This volume of Fantagraphics' ambitious series reprinting all of Guido Crepax’s most significant comics is the second of two volumes featuring Crepax’s comics adaptations from the literary erotica canon. This volume contains Crepax’s longest graphic novel — “Story of O.” A woman finds fulfillment when she subsumes her identity by sexually submitting to a secret society. Crepax sumptuously draws every strike of the whip and taps into the sensuality of body modification in his adaptation of this groundbreaking work. Also included is his short story “The Unexpected Exchange,” filled with the sensual delights you have come to expect from Crepax: lingerie, bisexuality, the 1920s, and the most symbolically drawn train you’ve ever seen outside of a Hitchcock film. As the Crepax Archives observes, “The cartoonist, licensed by the authority of classics, ventures deeply into territories of eroticism that up to now he had only dared to touch.” In addition to the usual accompanying essays putting Crepax’s stories into historical and cultural context, this volume also features Nouveau Roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s (The Voyeur, Last Year at Marienbad) introduction to Story of O.
