$18.95
ISBN 1561633631
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by William Dean
(09/03/03)
There are really only a very few seminal moments we can identify in the world of graphical erotica. For me, one of these happened when I first saw the works of H. R. Giger in 1978. The Swiss artist took the phantasmagoric bio-mechanical erotic nightmare and made it concrete and visual.
It was another of those special moments when I opened the envelope with my review copy of a new graphic "art + photo novel" titled Black Rust from NBM Publishing.
Chad Michael Ward, the artist, is a fellow denizen, like myself, of Lost Angels of the West Coast, where we are familiar with making what isn't real seem so. Where Giger's airbrush was still rooted in the past, Ward is wholly digital and today. But his imaginings are no less startling, sensually macabre, and erotically fascinating.
These are characters, as Tim Bradstreet says in the book's afterword, which "exist in a dreamscape, shrouded in smudge, sweat, mist, grit, grime, and blood." We cannot look away from the freakish and enhanced humans because they remain on our retinas and in our minds.
Bradstreet says Black Rust is "...like a hot stripper performing at a postmortem examination."
The appeal of the shadowy realms and erotica certainly trace back to Poe, to Baudelaire, Maupassant, Saki; artistically to Bocklin, von Stucke, and, of course, Giger. Art is exquisitely organic, however, blossoming even in decay and Ward's work reflects what is certainly the best in today's prime venue: the graphic novel.
Taking fetishistic models and transforming them into ever darker, ever more seductive and threatening beings as done in Black Rust reunites us with the impossible imagery of dream and, yes, erotic dream. Strangeness, fear, and doubt about reality work on our psyches as aphrodisiacs. Shadow becomes lover, monster becomes the desired, and in the headlong plunge into a maelstrom of obsession and revulsion, we merge with the unknowable in hot caresses, wet unions, and erotic shivers.
Certainly critics, such as Kenneth Clark and Camille Paglia can analyze and enlighten us about why we are drawn to the monstrous in art, but the bottom line is a visceral appeal that blindsides our aesthetic values; something that reaches beyond the aesthetic and teaches us that decay, cyborgism, phantoms, and the so-called demonic have their own forms of beauty. Were we to be truly face-to-face with a succubus or incubus, would we not discover our blood was in a dichotomy -- chilled and heated at the same time? The appeal of the monster which combines sexuality with fear, threat with seduction, repulsion with fetishistic desire is embedded so deeply and so anciently in us as to be undeniable. And so we succumb.
The brief stories which accompany the images in Black Rust are also lyrical, poetic, strange, and fitting. They're a peek behind the façade of the ordinary, the easy, the ho-hum of sexuality. Between the pages of Black Rust, you just may find your own personal darkness. But the fear will dissolve into the imagined caress and as we say in L. A., it's all good.
