MW

Osamu Tezuka. You generally associate him with Astro Boy and, less frequently, Kimba the White Lion. So it often comes as a surprise to find out that he did more than kid-friendly fare (I got that experience when I was a teenager and picked up one of his more dramatic works titled Adolf; it's about Nazis).

MW pretty much sounds like the prototype for Naoki Urusawa's Monster: pretty boy sociopath strings along an idealistic man, only MW has more gay sex. And women getting killed through poison-injected orgasms.

The real reason for this post: I was flipping through a copy and saw a pastiche of Aubrey Beardsley's art (well, pastiche would imply that he didn't nearly completely copy the images). And since Aubrey Beardsley is one of my favorite artists, I knew I had to do a post.

I think it's more than a little depressing that I can name most of the works referenced except one. From left to right, up to down: panel border from Le Morte d'Arthur and curtains from The Rape of the Lock, the ambassadors from The Lysistrata, Salome and Iokanaan's head from Salome/J'ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, an illustration I can't place, probably from Bon Mots or Lucian's A True History, and finally the famous Peacock Skirt from Salome.