Afrodisiac by Jim Rugg

Like the best comic creators, Jim Rugg is an amazing blend of low brow pop culture and high brow conceptual art.

Though Jim Rugg tends to spend more time in the low brow end rather than the conceptual high brow end. In a way you could say that Rugg is the Tarentino of comics repackaging those cheesy old pieces of pop trash culture that we as kids use to hungrily devour for hours on end.

With Afrodisiac Rugg has taken the whole blaxploitation culture in general and made a fictional blaxploitation comic in the vain of exploitation series like Luke Cage, Hero for Hire or Master of Kung Fu. 

He’s even gone so far as to create a fictional printing history, starting off as a bad ass black hero and by the mid 80’s series end, it became as generic as any other comic on the stands of that time. 

He went through the whole static animation incarnation

As well as a primitive Dell incarnation.

Alan “Afrodisiac” Diesler is as bad as Shaft ever was and twice the sex symbol. With no superpowers besides his black power and his animal magnetism, he manages to overcome any super powered threat, even that of the demi-god Hercules.

The funniest part of the book to me is all of the clever and not-so clever sexual innuendos.

“Good women forced to swallow their pride!”

“Super Beaver”

“Night of the monster cock-roaches”

“Impossible! Why don’t you turn to stone?” “I’m already rock hard baby!”

On the conceptual side, he spends a lot of time recreating all those different printing effects found in all those different 70’s media. He even recreates the target signs that printers use to align their plates and the little dots that they used to grade the color. His work is as detailed as any Roy Lichtenstein or maybe even more so. 

This is a thorough, loving and painstaking tribute to that trash media that we grew up with in the 70’s and an awesome benchmark for other creators to strive for.

You can see more of Jim Rugg on his web page.