I can't remember how, as a pre-teen, I ended up with a copy of L'Echo des Savanes magazine (Special Issue 3 - 01/01/1983) in my hands. I don't want to compromise anyone, because my memories are far too vague. But I still wonder who could have had the crazy idea of giving this to a kid.
First and foremost, for those who are unfamiliar with it, L'Echo des Savanes is a French comic book magazine for adult audiences, created in 1972. Its pages have featured works by Manara, Robert Crumb, Alex Varenne and other authors of erotic and alternative comics.

Leafing through the book, I discover Frieda Boher with amazement. She has the body of a goddess, but her face is not very attractive: with her large chin, big mouth, short hair and pair of glasses... Damn, she's sexy in her cold, authoritarian and violent dominatrix attitude, a true evil genius!
She is simply dressed in a black fishnet bra that cradles her ample breasts, long black gloves, black panties that cover only the essentials, held up by a studded belt with a steel buckle, and a pair of black thigh-high boots. She hides her outfit under a long black hooded cape. I really like the silhouette. I like to believe that this outfit is made entirely of patent leather, where others would prefer to see it as latex or vinyl.
Then Necron, a creature assembled from pieces of corpses, with a sexual appetite as ferocious as his taste for hyper-violence and cannibalism, makes his appearance! The passage I am reading is the one where Frieda Boher and Necron are on the train to Amsterdam, taken from the arc ‘Noblesse dépravée’.
The monster is locked in a chest in the biologist's train cabin. Begging his mistress, she frees him just long enough for him to greedily give her a mouthful of affection (Ooooh!), before she knees him hard in the face to signal him to go back into his box.

A few pages later, as Necron manages to escape, I delight in discovering the horrors he commits on the train. He smashes the skulls of a few ticket inspectors and passengers with his fists. Annoyed to find that he is fucking a transvestite, he explodes his backside with his big electrified cock.

He continues his carnage by raping and breaking the neck of an Asian beauty, or decapitating an old bourgeois woman to silence them.
The macabre trip ends with Frieda and Necron jumping off the train. All these horrors have excited the biologist, who offers herself to her creature.

The person who gave me the comic book magazine L'Echo des Savanes had no idea what a bombshell she had just handed me, and I still thank her for it. I suppose she hadn't bothered to leaf through the magazine when she found it. She hadn't seen all the scandalous content, let alone the pornographic horror story contained in its centre pages. Reading it would shape the artist I became, my attraction to drawing high-heeled shoes and severe, cruel dominatrixes, in a mixture of sex, violence and domination.
I am about ten years old when I discover this concentration of sex, violence, black humour and horror, and I become acquainted with the art of ‘Magnus’.

Necron, artwork by Roberto Raviola, known as ‘Magnus’, based on an original story by Ilaria Volpe, published by Edifumetto, 1981–1985.
First French edition – series incomplete – published by L’Echo des Savanes / Albin Michel
Second French edition – series complete – published by Éditions Cornelius

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