The Blowfish Blog

Borgia: Blood for the Pope

When I was a kid, there was one time we got a VHS tape from video store that was supposed to be a movie called Arthur. I’m not sure why my parents popped the tape in and left the room (a quick IMDB search tells me this wasn’t a kid’s movie). Anyway, what came on the screen was something I’ll never forget: instead of a happy alcoholic, there were naked people running through a forest, sex like I’d never seen before, and then a bit of sexual violence the likes of which I’d never even imagined before. The movie was Caligula. My parents came in around the time things were being chopped and immediately stopped the tape, ignoring my cries that I’d never know what happened now, gee, thanks Dad!

You may be wondering, by this point, why I’m telling you this. What I’m trying to explain is why I’m so fascinated by this next comic. Because, honestly, the illustrated retelling of Rodrigo Borgia’s rise to popedom is not your typical subject matter for an erotic comic book. But there’s something undeniably compelling, for some of us, about watching violence mixed in between or with nudity and sex. Borgia: Blood for the Pope is wrought with degenerate sex, gruesome violence and underhanded political scheming. There’s more violence than sex in this book, though some of the nudity is just lovely (it is drawn by Manara, after all). I just could not look away from this vivid and very disturbing comic.

• Borgia: Blood for the Pope

Share This

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 7 March 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Comix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.