Most of us may be in a winter holidays kind of mood, but tentacles don’t take holidays, especially not on the last Tentacle Tuesday of the year. While you lounge around in front of a roaring fire (or, more likely, in front of a TV screen), the tentacles continue their arduous work… of grabbing (and possibly disrobing) women.

However good they may be at undressing their victims, did you know that octopuses take the utmost care to hide indecent lady-parts from the audience? Case in point (it would have been much more efficient to grab her by the neck or midsection):

As far as I can figure out (Italian not necessarily being my forte), « Odeon » was an Italian comics anthology for adults published from 1977 to 1988. While the earlier issues proudly displayed the enticing warning « for 18 years and older! », later issues modestly called themselves « relatos gráficos para adultos », which loosely translates to « graphical records for adults ». Ironically, the relatively staid covers of early issues became progressively smuttier and more risqué, with bare breasts galore and more rape and bondage scenes than you can shake a stick at, the whole thing veering more than just a little bit into over-the-top ridiculousness. Frankly, I don’t even know why the octopus is bothering to hide the blonde’s nipples.

You can see a gallery of Odean covers here. NSFW, obviously.

Continuing the march into tentacular extravagance, here’s a couple of panels from a comic called « La mort amoureuse » (either “Death in love” or “romantic death”, depending on how one interprets it). It’s a rather violent story of Death (personified as a lusty though decrepit female), her equally prurient servant Destiny, her two semi-amphibian lovers (a torero and a rock singer kidnapped from the world of the living), and a beautiful woman in a capsule fished out of the sea.

I found this comic to be charmingly over the top, proving that digging through stacks of haphazardly piled up comics in the back of a comic store sometimes pays off. It opens with the story of a lesbian mermaid who dies of a broken heart when her lover callously betrays her, and merrily makes its way through all sorts of sexy shenanigans, amputations and transplants (as well as one decapitation), with dangling eyeballs and dream sequences cheerfully peppering the plot. The sex scenes aren’t explicit (although they’re “suggestive as hell”, as one of my friends would put it, and everyone is quite sex-starved), but the dialogue is equal parts titillating and gross, which elicited quite a few disgusted nose-crinkles and chuckles from me.

Here are two quotes, picked from two randomly selected pages, with quick (and rather literal) translations into English so you can get a feel for OXO’s poetic style. Memorize these in French and you can impress your lover during your next tryst – don’t forget to thank me later.

« Laisse-moi sucer, pour tuer le temps, et pour trouver l’oubli, la moëlle amère de tes os! » (Let me suck, to kill time and find oblivion, the bitter marrow of your bones!)

« Je suis au parfum: la passion est biodégradable! Amour et chair se putréfient également! Laisse-moi plutôt rêver de ton puissant gourdin… ta queue, tendre et primesautière, qui me défonce et défroisse un peu plus les plis de mon vagin flétri. » (I’m well aware: passion is biodegradable! Love and flesh both putrefy! Rather let me dream of your powerful cudgel… your tail, tender and impulsive, which shatters and smooths the folds of my withered vagina!)

And for our last entry, here’s a cornucopia of fun: Communists! Tentacles! Aliens with good taste in girls! Uncensored nipples! (Actually, the nipples *were* censored on my scan of this cover, but co-admin RG restored them to their former glory with a bit of Photoshop. Thanks, partner.)

Actually, I’ll be a generous little communist sympathizer and give you a two-for-one: here’s another issue of the same series, also with tentacles. Why break a formula that works?

~ ds