In the '60s noir comics were all the rage in Italy. Diabolik started the trend in 1962, but, soon, further comics with similar atmospheres and themes were released.
Most of them featured masked anti-heroes as main characters and the stories usually involved murders, robberies and other assorted criminal activities.
As the years passed, though, the noir themes were mixed with two new components: horror stories and explicit sex scenes.
Comic writer, journalist and director Luciano Secchi, better known as Max Bunker, created two extreme anti-heroes, Kriminal and Satanik.
The first issue of Kriminal was published in 1964, and, while its main character was sort of based on Diabolik, the contents of this comic book were much more violent.
Having spent his childhood in a reformatory, Anthony Logan, the protagonist of this comic book, first pursued revenge against the man who had pushed his father to commit suicide, and then, clad in a yellow and black costume with a skeleton mask (slightly altered in its cinematographic version, directed by Umberto Lenzi in 1966 – spot the connection with George A. Romero's Creepshow in the film’s titles), turned into a sadistic killer.
Kriminal was often banned because of the violence and sex scenes it featured, yet things got even worse when Bunker created Kriminal's female twin, the even more violent and sexually explicit comic Satanik.
Born Marny Bannister, this heroine was a talented biologist with a tragic and traumatic past: mistreated by her entire family who considered her as a sort of monster because a birthmark disfigured a large part of her face, she decided to take her revenge upon society.
After discovering a miraculous formula that transformed her into a beautiful woman, Marny turned into Satanik, and started carrying out horrendous deeds, killing as many people as possible (her family included…) and sexually exploiting all the men she met.
Clad in her red and black costume, Satanik frightened the readers because her thirst for money,
men, power, sex and success, put her on a par with the Devil, yet, at the same time, she also attracted them.
Satanik was mainly conceived by its author as a sort of female Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde, while the stories that saw her as main character mainly mixed Robert Louis Stevenson with Oscar Wilde, Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.
In the stories created by Max Bunker with drawings by Roberto Raviola, AKA Magnus Pictor (or simply Magnus) Satanik was a relentless killing machine capable of unleashing her destructive power upon men and women and of committing unspeakable deeds like injecting acid into her own sister’s
veins.
Satanik represented everything that society wanted to repress, in particular women's sexual power: legend goes that anonymous calls to Bunker often asked him to stop producing this comic because it was inconceivable for a woman to commit such criminal acts and to be so free.
Sadistic, avid and violent, the heroine destroyed all the last taboos that were left, changing forever the world of Italian comics: soon the supernatural elements (ghosts, vampires and mummies included...) featured in Satanik's comics were mixed with more sex scenes and noir comics turned into erotic tales aimed at an entirely new audience and readership.
The myth of Satanik remained, though, for one main reasons: male readers saw in this figure the embodiment of every man’s erotic dream, but female readers, especially those ones who didn’t see themselves as fitting the canons of beauty set by society, conceived Satanik as a final liberation, a nemesis against men and society.
The comic book was turned in 1967 into a film that, directed by Piero Vivarelli, was characterised by an almost inconsistent plot.
The most interesting point in this film from a costume point of view was Magda Konopka, who starred in the role of Satanik, appearing towards the end clad in a Diabolik-meets-Irma Vep leotard, and performing a strip tease.
Satanic women provided great inspirations for fashion collections: red may be considered as a colour symbolising love, affection, warmth and romance, but, more often than not, in fashion (and in recent collections) it was interpreted as the colour of strong passions, power, blood and war injuries.
In previous posts we have seen a young designer like Kat Marks creating armoured pieces that evoked in their colours, shapes and materials Satanik’s costume, while Tomas Maier’s at Bottega Veneta reinterpreted the themes of women's power in an original way in the fashion house’s Autumn/Winter 2010 collection, with black leather trouser suits and through structured shoulder red leather harnesses matched with fluid silky dresses.
In fact it wouldn't be incorrect to say that Satanik's subversive power is one of the engines behind the presentations of many fashion collections.
What we usually see on the various runways are indeed powerful and strong models who often look like amazons and dominatrixes.
The interesting point to notice is that this image doesn't seem to be reflected in our society in which we keep on seeing an annoying insistence on stereotyped women.
While the fantasy of a catwalk show suggests indeed women can be girls on motorcycles, vamps and dominatrixes with a wardrobe to match, our society still tends to relegate women to the realm of well-behaved nonsense.
In too many contemporary films or novels women spend enormous amounts of their time complaining with their girl friends about men rather than doing something to actively revert things, like going out and, well, terrorise men not through violent acts, but with their brains.
Let's ponder a little bit on this imminent catastrophe: in a few days’ time Sex and the City 2 will turn again cinema theatres all over the world into shopping windows for famous fashion brands (almost 200 brands and fashion houses to be precise).
Yet that’s definitely NOT the most criminal and satanic aspect of this film: the worst thing is that it doesn’t represent most modern and intelligent women at all.
Above all such movies do not represent the conditions of those women living in countries that still deny their rights, or in which they are physically, sexually and psychologically abused.
Rarely such women become the protagonist of any films, because they would be as unsettling and disturbing as Satanik for the society we live in.
It's safer for the society we live in to still portray women as a bunch of empty-headed morons with a shopping bag in their hands even in times of recession. Yet I do think that fearless Satanik is ready to step out of the comic book page and off the fantasy of the runway to come into this world. Believe me, most women out there are probably more ready to go on a killing rampage than on a shopping spree.
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