils Valentina Rosselli\u2019s Hasselblad as it captures black-and-white photographs that pierce the 1960s like a dream. She is a cultivated, powerful woman, with refined taste in art and fashion, left-wing political ideas, and an intense sexual curiosity. A photographer, she drifts through galleries and salons. Her life is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":245987,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18496,18563],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245850"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245850"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245989,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245850\/revisions\/245989"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}