"I anticipated my weekly rendezvous with Valeria with both joy and dread. All week I'd fantasize about it, and when it arrived I'd be terrified. But I wouldn't miss it for the world. Each visit was like a firewalk, a dance of Shiva. Each week I entered the furnace of my desire and was destroyed, only to emerge like a golden phoenix, stronger than before."

This is slave Jennifer's account of the courtship (or apprenticeship) phase of her relationship with her Mistress, the dark and mysterious Valeria. The story of their adventures would be an interesting one-handed read as a novel in words alone. As a novel in cartoons, it provides a delectable combination of pleasures.

Brian Tarsis' narrative style (as shown in the quoted passage) is more than matched by his skill in drawing the voluptuous Valeria, the smaller blonde Jennifer, and various villains, human and inhuman, engaged in diverse activities. While the characters are definitely stereotyped, they are convincingly and dramatically drawn in shaded black-and-white, complete with details such as whip marks.

As Jennifer tells the story of her kidnapping by enemies of her Mistress who use the slave as bait to lure Valeria into danger, the action becomes outrageously nonconsensual, sort of. Here is Jennifer's account of her violation by invisible demons who have sneaked into Valeria's gothic mansion:

"I think I might have gone mad, but for the instinct for submission that is my special gift. Unable to do anything else, I gave myself to the creatures, losing my self-awareness in a maelstrom of sensation . . . I became the willing plaything of demons."

These creatures are drawn as cat-like eyes in the darkness and represented by Jennifer's stretched cunt and anal openings as she is held in mid-air, eyes wide in shock. This scene is just the beginning of her ordeal.

After a drugged journey, Jennifer awakens in a temple of doom on a remote tropical island where shrunken heads on sticks decorate the swinging bridge that leads to the forbidding entrance. While held captive, she learns the true nature of Valeria as well as that of her arch-enemy and his minions. As she waits for her Mistress to rescue her, Jennifer attracts a lot of attention from a creepy crew who are drawn (as it were) from various nations:

"First there was Kogo [in a grass skirt], recruited from a nearby island tribe, and his buddy Otto, the geriatric Austrian [a mad-scientist type with hunchback and thick glasses] . . then there was Ryan, the Irish terrorist, who spent hours probing my orifices with his weird collection of home-made bottle brushes [a secret weapon of the IRA?] . . . I think Jackson [a muscular, whip-wielding African-American] was the only sane one in the place . . . Quinn was an American [a white, beer-swilling football fan] . . . then Desiree, the French woman, had a go at me. It's a good thing I'm flexible, because she had me twisted into a pretzel!"

After all this entertainment, Valeria arrives to reclaim her property. Will she succeed? Perhaps more importantly, will Jennifer remain loyal to her Mistress once her secrets are revealed? In a series of eye-catching scenes, the conflict is resolved (for awhile) as devotion is tested and proven. All the major characters remain alive, so there is a chance that Valeria and her nemesis will meet again.

This is a visual fantasy for adults who used to spend their allowance on the latest comic book starring their favorite superheroes, villains and their captives. The Story of O or a novel by the Marquis de Sade it's not, but Valeria and the other graphic novels by Brian Tarsis City of Dreams, Daphne and Wormwood are likely to become classics in their own way. For more information on these books, check out the website for Chastenwood Press, which seems to be a spinoff of Chastenwood, a group for spanking enthusiasts. More art by Brian Tarsis is advertised on his own site, including: "a series of works [mostly spanking scenes] that I've done specifically to hang on the wall, rather than for publication." These drawings on heavy art paper (some in full color) are not cheap, but they are polished and appealing. Although underage viewers are warned away from these images, they seem designed to appeal to the adventurous kid in every kinky adult.