Naked As The Day You Were Born

If you were telling a tale set in the ancient, primordial world, why on earth would you have your characters wearing clothes? Especially if your characters predated human beings by so many million years?

I’ve struggled with this quite a bit. Yes, this is one of the many ways I wile away the hours in my head, considering the implications of drawing panel after panel of non-human-yet-anthropomorphic characters talking, running, and fighting in the nude. The point isn’t to be titillating, but realistic. A fur-covered character would have little use for clothing, right? And if we’re talking about a breed of people only marginally human in nature, why would we assume they’d have inherited our self-consciousness about our bodies?

I was listening to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars” audiobook recently. I recall reading “Back to the Stone Age” several times as an adolescent boy, plus “Tarzan of the Apes” at least twice. I also read “Pirates of Venus”, but for some reason never managed to read any of the John Carter of Mars series. Anyway, one of the things about Princess that struck me in the first few chapters was that John Carter was naked. And so were the Martians he encountered. I love this sort of primal, savage, barbaric stuff - though it really is the purest of male adolecent power fantasies. I mean John Carter has superpowers. Come on!

Anyway ERB didn’t describe genitalia. In comics – a visual art – it becomes much more difficult to simply leave something like that out. You have to make acrobatic efforts to hide the naughty bits with leaves or other objects and have your characters always standing or lying or sitting or leaping in such a way as to obscure the parts you don’t want the children to lay eyes on.

I confess I don’t understand what the fuss would be about. Big shocker, we all have peepees and hoohoos, for the most part. Yet for some damnable reason this Judeo-Christian nightmare of a moral dragnet makes it a veritable crime to acknowledge such a fact in something as boldfaced as a drawing without someone stamping it “Objectionable Material”. Its not that I want to draw buck naked beast men with large phalluses, hell I don’t even want to draw the phalluses at all. In fact, it would be a simple matter of having an appropriately thick and well placed tuft of hair to take care of that problem. My goal is not to create an erotic comic book, just a significantly primal one.

One of the problems are with breasts. I like breasts. They’re very nice. And if I design a female character in this alleged comic book who I want to be attractive (as much as a non-human could be to us, of course) I’d give her some breasts. Not beach ball bouncers, mind you, just a healthy pair any woman would call adequate. But I’m not going to draw a large tuft of hair to cover them up. How silly would that look? Some ancient intelligent creature with overtones of humanity running around with tufts of thick hair that just happen to coincide with the areas us modern humans are for some reason terrified to look upon…nah. No artificial bras, thank you. I suppose it would be a simple matter of checking the size (since drawing larger breasts = an obvious nod to male heterosexual desires…not that I haven’t done my fair share of it), and keeping those nipples very tame, or completely leaving them off. I mean, I don’t draw fingernails on every hand or eyelashes on every eye…why would I draw nipples on every breast unless I want you to look at the breasts? Since I’m not talking about an erotic comic, I don’t want you to focus on breasts. So maybe no nipples.

Its all so goddamn exciting, I tell you.