So the other week I asked on the Trannies Yahoo Group if anyone knew where I’d taken the most recent tagline from on the Trannies In Trouble site (the little phrase in quotations under the main title). At that time it was, “”I shouldn’t have come…I didn’t want to…I wasn’t going to.” Well, I’m sure the suspense has been kiling everyone, so the answer is that it came from the Guido Crepax cartoon, “Valentina in Reflection” from Heavy Metal magazine, December 1980. Yeah, rather obscure but somehow that line got stuck in my head over three decades ago and has never left. (The line “But originally I said no” was another one that seemed weighted with significance and got stuck in my long-term memory.)

I remember getting that magazine in the mail on a late afternoon in Colorado. I recall that before walking back into the house I caught a quick glimpse of the picture below, got immediately turned on and then walked inside to find a friend of my mother’s there in the kitchen visiting. Strangely enough, this was the same woman who on an earlier visit had told me I should have been born a girl, which really threw me into a state of embarrassment and sexual excitement. (For some reason she was alone in the kitchen on that earlier visit and when I walked in she glanced at me – I was very slender and had long hair – and she uttered that startling sentence.) So anyway, here I was again with this same woman (don’t recall if my mother was there too), once again sexually agitated and after a few awkward moments I excused myself and went down to my room to immediately check out the rest of this cartoon (that one page was the best one unfortunately). I don’t recall if I rubbed one out while my mother’s friend was still visiting or whether it was later that evening but I’m sure it happened at some point. Weird the things you remember and the details you don’t.

In any case Guido Crepax is pretty fantastic though I’d always wished he’d done more blatantly bondage oriented stuff. Still his drawings were always very strange and sexy and he was obviously hugely talented. Good stuff.