Almost since the beginning of comic books, there were porn comics. The (in)famous Tiajuana Bibles of the 1920s and ’30s would frequently take well-known characters and celebrities and throw them into blatantly sexual situations for all of about eight pages. They were made cheaply, usually anonymously, and their sole purpose for readers was to see, for example, Popeye and Wimpy have a three-way with Olive. They were strictly off-the-books comics, and social mores prevented everyone from discussing even their very existence in public. The Underground Comix movement of the 1960s and ’70s brought sexuality in comics more out into the open, but at the time, they were still considered material that you didn’t really want to get caught with if you were anyone but a hippie.
With the internet, though, the notion of porn comics has expanded substantially. The ability to browse through them and select which you’re most interested in from the secluded comfort of your home means there’s a huge market that’s opened up. People who had been socially uncomfortable or even afraid to be caught dead with porn now have access to it in a way that was impossible before. That, in turn, means there’s more room for a wider variety of material. The old Tiajuana Bibles were for a small market, and focused primarily on pretty conventional heterosexual encounters. Now, there are options out there for all sorts of preferences—gender, race (or, for that matter, species!), environment, tone… even art and writing styles.
The benefits of working in online porn comics are essentially the same as working in webcomics more broadly. A creator can work on and develop a project in a way that’s most creatively satisfying to them without regard to an editor’s whims or whether a publisher might think there’s a viable market for the idea. And because more people have been able to work on it, it’s become more socially acceptable to discuss the topic. (Hence, today’s column!)
Dale Lazarov, for example, creates what he calls, “Smart, wholesome, gay comics smut.” You might think, “Sure, gay comics; I can see where there’s a market for that.” But Lazarov’s work also features characters with a strong emotional engagement with one another, not just a couple of guys doing it. And that’s a challenge he’s taken to a higher level by keeping his stories wordless. Everything in the narrative is told exclusively in the illustrations, which is no small feat for any type of comic story. So he’s working to and for a specific audience that’s considerably smaller than “everyone who likes porn.”
By contrast, John Persons focuses primarily on random encounters, typically between extremely athletic Black men and impossibly-large-breasted white women. The stories are much more shallow, and are meant to be enjoyed more for the art. They’re not poorly written, by any means, but they’re really only engaging on a hormonal level. But here again, Persons is working to and for a specific audience that’s considerably smaller than “everyone who likes porn.”
Just how not everyone is going to like and appreciate xkcd or Questionable Content, not everyone is going to like every kind of porn comic. Which, as I’ve said many times before, is precisely the beauty of webcomics in the first place!