Gil Porter is keen to point out in his introduction that James McQuade spent a heck of a long time on this book. It's hardly small in any dimension—the page format is nine inches by twelve—but he apparently drew the original artwork at twice that size. I'm not sure that I quite buy into the idea that each page took thirty hours to create, even if we're talking as an average, but there are lots of very detailed drawings here, so I can happily believe that some of them took that long. Any way we look at it, it's a lot of work for one man.

The reason I highlight that immediately is that setting yourself up for such an amount of work is a great reason to spend a heck of a lot more time perfecting the story first. And I can't see that. It's a fascinating book, because it's "an adult fantasy in visuals", which works whichever permutation of those words you use, but it was published in 1972 when there were still a lot of rules about that sort of thing. There are surprisingly few sex scenes, even if Misty wears little throughout and has her breasts on display at many points when nothing sexual is going on. Instead, this plays to me as a libertarian cliffhanger.

We're in the future, though we never quite know how far, and the world has become the Calivada Empire, ruled by machines which took over after the Ultimate War in order to stop mankind from destroying the entire universe. If you're immediately imagining this as dystopian, you're right on the money and the machines rule through faux religion. The machine in charge has a human face, goes by Godd and lives in the ludicrously tall Tower of Godd in Destiny City. Why a machine, even a machine that looks like a cross between a shaolin master and a high elf, would need Mary, his own “very intimately personal secretary and Girl Friday”, I have no idea, but it's that sort of book.

We kick off at a wedding, because the International Destiny Machine has chosen another perfect match, and a pair of nude performers enact an erotic mating dance to warm up the ceremony. In the congregation is Misty, but she's condemned by the bridegroom because Dirk doesn't want to marry Lyssa and is eager to tell everyone. He's in love with Misty and when he says that, a panel opens in the altar behind the mechanical priest so a Liquidation Machine can emerge to kill them both. Dirk's a quick goner but the machine kills Misty's friend Eve by accident. However, I.D.M. is inherently unable to make a mistake, which means that Misty has to die anyway.

In other words, we're suddenly in 'Brazil' but Jonathan Pryce is a buxom blonde who can hide out at a bar a thousand miles away waiting tables in a Playboy bunny suit. Well, not for long. Faylus is on a mission for Godd and slips her a potent hallucinogenic aphrodisiac so he can rape her in what feels like a kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley dance routine. At least McQuade makes it clear that she sees Faylus as a grotesque obsidian minotaur goring her over and over. The drug does fight it but it's still gratuitous sex scene number two and it's very dubious. The first was consensual, as Misty remembers back to not believing Dirk when he told her that he loved her, even as they took each other to heaven and back.

Faylus only has her for a single night because he has to hand her over to Godd, which means that she wakes up in one of his rat-infested dungeons and we can see the beginning of the major trend of the book. That isn't gratuitous sex scenes, by the way, but an attempt by McQuade to somehow manipulate his story into every subgenre known to fantasy fiction, even at its broadest definition. With gratuitous sex scenes. The most gratuitous happens right here, because she's about to be thrown into the Arena of Lost Souls to fight the other prisoner to the death and, if she's going to die, she wants to have sex with him first. You know, because "with the spectre of their imminent death, normal restraint is ridiculous."

Now, I was thinking maybe use that time to figure out an escape, but the mindset here is to set up certain death in a new and outrageous manner and then whisk Misty away from that into another subgenre to rinse and repeat. I should mention that this other prisoner is Lance and he's a poet, a writer condemned to death by Godd for writing original thoughts. Anything not sanctioned by the I.D.M. is strictly verboten, though that tends to translate here to freedom of speech and freedom to love whoever you like. I don't think it ever manages to come up with even a third freedom, but the sentiment is there, I guess.

The story is still relatively fresh, so we're not only consumed by the visuals but this is a very visual graphic novel and the artwork has a habit of taking over, even when Misty's breasts aren't out on display. McQuade doesn't draw men as well as women but he's clearly a student of anatomy and it would not shock me at all to learn that he evolves his characters from live nude models and uses a lot of reference poses to grow those into stories. When it comes to story, it feels like he's simply a fan of pulp fiction, whether he read it in pulps or novels or comic books. It's not deep, even when a clear influence shows up, like in the sorcerer Le Bouq's impressive Lovecraftian library.

The overarching framework is dystopian science fiction, but the general look is taken from sword and sorcery mixed with a little psychedelia. As Misty bounces from one subgenre to another, that look adapts to its material. So there's gladiatorial combat in an arena ruled by the Gamesmaster machine. There's hallucinatory slip and slide maze. There's mad scientist's library and laboratory, so Le Bouq can use a penetrating ray (get your mind out of the gutter) to ensure she stays young and beautiful forever. Oh, and he teaches her to use her psychic powers and gives her a Sun Jewel, a magical amulet which contains the living core of the mightiest sun in the universe.

If you think that progression is a stretch, then just wait until you see what's coming next. After a nod to Robert E. Howard and another to H. P. Lovecraft, as filtered through horror comics, she's promptly thrown into Jules Verne territory when she dives into the Subterranean Sea to elude a set of pursuers. The jewel allows her to breathe underwater, so she spends time with the pseudo-human fishmen and their queen Poseidia in the city of Marebos, even though they're doomed to evolve into fish.

She's rescued by a Viking Raider, Captain Ull. That's apparently an I.D.M. life function—Misty's is actress—and that prompts sex scene number five (I think) at a most wildly inappropriate moment. Then we're into backstabbing pirates and spacefaring Shakespeare and World War I dogfights and—yeah, I know you think I'm kidding but I'm not. I haven't even mentioned that Juliet is white but Romothello is black, neither for any reason whatsoever. The biplanes make about as much sense as the self-sacrifices and the squad of cheerleaders who are thrown into the front lines against an army of machines sent back to destroy their former masters. If we can't go with the flow here, we aren't likely to get past the wedding.

This is actually a lot of fun if we can get into the spirit of it, but a lot of readers probably can't. It's likely that they read "an adult fantasy in visuals" at the top of the front cover and imagine that it means porno comic. It doesn't not mean that but it's rather chaste compared to what you can buy now because of its 1972 publication date. We mostly see breasts and butt, mostly but not entirely Misty's, and the occasional subtly drawn full frontal, always Misty. Adult fantasy also means that it's in the fantasy genre and the story is adult in nature, but it also means that McQuade is giving himself personal permission to break traditional rules and just go hog wild by including whatever he wanted, however little sense it might make.

If that's your sort of thing, then 'Misty' might just be a pioneering graphic novel for you. If you're hardcore libertarian to the degree that you'll recognise that the C.D.L., or Censorship and Death League, is a riff on the largely Roman Catholic pro-censorship and anti-pornography body initially called Citizens for Decent Literature and later a whole slew of other things, including Citizens for Decency through Law, then you'll dig how much this preaches freedom. However, if you're looking for coherent story and, well, an actual ending, then this isn't remotely for you. It's convenience in cliffhanging taken to a genrebending extreme and you'll hate it. Even with boobs. ~~ Hal C F Astell