I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus.

[READ: February 2024] Kris Kool

Caza is Philippe Cazaumayou, a French illustartor who has been working since the 1960s.  This was his first novel and it is as psychedelic as one might expect from a comic made in 1970.

There’s sex, there’s trippy colors, there’s outer space, there’s even a plot of sorts.

Kris Kool “has known the sumptuous vertigo of sinking among the moribund asteroids… [his] eyes were burnt by the truly dense flames of the sun’s corona.”

Kris is talking to a naked woman [we learn later that she is a “Lectronic Party Doll–For bachelors only”] about his spacecraft–that he sold it to the scrapyard and doesn’t have enough for a new one.  This adventurer can’t possibly end his days like this can he?

Fortunately a rogue named Bluebeard offers him a job piloting an illegal ship for Gweene.  The Gweene is a hot woman with tattoos all over her body and… no face.   She offers him a job to go to the Mandrakes from Venus, the flowerwomen that Kris believes are a myth. 

The art is very much in the Monty Python/Yellow Submarine style.  But far more adult. The entrance ways to various rooms are 100% vaginal.  The Mandrakes gives off a scent that is orgasmic and in era-perfect letters, the naked torso shouts BURNING JOY!

When Kris realizes that the Mandrake (named Corolle) is chained up by Gweene, he frees the Venusian and fights his way out of the building.  To no avail.

I love that as he tries to flee, he takes the Astropolitain (written in the same font as the Metropolitain.  Onboard the trip to Venus, it is all sex and costumes with men (dressed as a wacked out Batman) feeling women up.

Kris (through some fascinating detours) lands on Venus where he climbs a rainbow colored mobius strip and winds up…. somewhere else.  HE is chased around by cartoon nightmares, like a giant hand which has naked women for fingers.

He meets a pterodactyl type creature, but his ray gun starts shooting rabbits.  There’s a Magritte Apple-headed person who talks in Rebuses. But he ultimately lands among the Flowerwomen–it’s paradise because they have never had human sex before and they are all so very curious about it.

It turns out that they lay eggs at the foot of the Mamountain which grow into Lushrooms. The lushrooms ripen and then fertilize the women whose fertilized eggs develop flowerbubbles out of which flowerwomen hatch.  But the Mamountain drinks their breast milk and once they feed the mamountain, they die.

Kris decides to set things right and plans to kill the Mamountain.  Especially when one of the flowerwomen says that he has fertilized one of her eggs–they don’t need the Mamountain anymore!

It’s pretty wild.  The colors are extraordinary.  The visuals are trippy.  And yes, there is even a story.

Mostly though, the visuals are a real treat–so of its time and so bizarre.