Fanni Hall
"Fanni Hall" by Robert Bishop House of Milan
House of Milan serialized Fanni Hall comic strips by Bishop in Knotty magazine. Those 12 episodes were collected and published as The Complete Fanni Hall, They provided source material for the 30sg.com Fanni Hall ebook (30sg.com SKU #301368).
Mr. Bishop also provided incidental art for the company. Pictures introduced short stories, detailed sex products and were often used as filler.
The story begins with Fanni Hall on a quest to find her missing assistant. We can infer from her bravado, martial-arts prowess, and sophisticated firearms that her occupation may be connected to some security agency or special missions service. [Mr. Bishop adds the words SUPER SLEUTH to the first panel.] At the end of the first episode, she scolds herself for allowing a note to lead her into a trap, “like an amateur.” Her car sports the lines of a DeLorean proportioned like an AMC Pacer, both of which were hyped in the 1970s.
Like Blunder Broad and Sweet Gwendoline, Fanni's wholesome pursuit lands her in the grip of exotic bondage that displays her fine figure. Her nemesis, Madame Boundy, rules as monarch of a wicked, multifarious enterprise that includes ominous castles and intimidated assistants.
One of her businesses manufactures bondage implements. Restrained slaves are forced to work leather and buckles into reliable binding paraphernalia.
A gleeful, busy sadist, Madame seems pleased to subdue Fanni in a spectrum of unrelenting devices. Armbinders, metal cuffs, leather cuffs, spreader bars, mummification outfits, ropes, stiff brief panties, blindfolds, mittens, a hard shell cocoon, and a varied wardrobe of gags keep our cute heroine immobilized and silent. In some scenes, her thoughts appear in bubbly balloons.
Mr. Bishop's compact ladies all have the same girlish silhouette, which seems to beckon touch. Nipples are usually concealed by costumes while shaping adhering fabric. Tight binding schemes compress the flesh of hardbodies, turn, twist and bend shapely limbs.
The artist here functions as author, dialogist, costumer, letterer, and bondage stylist. For the genre, he succeeds at all his roles.
The eight episodes mix techniques. Early in the series, pictures show hard-edged black regions as shadows and curved hatching and cross-hatching. In the middle of the third episode, soft airbrush edges define rounded contours on foreground characters with hatching in background elements.
Mr. Bishop also applied commercially printed patterns to add grays and textures to his monochrome scenes. Cut to shape and pressed into place, these adhesive applications appear as film grain, dusty gradients, close parallel lines, and concentric rings. [[[Bill Ward]] often used printed floral patterns on hosiery.]
The intent here appears to be the feeding of bondage fetish appetites. Enthusiasts will appreciate his attention to boot heels, rivets, buckles, straps, knots, and linkages and the skillful draftsmanship that appears in lines, corners, spacing, and hairdos.
Volume 1
Volume 2
Mr. Bishop's stories and pictures are so clear that they seem to disclose his own fantasies. But that functions as evidence of an accomplished master at work.
Volume 3
More like a graphic novel than a comic serial, Number 3 exposes Mr. Bishop's prodigious graphic skill and his conversational prose. By 1978, he'd mastered airbrush techniques that add subtle contours and shading to the alluring figures of his female characters.
While not a character, the third-person narrator has personality, maybe Mr. Bishop's. A colorful raconteur with a consistent tone and viewpoint, the narrator expresses both sympathy and admiration for our determined heroine and outrage over her captors' cruelty.
When describing Fanni's painful ordeals, he speaks from her point of view, complaining about the severity of endurance challenges primitive stooges enforce during periods of Fanni's captivity.
Unlike the consistent perils of episode two, three shows Bunzie both in bondage and escaping it, taking charge in dangerous circumstances, managing her own captives. We see her devising tactics that injure her would-be captors while extricating guilty and innocent from a dark assortment of perils.
The writer provides many details about subversive organizations and secret government agencies involved in Cold War espionage. The prose includes lists of vehicles and weapons, identified by manufacturer and model number. Descriptions explain the unpleasant sensations that ropes, arm binders, belts, blindfolds, straps, cuffs, dildos, and oversized gags cause.
In this sequence, Fanni interrogates her own would-be captor (Paula) who's fastened to a steel rack:
See also [ Bishop ]
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