Nudity Content Must Be Over 18

Ramba!

By Robin Bougie

Eros Comics, the overtly sexual division of
Fantagraphics publishing, publishes pretty much every English-language adult comic book worth it’s mustard these days, with many titles translated from the Japanese, French, and Italian in which they were originally published.

But of all these hundreds of titles, there is one that they reprinted for about a dozen issues in the mid-’90s that mixed callous violence, bad taste, and hardcore sex in such a depraved and exploitive way--it’s vile storyline was destined to stick in my craw like an exquisite wet dream. In short, it’s a comic book that would make for incredible porn-flavored grindhouse cinema.

In the mid-1980s, writer Rossano Rossi and artist Marco Delizia began work on an adult comic book and shopped it to a popular sleaze publisher in Rome called Blue Press. That series was called Ramba, and one can be forgiven for an early dismissal of the title (as I did), since it bears such a lame resemblance to the Stallone Rambo series. But don’t be too hasty; there IS something of interest here--especially if you’re a drooling pervert.

Here's the lowdown: Ramba is a female assassin-for-hire with the unintentionally humorous wardrobe of a Bon Jovi groupie. She's temperamental, has a total lack of remorse, and takes every chance she can to work sex and/or torture into her victim's last moments. She rides around on a big motorcycle, guns blazing, and hands out pain and suffering to anyone--as long as the money is good and the cock is hard.

While North America’s X-rated illustrators generally shy away from mixing death and sex, Italian adult comics are renowned for violent pornographic imagery and are occasionally renounced as misogynistic by their detractors.

Ramba is packed with violent death, grinding anal sex, sticky cumshots, bloody bullet-riddled corpses, big ’80s rocker hair, sleazy Mafioso, tender lesbian encounters, feline bestiality, defiled virgins, maggot-covered rape zombies, and most at the forefront? G.W.G.

Yes, if you’re into the popular geek fetish of naked Girls with Guns, you will not want to pass this by. It’s like an off-kilter, sub-automatic, cum-drenched version of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita.

So when Eros began to translate the series into English and put it out uncensored on the North American direct-sales comics market, I was pretty damn surprised and pleased to discover it. Early issues went into numerous printings, and a couple of years later, three hard-to-find book collections were released in Spanish as well.

DeLiza's art is clean, gorgeously inked, and realistic. He was replaced for the middle third of the English-translated issues, (which make up about 1/4 of the comics that were originally created in Italy) by an artist named Valdambrini, who is nearly as talented, but who employed a loose inking style that isn't quite as lovely to look at. Mario Janni, with his slightly cartoonier version of Ramba also subbed in for an issue here and there.

Rossi's story lines are audacious and lurid and don't let up for a moment. It's tightly plotted stuff that leaves little time for the characters to quietly reflect on the insanity going on around them.

Nearly every self-contained story has Ramba contacted by Ox, a lumbering go-to guy who dredges up work (read: victims) so our heartless heroine can put some groceries in the cupboard. At twenty grand a pop--and victims aplenty--one kinda wonders where all her money goes. She's like Mike Hammer, except instead of solving mysteries, she empties her bladder and her machine gun into the face of whomever she's been set upon, before masturbating with the corpse and then going home to get her juiced-up pussy licked by her cat.

That's not to say this is redundant or boring. Things get spiced regularly with spy-style espionage and backstabbing, and there's even some over-the-top witchcraft and hellish monsters that get unleashed between fuck scenes.

I'm also a fan of the adventure where Ramba is appointed as an investigator in Antarctica and discovers a plot involving military-trained dolphins. Things go horribly awry when she's captured, tied up, forced to felate a football-sized cock, and gets raped in the asshole with a big icicle. But not to worry, she "keeps her cool" (har), and ends up severing a few heads in retribution. Ramba kicks much ass, yo.