Retrospective: Barbarella (1962)
"Your hardware and my software interface perfectly!"
... so says travelling space adventurer Barbarella after making love to a robot in the original 1962 comic strip. That's after dallying with several men, women and an angel...
If you are familiar with the movie adaptation staring Jane Fonda in 1968 you will already know the tone: camp titillating high jinks bordering on soft porn. The titular heroine is a sexy young hedonistic astronaut who finds herself tumbling into one compromising situation after another, invariably losing most or all of her clothing in the process.
Sexploitation? Perhaps a little, but the lewdness here is too mild to be offensive, certainly by today's standards. Barbarella is an object of desire, yes, but she is also a fully autonomous agent, not a vacant bimbo.
What we have here is an embodiment of 1960s sexual liberation ('free love' as a personal and political statement against a conventional Western society that frowned upon any expression of sexuality that did not conform to the missionary position within wedlock). Our heroine also embodies women's liberation, quite at home with a raygun and ready, willing and able to battle the forces of evil alongside the boys.
This is perhaps also a reflection of the specific culture of her creator; this femme fatale is an emancipated free spirit with more than a passing resemblance to the legendary Brigitte Bardot...
Written and drawn by Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella begins with the leading lady crashing her rocketship into a greenhouse on the planet Lythion. She stumbles from the wreckage only to be lashed by the thorns of giant roses caught in the winds of the escaping atmosphere, her clothing torn to shreds...
Various adventures follow as she travels to different locations on the planet, encountering a variety of exotic characters and landscapes. She finds herself in a desert, an underwater kingdom and the snow-covered city Yesteryear where the people have adopted the fashions and architecture of 1880s Europe (proto-steampunk?). Eventually she ends up in the Labyrinth of Sogo, the setting for the Jane Fonda film.
Forest's drawings are charming with suitably sensual lines and an art nouveau flavour to each surrealist tableau. This edition is dichromatic; black and white panels with additional blue shading. This reflects the comic printing techniques of that era. As this edition was adapted in 2014 they could have added full colour but I'm glad they didn't, as this is a nice nostalgic touch.
There have been many feisty female space heroes in the decades since Barbarella first launched, and the later incarnations are certainly more politically correct, but the original still has an enchanting power all of her own. She was probably the first to exemplify a heroine who stood alongside the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordons of the galaxy as equal but different... and Vive la différence!
Zak Webber
Twitter - @sfcomicartist / Instagram - @sfcomicartist
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