Holiday,
Oh what a lovely day today,
I’m so glad they sent me away,
To have a little holiday.*

Today we embark on a V̶i̶c̶t̶o̶r̶i̶a̶n̶ r̶o̶m̶a̶n̶c̶e̶** romance set in 1889, seasoned with more than a dash of steampunk, all in the name of sweet (and currently very much needed) escapism. Expect NSFW, in case it matters.

Chester 5000 (Top Shelf, 2011) is a typical love story: boy meets girl, boy loses interest in girl sexually and so builds her a sex robot, girl falls in love with robot, boy gets jealous. The mechanical turn of the plot does in no way impede the emotional progression and, as a matter of fact, one finds oneself distinctly rooting for the very sweet Chester. Really, the fact that he’s a robot only comes into play to show off his many pleasure-centred tool attachments, not to mention his ability to hold a lover in mid-air for extended periods of time.

This comic is entirely mute, told in little vignettes which make it quite clear how the characters are feeling. American cartoonist Jess Fink has been singled out for her titillating talent of depicting luscious breasts, and I quite agree (and extend that compliment to the rest of female anatomy). Here are a few of the tamer scenes —

« Jess Fink’s “erotic, robotic Victorian romance” Chester 5000 XYV, an ongoing Web comic that’s recently been collected into a graphic novel by Top Shelf, is utterly of the zeitgeist. It has enough gadgets to entice the steampunk crowd, enough heat (tempered by romance) to seduce the yaoi*** crowd, enough sex-positivity for the feminist crowd, and enough craft for any “but girls can’t draw” naysayers. » (source: TCJ)

One might say this graphic novel is part of a wave of woman-penned, sex-positive, body-diverse comics — and indeed, Fink has several contributions to the anthology Smut Peddler. As for the anthology, I respect it as an admirable initiative, but is not something I collect because sadly most art within rubs me (ha, ha) the wrong way. I had purchased the 2014 edition because of Fink’s How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm story, but I gave it away to a rather stunned older man who came to pick up a box of random books I no longer wanted. Well, he said he wanted to read something new for a change (while his eyes goggled) — I hope he enjoyed it.

~ ds

*Holiday

** Co-admin RG would like to point out that this isn’t really Victorian other than in costume, and so objects to that categorisation. I’ll leave the reader to decide whether works of fiction set in a specific period (well before the author’s lifetime) deserve that era’s label or not. The Professor’s Daughter (discussed in Félicitations, Emmanuel Guibert!) was described in a review as ‘a love letter to Victorian London’ despite having been brought to life by two men from the late 20th century, but it was better researched than Chester 5000 — though the latter still has historical details, especially in the second volume, and Fink clearly knows a lot about Victorian costumes, as evidenced by this fun interview. If you want smut from the actual Victorian era, I’d like to point you in the direction of Victerotica – A Carnal Collection, volumes 1 and 2. RG also points out a certain plot similarity to La poupée sanglante, a 1923 novel by Gaston Leroux (author of Le fantôme de l’opéra).

***Speaking of yaoi, volume 2 of the series, Chester 5000 book 2: Isabelle & George (also published by Top Shelf), has some nice mann-gegen-mann action.