Comic Book Club Read Along – Penthouse Comix #1 – Libby’s World

Since Madam Fomo gave up on her comic book club, disappointing all six people who were going to do this, I’ll take up the torch.

But coronavirus is out there, bringing death to millions.  You’re stepping over corpses just trying to get to the grocery store.  No problem.  If you Google “zipcomic” you can download Penthouse Comix #1 for free.  Along with the entire Penthouse run.  And any comic you can think of.

No more embarrassing trips to the liquor store to get your porno.  I remember being like 18 or 19 and getting a copy of Juggs or whatever and the Eastern European woman working there asked if I was over 18.  I was.  Then the next time I went, I bought a copy of Busty or something and the same woman was working there and asked to see my ID.  So I gave it to her.

It was embarrassing but it was also part of the rush, I guess.  Going to the liquor store, working up the courage to get a porn magazine, and then excitedly reading it on the journey home.

Sadly, the young people of today can’t experience that.  You can get all the porn you want for free on your phone.  Anyway, just a little pornography *nostalgia* for you.

Penthouse Comix #1.  Published in May 1994 to much fanfare.  And then it quickly failed.

But it was a noble experiment to bring established, mainstream writers and artists into the seedy world of smut comics.  Arthur Suydam was the artist for this first Libby’s World.  I never heard of him but according to Wikipedia, he’s done a lot of cover work for Marvel and a bunch of other shit for magazines and comics.

Libby in the Lost World was one of my favourite stories in Penthouse Comix, but that’s not saying much.  All of the stories were pretty lousy.  Pretty really lousy.  They failed as entertainment and they failed as pornography.  Sort of like CannotBeTamed’s Vampire the Masquerade video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLnY7HKdymY

The Libby story starts on page 35.  The preamble says:

Arthur Suydam was one of the first artists I approached to work on Penthouse Comix.  Libby was born from Arthurs’ (sic) and my conception that there should be one, and only one, series in Penthouse Comix that was accessible to women (but still interesting to men), so that guys who read Penthouse Comix could have a story in the book that their girlfriends/wives might like and thus enable these men to get away with reading the rest of the book right under their pretty noses……

So this is supposed to be like a women-friendly story.  I’ll come back to this.  But it reminds me of Madam Fomo’s first try on haul where she contended that it was done to get WOMEN interested in the channel.  Because as we all know, women enjoy looking at big-titted, half-naked women parading around in little outfits.

The first page is Libby, nude, and behind her is some kind of long-necked dinosaur rearing up on its hind legs.  Maybe supposed to be suggest an erect penis?  Good use of symbolism, if so.  This is like studying great art.

Then the first proper page of the story sets Libby up as a woman who’s looking for a rich husband, on the advice of her mother who told her that she should marry a doctor.  I didn’t catch this at the time, but reading it now, Libby is clearly supposed to be Jewish.  This is relying heavily on Jewish stereotypes, the character lives in New York, Libby is a Jewish name, and Arthur Suydam, who co-wrote this, very well may be Jewish.  I don’t know what kind of name Suydam is but could be Jewish.

The picture in the lower right hand corner got a fair amount of use from me.  It’s the character using a dildo with giant breasts.  By the way, the character’s breasts are off-model throughout this.  Sometimes they’re huge, sometimes they’re merely big.

So she’s in an airplane with this rich old Middle Eastern oil tycoon who she’s going to marry and then on the next page, a giant tyrannosaurus-type creature bites the plane.  The plane must have been flying REALLY low to the ground.  It’s not explained.

Miraculously, Libby is the sole survivor of the crash.  She wakes up and sees that everyone else has been eaten by this dinosaur.  She theorises that she was spared because the dinosaur was saving the “juiciest, tastiest morsel” for last.  Seems unlikely that a voracious dinosaur would have this thought process but this was what she thought.

Page 38, she runs from this dinosaur, losing her clothes in the process.  I’m not entirely sure why her clothes come off but whatever.

Oh, she says “oy vey” so this is definitely supposed to be a Jewish character.  I wonder why that decision was made.  Does it add to the titillation?  “Oh, yeah, we get to see a rich Jewish woman getting her comeuppance.”  I don’t know.  And this is all so New York.  That’s why I didn’t get it as a young man.

People in New York think that everybody cares about New York.  But they’re grossly mistaken.  I don’t give a fuck about which diner has the best pizza, I don’t give a fuck about the subway, I don’t give a fuck about the Mets versus the Yankees, I don’t give a fuck about any of this.  Take your Spike Lee and shove him up your ass.

Next page, our heroine encounters some horny natives who rip off the last shreds of her clothes.  I didn’t notice this at the time but these natives are white.

Now, the natives’ language seems to largely be comprised of “oogah boogah”, which is a phrase used to denigrate people of African heritage.  The characters also have African hair.  One of these tribesmen is wearing a large witch doctor’s mask.

These are clearly supposed to be African savages who can’t control their lust for white women.  But they’re light-skinned.  So Penthouse Comix was too PC to go all the way with this.  Maybe they didn’t want to put off readers by having any black male characters.  Now that I think of it, I don’t think that they had any black male characters, at least in the first six issues.  I haven’t read past issue six.  I can think of at least one black female characcter but that’s it.

Page 40, Libby remembers her female defence training classes and starts kneeing these savages in the testicles and whatnot.  Then, upon vanquishing her foes, she says, “This is more fun than Bargain Day at Macy’s”.  So yet another Jewish reference.  Yet another New York reference.  Still nobody gives a fuck.

Then the next page, the dinosaur just comes back and our protagonist sprays it with…mace or something.

On the next page, the dinosaur, stunned from this mace, falls onto a big monument of a penis, impaling itself.  The tribesmen then begin to worship Libby because she defeated this dinosaur which was presumably terrorising their village ala King Kong.

Then on the last page, it’s revealed that they began worshipping her as a goddess and she entered into a sexual relationship with this guy with the witch doctor mask.  She believes that she has made her mother proud because she got with a doctor.  This is a call back to earlier in the story.

The End?  No, but I remember subsequent episodes of this story really sucking.

So that’s the story.  This was supposed to be Penthouse Comix’s “female friendly” comic.  Is this what women want?  They want to read a comic about dinosaurs and sexual violence and a giant-breasted Jewish protagonist?

I think that “female friendly” porn is like more romantic stuff and focusing on the guy a bit more and the woman doesn’t have giant fake tits and there’s no money shot, stuff like this.  This Libby in the Lost World…no.  There’s no woman on earth who would find this appealing.  You’d be hard pressed to find any man who finds this appealing.

But in 1994, as a young man, this is what we had to jerk off to.  It’s like a Destiny Fomo video.  If I was in high school and my pornography options were limited, I could see masturbating to Destiny Fomo videos.  But today?  Given the proliferation of free erotica all over the internet?  I don’t get it.  It doesn’t make any fucking sense.

Penthouse Comix, the Sears catalogue, scrambled porn on the Spice Channel, forget it.  I’m not looking at that shit. Nobody is.  And yet, you have people jacking off to Destiny Fomo or Erin Plays or whoever.  Fully clothed.  What’s the appeal?  This isn’t 1994 and you’re not in the 10th grade.

Even Destiny Fomo’s OnlyFans, first of all, I don’t think that she’s naked in any of them.  Her leaked “nudes” weren’t nude.

But even if she is naked, who gives a fuck?  There are millions of videos of nude women doing all kinds of shit right now, on the internet, for free.  What is it about Destiny Fomo in particular that you find so interesting?  You want see a big-titted Hispanic woman from New York?  Google “Heather Lee”.  You can watch hundreds of hours of this woman engaging in intercourse.