How about a little spice this Valentine's Day season? After the various volumes of the Sunstone series, a feminist and endearing series on BDSM, Panini continues her exploration of sex comics with Faithless written by Brian Azzarello and drawn by Maria Llovet.
Risky encounters
Faithless opens with small boxes of the body of a woman whose reader understands that she is approaching pleasure but in the next page we discover that she is alone and can not reach orgasm. This young woman, Faith, is an artist surrounded by many friends who seem to give her directive advice. It does not assume its own choices. She is attracted to women but has not yet taken the step (of the bedroom). However, the innocent young woman is looking for an adventure of novelties. When she pushes and then helps Poppy who is trying to get rid of a man who does not accept the breakup, her whole life will change. Not only is the style of this blue-haired Asian intriguing but she is also the muse of famous painters and knows the best places to have fun. (spoiler, we can remove the whole sentence) It is with her that Faith takes her foot for the first time. Thanks to this meeting, Faith enters a private party with pop stars, coke and bodies released in public. Still very shy and awkward, she is taken out of the evening by a misunderstanding but this clumsiness allows her to meet Thorn and she lets herself be kissed. This self-confident, even pretentious artist bewitches him. Each episode ends with a successful cliffhanger that pushes to turn the page as quickly as possible. At the end of the second chapter, it is revealed that Poppy is Thorn's daughter. It is he and Poppy who will introduce Faith to the pleasures of the body, but are they so benevolent?
Magic happens
The magic is present from the outset in Faithless but no one really believes it. Faith is a magician to get out of the routine more than out of interest … until dreams and then stranger and stranger events occur. A photo reveals the presence of a wolf during the evening. This prowler is a metaphor for the wild and indomitable pleasure that gradually spreads into the narrative. As often in these magical stories, the excluded know this secret world. This magic is modern. It is not a question of potion or evocation but of persuasion by speech. While Faith breaks away from her former friends to reach another social and artistic level, she signs a Faustian pact with Thorn and his daughter but does not yet realize it. 
A bold drawing
In Faithless, sex is an experience at first before the heroine is swallowed by her gluttony. Don't expect steamy pages. Even if the images are a little more explicit on a square at the end, Faithless remains more a narrative about art than sex. The style of the cartoonist Maria Llovet is a very original choice for this genre. In general, eroticism is embodied by a hyperrealistic and precise drawing with soft or warm colors but the drawing is flat and lacks relief with barely sketched inking. Very bright almost fluorescent colors are a bold choice because they are rare in this genre more accustomed to heady colors. We can find that it is a failure like the very light inking that sketches the shapes rather than it highlights them. This choice of blur is a problem for a narrative about bodies. This volume of Faithless marks the beginning of an original series for Brian Azzarello often associated with the thriller. Faithless is presented as an erotic tale. If we follow the sensual discoveries of an innocent artist, the book goes further by proposing above all a reflection on deadly sins, ambition and art. The screenwriter was inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy and this volume opens with a quote from Anaïs Nin. This quick read sets the scene and the issues that will likely thicken later.
