Above and below, a revisitation of the Italian fumetto Pornostar, with cover art by Roberto Molino and interiors from Giovanni Romanini. A couple of websites say the physical aspects of Beba and Fiona are based on two showgirls from the Italian television program Striscia la notizia, but we checked and it turns out the show debuted three years after the comic. See our other entry on this comic here.

Since we mentioned in our Kennedy post that Mercocomic had serials about other historical figures, we decided we’d go ahead and share these Spanish Che covers from 1978. The complete run was three issues in the order seen, and the art is once again from the excellent Prieto Muriana, who even worked in a Pietà on cover three. “Hasta siempre, Comandante,” by the way, is a very famous Carlos Puebla song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Nathalie Cardone. 

A long while back we shared a Spanish cover of the Mercocomic publication Kennedy and mentioned that a series of six appeared in 1977. The same comics were also published in French, so today, inappropriately, we’re sharing those six covers from France with their excellent if unsettling art by Prieto Muriana. Mercocomic published serials of other well known figures, among them Che, Hitler, Mussolini, Don Juan Tenorio Garcia, and Quijote 78. None are strictly factual accounts, but rather re-imaginings of the circumstances and motivations that drove important historical episodes.

Above, exceedingly rare Mexican cover art for a pulp-style comic book about the mass suicide/mass murder of more than 900 people at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project of Rev. Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana. That event, from which the current U.S. English phrase “drank the Kool-Aid” is derived (though group members actually drank Flavor Aid), occurred today in 1978. 

Where we stayed in Paris near the famed Sorbonne seemingly dozens of comic book shops had sprouted. Here’s an amazing cover that caught our eye—Dans les spirales du temps, from Elvifrance, number 103 in its Serie Verte, 1973. See more Elvifrance here, here, here, and here.

The interest in Mexican pulp art continues to pick up steam. This heroin themed piece was created for a book or comic called Rock Candentes y Mortal, which translates as something like “red-hot and deadly rock.” It was painted, quite skillfully we think, by Jaime S., or alternatively Jaimes. The artists who worked in this market typically signed their work with single names, with the result that today info on most of them is impossible to find. At least for now. Let that be a lesson to you to always sign your work properly. This coming from a couple of anonymous website guys.

A selection of ten amazing Elvifrance comic book/graphic novel covers, 1978 to 1982.

Today we’re back to Mexican pulp art with a piece from an artist who has signed his work R. Rojas Ordonez, someone we’ve never heard of before. A bit of text on the back of the painting suggests that the skull is somehow controlling the action here, maybe causing one of the characters to act while under a trance. Mexican art has used skulls as a major motif since at least the time of the Aztecs, and it has since been explored by everyone from Diego Rivera to contemporary graffiti artists, so we particularly like how this painting fits into that tradition. As we mentioned back in July when we shared five pieces from Dinorin, this style of art blossomed in the 1970s as covers for Mexican comic books, which makes it post-pulp rather than pure pulp. But the feel is certainly right, and collectors are responding, snapping up examples like this for hundreds of dollars. We’ll share a few more of these later.