A&E

Prostitution meets the comic strip in ‘Lust to Dust’

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One of the many creative entries featured in Lust to Dust.

Come across wacky comic strips about superheroes doubling as prostitutes, Popeye’s ginormous erection and a heartbroken sock ravaged by one of “four horses of the acockalypse,” and you know Michael Ogilvie must be behind it.

Back in 2009, Ogilvie and friends published the limited-edition hardcover Drunk, A Comic Book About Bar Stories, featuring 24 artists’ bar and drinking yarns set in and outside of Las Vegas. It was a great journey into well-told narratives, real or imagined, peppered with all the bravado and shame of life’s alcohol-saturated moments.

The Details

Lust to Dust
November 30, 6 p.m., free.
Photo Bang Bang, 224 E. Imperial Ave., lusttodust.com.

This time it’s Lust to Dust, a comic-style collection of stories by artists (most of them Vegas-based) with legal prostitution in Nevada as the common theme. The tales are raw, gruesome, vulgar, funny, sad and bizarre, but not every plot is built solely around sex for money (or payment of any kind).

Sometimes it’s merely the backdrop for another scenario, a chance to throw graphic f*cking into an otherwise visually sanitized storyboard or a way to juxtapose innocence and decadence (in the jarring old-school comics style). Or it can be an opportunity to lampoon issues regarding same-sex marriage during the Roman Empire, dire dehydration in the desert or extraterrestrial rumors—prevalent in this Area 51 region, but even more concrete at the fictional Fabulous Area 69 Ranch in Lust to Dust, where an FBI agent stops in for a romp with a working girl. (Local newsman George Knapp makes a cameo in that one). Thirty-six artists are featured.

Artist F. Andrew Taylor takes a historic approach, revisiting the 1954 FBI raid on Roxie’s brothel four miles outside Las Vegas. It includes appearances by reporter Ed Reid, author of The Green Felt Jungle, and Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun. Other artists include PJ Perez, Jarret Keene, Noelle Garcia, Sam Reza and Rachel Sparrow. The book also features photographs by Marcos Rivera. The crew will be at Photo Bang Bang for Friday’s Lust to Dust book launch and art exhibit to autograph copies.

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