Comic Review: Miss Don’t Touch Me

Posted on | October 13, 2009 | No Comments

Miss Don’t Touch Me
Hubert & Kerascoët
http://www.kerascoet.fr

I freely admit that I am biased against French and Belgian adult comics. This is because at some point no amount of high concept sci-fi or fantastic art can make up for the way the female characters are too often written as fantasy dolls propping up a pair of perfect tits. No, this is not all of them, and there are French and Belgian comics I love, sometimes despite the issues, but at some point I just gave them up.

Miss Don’t Touch Me is a French adult comic about prostitutes being murdered by a sadistic killer, features half-naked women on most pages, and I loved it to pieces.

Here’s the set-up: Paris in the 1930s. The virginal Blanche works as a maid together with her free-wheeling sister Agatha. She begs Agatha not to go to the dances where a murderer has been known to be picking up victims. When Agatha is (inevitably) killed, Blanche swears revenge and tracks the killer down to a high-class brothel. She gets hired as the brothel’s “English governess”, a girl who whips but must not be touched, “Miss Don’t-Touch-Me”. It’s a job she performs with vigour, putting all her anger and revulsion – towards her sister’s killer, or men and sex in general – into the act, while continuing in her off hours to search for clues. She intends to take the life of her sister’s killer.

The two artists behind the name Kerascoët have managed to create an art style that draws the eye and holds it by packing a big wallop of charm. Yes, charm is the word, despite the subject matter. The art is sketchy, but expressive and detailed. The characters are instantly recognizable, as they come equipped with varied body-types and their own unique features features. A cartoony, exaggerated style applied to the characters is combined with rich, almost expressionistic backgrounds. The layouts are simple with little variation between the panel shapes. Dramatic moments are underlined with larger panels and close-ups.

The plot sounds like a woman-against-man parable, almost as much as it sounds like slasher porn, but doesn’t in the end come off as entirely either. The story takes place very much in the female sphere, with men – even the ones who have all the power – barely making an appearance. Blanche’s main encounters are with women. She clashes with the other prostitutes as well as forms attachments with them, becoming particularly friendly with the other two “special girls”, the angelical masochist Annette and the “madame-monsieur” Josephine. Perhaps it’s partly because of this focus that the novel doesn’t come off as as offensive as you might think, though mostly I still put that down to decent writing, that is to say, that female characters are full-fledged and their motivations, however extreme, make sense within the story.

Blanche is not a likeable heroine, a wish-fulfilment character or even someone you might want to hang out with. She’s driven, murderous and has trouble controlling her impulses. Even so I found it easy to sympathize with her. I find this kind of character is particularly satisfying to read about, as, when successful, she provokes and evokes the reader’s darker impulses, and makes her question the moral structure of the story itself.

Many of the characters easily fall into categories – neurotic Blanche, Agatha who loves fun and gets punished it, martyred Annette, the money-grubbing madame, the cruel bully, and so on – but they’re also characters you can understand and recognize. There’s no forced feminist message obscuring plot and characters; what you get instead is a depiction of subjection, commercialism and dehumanization as the default state of these women’s lives and the (even more) gruesome consequences thereof. They are tied to the brothel in more ways than one, no longer fitting into the world outside after living by different rules within its four walls, and the description of their predicament and their world is gritty and evocative.

I have to add, despite it being a non sequitur – how awesome it is to have a black transsexual prostitute as a wise mentor character, someone kind, beautiful and adored? Josephine is strong, intelligent, in control, and not the least bit ridiculous. More of this, please.

Does it pander to sexual sadists and exploit its premise? Certainly. Does it uncritically portray the virgin/whore dichotomy? Yes – in a sense. Whatever the reason or plot behind it, the image of a naked woman strung up and cut is always a titillating image, harking back to the old days of pulp art and true crime scandal rags as well as ongoing, franker publications. The setting is all about sex and violence and Hubert & Kerascoët exploit the reader’s potential interest in them shamelessly. There is, however, a difference between presenting sadomasochistic scenarios and condoning actual violence against women, as there is between exploiting a kink and espousing an ideology. In my mind Miss Don’t Touch Me is on the good side.

As for the virgin/whore dichotomy, the dichotomy of perception exists in the world of the novel, where whores and loose women are considered by male outsiders, by the killer, the brothel owner and at first Blanche herself as less worthy, as people who can’t expect to be treated humanely unless they enforce this through violence. Blanche herself becomes a star attraction of the brothel because of her hallowed virginity. I am however willing to argue that this, rather than blaming sexual women for their predicament within the context of the story, is instead a depiction of attitudes towards virginity and of women’s own mobility – and lack thereof – within the trap those attitudes have made.

I might not be over my bias yet – it is reaffirmed every time I walk past a comics stand in my home town – but I will certainly be keeping an eye out for these three authors.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

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Category: 5 Stars, Reviews, Reviews - Comics

Comic Review: Miss Don’t Touch Me

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