Today at The Comics Journal, we're pleased to welcome Katie Skelly back for another installment of Creators Talking To Creators. (We're still workshopping the title of these things, stop making that face.) This time, Skelly is speaking with Guy Colwell, whose book Doll is returning to print via Fantagraphics--where it will include a print edition of this very conversation!
Do you consider Doll an erotic work? Or do you view the sex scenes more as functional for driving the plot?
Can I say the answer is both? I suppose I was inspired by Larry Welz’s Cherry books which were selling very well through Rip Off Press when I was working as art director there. So I wanted to do an erotic book and make some money, but something like the raw but trivialized sex in Cherry would not have been my way of approaching a story that had to rely on a lot of sex. Not very interesting and there were plenty of other pure stroke books out there already. I wanted something a little more serious that looked at some of the dark side and sadness and tragedy of sexuality, not just the bumping and pumping and grunting. So, yes, the sex is a driver of the storylines and, yes, it is still an erotic book meant to excite the reader.
