Barbarella, Book 1 by Jean-Claude Forest

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a book older than I am is dated these days, but I am. 1965 doesn't seem that long ago - it was just before me, and I'm still here, right?

But 1965 is a long time ago, and this was even more early '60s than I expected.

Now, what I read is not exactly the same as the original stories, I think: the first batch of Barbarella stories were written and drawn by Jean-Claude Forest and published in the French V Magazine in 1962. I think they were just collected, not edited or altered, for book publication in 1964, but I could be wrong. But this 2014 English-language edition from Humanoids, Barbarella, Book 1, is credited as adapted by the noted contemporary writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, which to me implies somewhat more work was needed than just translating the words in the balloons.

There's no explanation in the book, so I'm not sure if DeConnick turned Forest's laconic Gallic jump-cuts between episodes into something slightly more coherent, if she removed or downplayed more explicit (or rapey) sex scenes, if she made Barbarella more active or articulate, or if she just took a very "sexy French" thing from 1962 and made it as contemporary and straightforward as she could.

Barbarella is oddly disjointed, with each episode ending abruptly and leaping into the next, with a physical dislocation as Barbarella takes yet another unlikely transportation device to yet another strange location, where that transport will be almost immediately made inoperative for plot purposes. The episodes feel like semi-separate stories, and would have been better served with titles, instead of Forest pretending it was all one continuous flow.

But anyway: that's how this book works. We begin with Barbarella, a woman sometime in the indefinite galactic future, flying alone in her spaceship, fleeing some kind of badly-ended love affair, over the planet Lythion. She crash-lands in the great greenhouse Crystallia, destroying her ship and setting the general plot outline for each episode: she will be thrown into a situation where groups are fighting with each other, she will try to solve the situation (generally by seducing one or more leaders), there will be some vaguely implied sex but it will not solve the situation, Barbarella will get somewhat naked multiple times, there will be violence in which Barbarella takes part enthusiastically with a ray-gun, there will be a lot of running about to vague effect, and a vaguely positive outcome will end with Barbarella leaving in another means of transport, generally somewhat depressed, to another location on Lythion.

There are five or six of these episodes. The details are different, but they all follow that rough plot.

I will say that Lythion easily avoids the bad-SF "this world is all one thing" trope: every episode is set in a different location, with different environments and different inhabitants. In fact, they all seem to have very little knowledge of each other: they barely seem to be on the same planet at all.

These are wordy, talky stories. Barbarella and her lovers and nemeses (who are often the same) talk at each other a lot, and Forest fills up the sides of panels with long captions. Barbarella does get topless a lot and naked only slightly less often, but unless your kink is specifically "hot girl in danger," it's not that sexy: she's a relatively small figure in busy, caption-filled panels, and the implied sex happens between panels, referenced in dialogue and captions. A modern, careless reader could entirely miss the fact that she is having sex with a large fraction of the people she meets on Lythion.

Again, DeConnick might have specifically toned down the 1960s sexiness for this edition, but it doesn't come across as the scorching-hot thing it supposedly was in the mid-60s. It's a talky light-SF adventure with a heroine whose first instinct is to solve problems by fucking people, and only turns to shooting them when that doesn't work - ooh la la!