Saturday 7 April 2007

An Easter rising


The Zora cover, using the same art and Gothic logo as the original

Just in time for Easter, a tale of death and resurrection. This is an English translation of the origins issue of the Italian fumetti Zora, a one-shot published by Eurocomics in 2003. I found the link to it on http://comix-collection.blogspot.com/, which has links to lots of adult comics, in a mixture of English, French and Italian, and then downloaded all the images, numbered them in sequence and created a .CBR file for easy reading

Get it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/24789698/Zora.cbr

The story starts in 1859 as Zora's father, Professor Pabst, returns to London from a scientific expedition to Transylvania. He has with him Dracula's coffin, but as a scientist does not belief in vampires and that the remarkably preserved state of Dracula's corpse must have a rational, natural explanation. He also has a hot-looking daughter, Zora, for whom he has the hots in an amusing display of Victorian hypocrisy, even having a peephole in the bathroom that looks into her bedroom where, naked, she entertains her own fantasies and tries to sleep. Restless, Zora then gets up and goes to have a look inside Dracula's coffin, summoning up courage she had lacked earlier. She also kisses the corpse on his lips. Back in her room and reading a book about the vampire, Zora then discovers that this act, coming from a virgin, is supposed to bring Dracula back from the dead...

Now all we need are the other 124 issues that were published in Italian between 1972 and 1979 to continue the saga.

Admittedly this has nothing to do with Argento nor the giallo directly. But again it is part of the general culture in which they emerged – remember that Argento and Luigi Cozzi had the idea of doing a revisionist Frankenstein film as a co-production with Hammer around the time of Four Flies on Grey Velvet or indeed the later Argento-brand fumetti in which he appears as the Crypt Keeper style master of ceremonies.


Argento, fumetti style

3 comments:

Rogerio said...

Thanks for the heads-up, Keith!
For Eurosleaze fans, Guido Crepax´s Venus in Furs is also noteworthy, imo. You can find it here:
http://comix-collection.blogspot.com/search/label/Guido%20Crepax

Cheers

K H Brown said...

Heh - I downloaded all the Crepax yesterday. It was too good an opportunity to miss; I've got one of the Taschen books from ten years or so ago, which has Venus in Furs in English in it and got me into his stuff. That and the odd album or CD cover for Garibaldi's Nuda album, Baldan Bembo's Io e Mara etc.

Anonymous said...

what's the name of the comic in which Argento is the narrator? can you download any issues on the net? thanks.