I ordered Holy Sh*t! The World’s Weirdest Comic Books (128 5x7-inch pages, color; St. Martin’s hardcover, $12.95) from Hamilton or Dover or some other cut-rate outfit (at a price less than the list price) without remembering that its authors, Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury, are both British and likely to cast their net much wider than the usual American product, which is what Scott Shaw! exposes in his slide show of similar stuff with a focus on covers. Gravett and Stanbury scoured the entire planet Earth for examples and found lots, including the U.S. and its undergrounds but also Italy, France, Brittain, etc. Each comic book gets two pages; one to reproduce a cover, the other for text. Herein we can find, for instance, a spread for Italy’s porn-horror version of Spider-Man in which the person bitten is a woman named Virgin Mona, who inadvertently arouses a radioactive spider, which, before it dies, manages to penetrate her, giving her amazing powers — “nymphomania and the unfortunate instinct to strangle her partners whenever she is about to climax.” She dons an “impractical outfit exposing her breasts and hardly concealing her crotch and becomes ‘The Spider Woman,’ doomed never to reach her first organism.”
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