Spicy Tales: A Naughty Anthology

(1988-90, Eternity Comics/Malibu)

  Spicy Tales: A Naughty Anthology was a comic book from Eternity Comics/Malibu Graphics that ran for twenty issues in the 1980s and 1990s, and reprinted comics from the pages of the “Spicy” pulps of the 1930s and 1940s (Spicy Detective, Spicy Mystery, Spicy Advenutre, et al), and from the pre-code comic books of the 1940s & 1950s. There were also a couple of themed “specials.”

Most of the issues included reprints of strips featuring Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner and Adolphe Barreaux’s Sally the Sleuth from the pages of Spicy Detective, and featured introductions by pulp historian John Wooley.

Cheese? You’re soaking in it.

It’s ironic then that, given that the original “Spicies” pulps boasted some of the most alluring and wink-wink suggestive covers of all the pulps, the Spicy Tales comic covers themselves were so often disappointing. Occasionally lurid and often tasteless, but the art couldn’t touch the original covers published back in the thirties and forties for eyebrow-raising suggestiveness or even saucy professionalism. Instead they often settled for rather crude and crass amateurishness. Not to mention more than a troubling whiff of misogyny.

COMICS

  • SPICY TALES: A NAUGHTY ANTHOLOGY
    (1988-90, Eternity Comics/Malibu)
    Twenty issues
    Various writers and artists: Adolphe Barreaux, Robertl Leslie Bellem, Clayton Maxwell
  • SPICY TALES SPECIAL #1
    (February 1989, Eternity Comics/Malibu)
    Contained “four complete stories.”
  • SPICY TALES SPECIAL #2
    (April 1989, Eternity Comics/Malibu)
    This one promised “40 pages of fabulous jungle babes.”
Respectfully compiled by Kevin Burton Smith. Any additional info would be greatly appreciated.

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