[review] [ZUM!] Hong Kong Pussy

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review by Steve Edgell

Hong Kong Pussy
Not a lot to do with Hong Kong. A lot to do with pussy. Mostly to do 
with the Camp X-Ray that is the history of US comics from the mid 
1950s until fairly recently.
The historical allusions start on page 2. The EC horror comics that 
were so reviled by Estes Kefauver's investigation committee are 
revisited yet again from our side of the Comics Code divide. Instead 
of the Crypt Keeper or the Old Witch hosting the narrative 
corruption, here it's the Crack Whore in irony overdrive and no 
knickers, luring kiddies to her Dungeon of Depravity, enticing them 
to take a toke of 'that crack' and witness a world of perversion, 
promising "this time, I'm gonna make ya bleed".
I've lost count of the times such material has been reheated in pop 
culture, let alone the comics small press. Given this saturation, the 
most practical option is, while retaining all the classic lugubrious 
brio and flourish, to crank up the intensity to the point of near 
unintelligibility. And that's what we get here: a jokey fantasia of 
autoeroticism where wank and wank fantasy fuse, story unravelling as 
body parts merge with each other and almost every other line seems 
about to turn into an orifice.
There are some tips of the spunk-encrusted member to more recent 
comic inventions, such as Chris Ware's gigantic lettering: pages 3 to 
5 could more or less be summarised graphically as FUCK YOUR SELF 
STUPID, CUNT FACE, FUCK FUCK FUCK, WANK WANK FUCK, COME. However the 
main target is the madness of porn.
In a sense, it's a testament to the enduring quality of the taboos 
enshrined in the Comics Code , even now when the Code itself is 
pretty much moribund, that little comics like this can need to exist. 
It suffers the problem of all transgression - its impact is reliant 
on the power of the taboo it flouts. However, since sex taboos have 
disfigured comics and comics publishing for so long, it's not as 
though there's no starting point at all.
What else could be bad about this comic? Illustratively, its 
rendering puts it a little on the wimpy side. The Crack Whore's face, 
for example, might be a mess of repugnant shit but Pussy's pissy 
little hatched lines don't really show or tell it. That's fixable, 
but it'll be ZUM!'s Pussy#2 review that sees it.

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