Barbarella

Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's not an easy way to summarize this one so I'll just say Barbarella crashes her ship and goes on a series of sexy misadventures.

I remember watching the Barbarella movie starring Jane Fonda on Showtime late at night a couple times as a horny teenager. At the time, I didn't know it was based on a French comic. When Humanoids reprinted this with a new translation by Kelly Sue DeConnick, I had pre-ordered it.

First published in 1962, Jean-Claude Forest's art reminds me more of Wally Wood's 1950s SF stuff more than what was going on in American comics at the time. The art has a sketchier feel than Wood but Forest knew his way around both a space ship and a scantily clad woman.

While there's a fair amount of T&A, most of the sexual content is in the form of innuendo. Barbarella feels more like Flash Gordon than anything else. The movie has more of a plot than the book, the two Barberella stories within being more of a string of sexual encounters with some science fiction plot hastily wrapped around it. Born out of the freewheeling, free-lovin' 1960s, Barbarella both feels of that time period and somehow timeless. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

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