By FRANCISCO SOLANO, BARRIERO (Eros Comix; 1995/96/97)

This is a sequel to the adults-only comic saga YOUNG WITCHES by Francisco Solano and Barriero, but LONDON BABYLON deserves to be read as a standalone.  The initial YOUNG WITCHES was a handsomely drafted but by-the-numbers wallow in Euro-flavored perversion, while this crazed follow-up is something else entirely: a veritable epic of pornographic outrage, rendered in full-bodied black and white imagery that favorably recalls masters of erotic art like Milo Manara and Guido Crepax, and stands as one of the very few books of its type to fully earn that much overused term mind-blowing.

It begins where volume one left off: in London at the turn of the Twentieth Century, with the young witches Lilian and Agatha escaping the cult of Ishtar, at whose hands they spent much of the first volume being manhandled.  Lilian and Agatha are again unspeakably manhandled in LONDON BABYLON, after they’re picked up by a coachman who identifies himself as Doctor Jekyll.  He takes the gals back to his home, where he’s promptly “detained” as a certain Mr. Hyde takes his place.  Hyde, as we all know, is a psychotic pervert, and ensures that the witches are detained for much of the remainder of the narrative.

The title is somewhat is misleading, as the Young Witches are actually supporting players in this depraved tapestry, in which Jekyll and Hyde are joined by a wealth of famous folk both fictional and non: Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sigmund Freud and Jack the Ripper, whose “true” identity is revealed here.

All this compulsive name-dropping is fun—and not a little top-heavy, being a case of too many characters crammed into a perilously lightweight narrative–but the real spark of this book is the sheer volume of outrageous acts it includes.  Nunsploitation, satanism, substance abuse, nymphomania, sadomasochism, polysexual perversity and splatterpunk (provided by the gruesome exploits of Jack the Ripper, which are quite explicitly portrayed) are only a partial listing of the naughtiness on display here, which is so intense a disclaimer is included on the copyright page informing us that the following is “a condemnation of the exploitive excesses and hypocrisies of Victorian society…linked to the theories of Freud, which are iterated and satirized throughout the story.”

Actually, LONDON BABYLON is every bit the demented pornographic reverie its packaging suggests.  As such it’s something of a breakthrough, as you’ll have to go back to the most fervid imaginings of the Marquis de Sade to find a more uninhibited example of erotic excess.