The Complete Crepax: Surreal Stories Volume 10

These erotic comics stories, spanning 1968–1991, introduce Bianca, whose dreamlike, ever-shifting adventures, completely unmoored from reality, bounce back and forth from a sinister boarding school to under the sea to Gulliver’s travels and much more. Introduced in the aptly named “An Expansive Story,” the first two-thirds of this volume, Bianca appears to be trapped in (or haunted by?) a gothic boarding school, whose administrators and pupils have untoward and sinister designs. Bianca will bounce back and forth between this school and dreamscape after dreamscape — she becomes a plant, talks to fish while diving under the sea, is served up on a silver platter, thrown out with the garbage, witnesses a double homicide, and much more — unfazed as she contorts into ever-more-absurd scenarios. Then, Bianca faces the trials and tribulations of Gulliver before she passes the baton to Valentina, Crepax’s most famous heroine. Who, feeling introspective, “speaks” to both Bianca and Crepax before modeling in a spectacular, full-color “fashion dream.”