Yesterday, Ellen Forney favored us with tales of her history with Babeland, ruminations on sex-positivity in life and art, and the impetus behind the Stranger’s Lustlab Ad of the Week. Today, we continue the second installment of our interview with bits about Lustlab proper and how the illustrations were lovingly culled into LUST the book.
Part II
How was it working with the personal ads as a whole? What were the criteria for choosing a particular advertisement each week?
I’d go to Lustlab online – the ads have more information. It took a long time to find ads that would lend themselves to being adapted into a cartoon. My favorite ones, just on a smart, well-written personal ad level, didn’t make for good cartoon – just, here I am and this is what I’m looking for - there’s nothing to make into something silly or splashy.
I‘d have to find something vivid like, “I want to watch a woman straining on the toilet,” or maybe something broad like, “I’m a submissive guy who wants to serve a woman or women.” Those can be visually interesting. Sometimes there’d be ones that I really just wanted to include, like there were very few female-female couples seeking someone else, so every time I found one, I would use that.
I would take the original ad text, and edit it. I definitely edit it down a lot. One of the stipulations in this assignment was that I just couldn’t misrepresent the person, but that’s about it. Sometimes I used direct quotes, but rarely, actually – I always messed with them at least a little.
How did “Lustlab Ad of the Week” become LUST the book?
I knew shortly after I started the series that I wanted to turn it into a book. A regular series is one of the best ways to build a body of work, the way I did I Love Led Zeppelin and Monkey Food. Aiming for a book collection was part of my impetus to spend so much time on each cartoon. The book is the result of so many hours of work.
Tell me a little about working with Fantagraphics (iconic Seattle-based publisher).
I’ve done work for Fantagraphics for years. One of the many things that’s great about Fantagraphics is that they’re very committed to comics. They publish a lot of vintage comics and translated foreign comics that certainly won’t be blockbusters, but that they feel should be available.
They’ve been really supportive of my work from the start. For LUST, I asked for a hardback with a gold foil, nice end papers, and spot color. I also got a bellyband, so it’s an art book without a barcode. I was really surprised and just delighted they said yes to those things. I even got to sit next to the art director and tweak the end papers. The book was just what I’d pictured. That’s so satisfying.
By the way, the endpapers in LUST are a collage of sex toy drawings that I did for the original Babeland catalogs*. Babeland also got a spontaneous shout-out from one of the people I interviewed for the beginning of the book: a neophyte dom said that he loved to go shopping at Babeland to pick up a new toy before each session with a new submissive.
*A free download of the endpapers is available in .jpg format for your desktop or iPhone.
Stay tuned for part 3 of our interview, and make sure to mark your calendar: Ellen Forney will be celebrating the opening of her show, Ta-ta Lustlab Ad of the Week, on Tuesday, September 9th as part of the Capitol Hill Art Walk. Join Babeland Seattle at 6pm for a close-up look at original illustrations from Lustlab.
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