Hotel Eden From Dofantasy: A Review
From time to time I have been posting bits of artwork from the bdsm comixs published by Dofantasy.com. They have a wide variety of artists, some of whom I really really like; and being European, they are quite seriously over-the-top when it comes to their BDSM.
This is not, however, an unalloyed virtue; some of the text in these comics is stunningly unerotic (perhaps there are translation issues) compared to the art it sits beside, and of course none of these titles is drawn or written with spankos primarily in mind. So it occurred to me that I ought to do a more detailed review of one of the comics — good features and bad alike — so that when I post spank-happy snippets in future, you’ll have a better idea of the context it’s coming from. But please bear in mind, Dofantasy publishes hundreds of titles by many different artists, and the range of style and content is extreme. This is not “seen one, seen ’em all” territory.
The title I chose for review is Hotel Eden aka Hostel Eden. This artwork is your picture-worth-1000-words summary in a nutshell:
The plot? Simple as such things go. Eva and Maria, two lusciously-drawn lesbian tourists, have a reservation at a poorly-chosen back-street Mexican hotel. Little do they know it is a hive of scum and villainy and druglord slave sex orgies.
So. They check in. They get a room. Eva, the blonde, jumps in the shower, where she luxuriates and calls out to Maria all the sexy things she wants to do to her. Meanwhile, Maria is getting jumped and tied up by a thug room invader:
Back to Eva in the shower. The shower curtain pulls back, and it’s bad news. Generally this is not what you want to find, suddenly, in your shower with you:
Predictably enough Eva gets grabbed, handcuffed to the shower head, and there’s a bondage sex scene. Then to advance the plot, she breaks the plumbing off the wall, bashes her abductor in the head, goes screaming out of her room looking for help…
And, well, it’s out of the frying pan, into the fire.
First she runs downstairs to find the manager. He’s sitting in a room full of monitors, watching sex slaves being boinked in bondage in every room. Eva’s wet, naked, and handcuffed; he takes predictable advantage of the situation, while explaining to her just how unfortunate a situation it is. Then he turns her back over to the thug whose shower fun she interrupted. He reunites her with Maria, and some chairs and some rope, and a riding crop. We now rejoin the broadcast already in progress. She begs nicely: “Oh, please don’t hurt us…”
But if you click that panel for a view large enough to read the villain’s dialog, you’ll see where the wheels start to fall off the bus. This for me is the great weakness of the Dofantasy comics. He says:
Damn! Look at those tits and that juicy piss box… I can do anything I want, bitch. And what I want… is to see you squirm. See you writhe in pain. My very own painslut…that’ll be your life!
Doh!
OK, OK. So the painslut talk and the bitch and the writhing, that’s fairly standard BDSM stuff and lots of people like that kind of play. Not my style, but whatever. But, ah, er, “juicy piss box” as synonym for pussy?
I’m throwing a bad sex writing / bad dialog penalty flag on that play.
Moving rapidly along…
There follow several nicely drawn scenes of bondage fellatio (Eva) and breast bondage (Maria), after which for reasons unclear Eva gets a combination gag and mop put in her mouth and is forced onto the floor to clean up the mess that’s been made. Here, again, the visuals are a spanko’s dream, but if you click for the large version you’ll see that the dialog has what my third-grade teacher used to call “room for improvement”:
There follows some kidnap plot line (Eva, it turns out, is not exclusively lesbian; she gets a call on her cell phone from a boyfriend and her captors force her to break up with him and tell him she’s staying in Mexico) and some creative dungeon bondage complete with inventive bondage sex machines. Eventually Eva escapes (painfully) from all the iron clamps and clips that hold her, giving her the chance to run from room to room and see all of the other creatively-bound sex slaves. Looking for a way out, she eventually stumbles on what appears to be a cross between a rave party and a BDSM orgy, with captured women playing all the submissive roles the Marquis de Sade could have ever imagined.
Of course she gets grabbed again, and for the final scenes of the comic, she’s trussed to a St. Andrews Cross for a very public, very naked, very painful whipping, drawn in elaborate detail across more than 20 panels, of which this is just one:
Caption: “Eva’s body floats on a sea of pain. The leather pounds her relentlessly, leaving burning strips of red-hot agony across her tender white flesh…”
Overall, my conclusion and recommendation is to pick these comics by their covers, which tend to offer a fairly good idea of the artist’s visual style. Then, count on ignoring the text and enjoying the rich visuals. Be extra careful if you’re turned off by rough treatment of cartoon women; in most cases these pixels get pretty raw handling.
See Also:
A great review.
[…] are from Spanking Blog’s review yesterday of Hotel Eden by Coax. Her name is Maria and I think she looks pretty edible for a […]
[…] of reviews, this is from a review of a BDSM comic book by Coax at Spanking […]
I guess I dodged a bullet on your post! I’ve been writing and translating DoFantasy stories for a while now and was afraid you’d selected one of mine for your criticism. But I’m proud to say that I wasn’t the author behind any of the ones listed on your post. Yes, writers should be immune to criticism but that doesn’t mean they enjoy it.
In all honesty, I will admit that some of the stories I’ve penned can fall into the same trap you mentioned. I’ve never used “Piss Box” before, but I’ve often been left scratching my head trying to come up with another euphemism for “bottom”, which is tricky when the term has been used 20 times already and there’s still 10 pages of artwork to go.
Three quick things about your post:
1) Yes, there are translation issues. Comics featured on the DoFantasy site come from graphic artists in many different countries, and sometimes the story elements can get battered around in translation. I do everything possible to keep the flow of the story smooth so the reader isn’t aware of its international origins. Success varies, but the effort is always there.
2) There’s no doubt that the pixels do get rough treatment, and that spanking is only part of the carnal cornucopia these comics encompass. Personally, I’d like to work on few comics specifically devoted to spanking, and maybe there will be some in the future.
3) Cartoon “speech bubbles” hold a pitifully small amount of text, something I didn’t appreciate when I started. I can’t tell the number of times I’ve come up with the perfect dialog for a character, but had to settle for “Take it, bitch!” because of space considerations. Ah well.
Thanks for posting your review, and I hope I get the opportunity to thrill you in the future with some of my writing.
-Sandow
[…] a review at Spanking Blog of a Dofantasy BDSM comic book called Hotel Eden by artist […]
[…] From Hell Posted on January 13th, 2013 by admin. Categories: BDSM.A comic book treatment of the worst hotel ever. Pretty girls check in, but they don’t check out! no comments yet. « Shower […]
Spankboss, I’m a foreigner so please excuse my silly questions, but is it bad English or is it just too vulgar to your personal taste? Because, even if I’m not a fan of that kind of expressions myself, I can well imagine that some people really like it that way. Maybe the idea is that the more “unsuitable” language, the more taboo it feels and therefore more exciting. I’ve personally met some men who like to use expressions so terrible that it’s been nearly turn off to me and who want to do things like… Well, like spreading lipstick all over a girl’s face or make her wear a pig mask yo humiliate her. :D Which to my taste isn’t sexy at all but for each their own.
Hey, K. It’s not the vulgarity per se, it’s a specific and commonly-seen problem I called “bad sex writing” in the post. Sandow put his finger on the cause of it, which is the desire to find new synonyms for words like “pussy” so that you don’t use the same word 800 times in a document that’s all about that. It’s a real problem but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, especially when the phrase chosen falls so poorly on the ear as “piss box”. Piss is one of those words that’s typically only erotic to somebody with a specific urine fetish; to everybody else, it’s jarring and unpleasant.
Are there guys out there who enjoy using crude language, and women who enjoy having it used about them? Sure. But in the Dofantasy comments, you never get a genteel villain; it’s always maximum degradation. Which is fine in measured doses only, IMO.