Pfil and Pamela: Fairies of Eastern Promise? August 13, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
Beach has previously advertised the splendors of the fairies of the east: particularly that nature elemental Totoro, one of the great film heroes of the last generation. However, this summer while researching fairy comics – there are not as many as he had hoped… – Beach came across another eastern contribution to the modern fairy mythos and he thought that he would cover it before the kids get back from their hols: the Bondage Fairies.
Where to begin? The BFs are Pfil and Pamela, sweet-looking diminutive winged fairy folk. They work in the forest where are, let’s say, gamekeepers: which means that they hunt and run in bad animals and insects. So far this is all very interesting, it would make a great story ark: a peculiar but perhaps improved version of the Jungle Book. The sticking point is the gratuitous sex scenes and Beach means gratuitous… BF is written like a 1970s ‘erotic’ film in which Pfil and Pamela constantly walk into implausible situations and find themselves at the receiving end of even more implausible outcomes involving the animals and insects of the forest and, of course, each other….
Make no mistake, there is a tradition of eroticism concerning fairies. Think of all those folk tales about men and women being seduced by fairies with bushy eyebrows and the typically disastrous consequences of these liaisons. The sex is great but God help the offspring… Even modern fairy writers appreciate this. In 1972 Maureen Duffy wrote the Erotic World of Faery looking for the most unlikely Freudian concatenations in apparently innocent fairy acts like leaving pennies in the pale and riding horses: what would Maureen have made of Pfil and Pamela? With their chronic lack of subtlety MD would find herself out of a job and her hair would have turned white overnight.
So Beach’s question is where do the BFs come from? Do we have a native Japanese tradition that has dressed down. Or do we have the chorus from a Midsummer Night’s Dream that has found employment in a particularly sleazy strip club? Beach’s money is on the second, i.e. the author has borrowed from the west. What Beach finds interesting is that putting the score of comics that have dealt with fairies over the last generation, the BFs outsell most and possibly all on the list. They were not only successful in Japan, they also proved breakthrough manga in the US in the early 1990s.
Are there any fairy comics out there good or bad taste: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com And fairy comics are not the same thing as fairy tale comics (Fables etc)
