“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted”: the sexual journey of Druuna, by Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri

Alexandre Rodrigues da Costa

01 april 2022

What to say about Druuna, created by Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri? That she is the dream-woman incarnation of every nerd, geek and otaku? Since her first appearances in Métal hurlant and Heavy Metal magazines, Druuna entered the erotic imagination through stories that mix science fiction and pornography.

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Druuna X

In the album Druuna X, Serpieri explains that he created Druuna from a series of personal experiences, such as watching a woman emerging naked from the sea on the beach he was on, using the body and features of Valerie Kaprisky, an actress in the film La Femme Publique, as a model for his heroine's anatomy, as well as using the Native American facial features he was used to when drawing western stories.

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Non-Consensual Sex

If the creation of Druuna can be seen as a montage of several female references, we can observe the same principle applied to the narratives, which include influences from films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, The Abyss, Terminator, Total Recall, and science fiction authors like Bradbury, Asimov, Anderson, Heinlein, Herbert, Simak and Zelazny. Hence, the dystopian character that characterizes the saga of Druuna, whose sexual content only becomes explicit from volume 3, Carnivora, on, where we can see some scenes with almost explicit sexual penetration. Thus, throughout her adventures, Druuna is exposed to various types of sexual acts, ranging from consensual to non-consensual. Focusing only on non-consensual sex, some critics tend to claim that Druuna is aestheticizing rape, since Serpieri uses his skill in drawing anatomy to associate beauty with sexual violence. Such a statement focuses only on the character Druuna, forgetting that male characters are also represented as beautiful and almost always suffer a brutal death associated with sex.

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Tormented

As Druuna is the heroine, she has to survive - unlike some of her partners - with resilience and, at times, with pleasure, the obstacles that arise in front of her. And let us keep in mind that she doesn't have any superpowers, except those of her femininity and beauty, as Serpieri himself explains: “All the contrast comes from the psychology of (…) Druuna, the only true human being in the story. She is used to describe what human beings are: tormented indeed, but possessed of values. They are people, not anonymous entities, numbers. Druuna is not a heroine. She is a woman, with her complexities, an ordinary woman, a contemporary woman. (…) The woman, psychologically, represents the future of the man. But it is also another side of humanity, just like man.

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The extended Premium edition of this article includes a lot of BONUS FEATURES like more of the influences of earlier artworks on Druuna like Death And the Maiden (1515) and paintings by Hans Baldung Grien and Albrecht Dürer, his fascination with the domain of violence and rape, the controversy surrounding Serpieri's non-consensual illustrations, how the principles in Plato's The Republic , the ideas of William S. Burroughs and Ricky Gervais all defend Serpieri's principles, Druuna as an object of desire, references to the ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi and similarities to the art of shunga. interspersed with 110 additional images of Serpieri's bold erotica and much more...!

Click HERE for articles on the non-consensual images in the ancient shunga