I was recently lured to a hotel room to look at some dirty pictures.

Well, sort of. I went to a room in San Diego's Marriott Hotel to meet some friends for dinner, and ended up browsing through their recent comic purchases, which included several issues of XXXENOPHILE. For those of you who don't know, XXXENOPHILE is the name of a series of comics, books and games produced under the auspices of Phil Foglio. The website describes it as "fun, cheerful erotica", which is a fair description.

I'd never seen any XXXENOPHILE before, but I'd heard about it. A very respectable and determinedly Christian married couple I know have quite the collection, as I understand it. The comics may not quite be fit for dinner parties, but they're good clean muck, with tongue planted firmly in someone or other's cheek.

And if sex in comics is your thing, XXENOPHILE isn't the only option available to you. Oh no. It's just one of the nicer options. At the other end of things is Avatar Press, publisher of nasty books about demons, sex, and sometimes demon sex. Well, most times demon sex. All demon sex, all the time, for all I know. I'm no expert. Vaginas dentata are not my thing.

Then there's Fantagraphics, publisher of such estimable works as the Carl Barks Library, SAFE AREA GORAZDE and BOFFY THE VAMPIRE LAYER. Fantagraphics publishes its erotica under another name, Eros Comix, for reasons only their mothers can truly comprehend. I actually own an Eros comic. (Comeau? Is there a singular of 'comix'?) I picked it up in Atlanta during my grand tour of Americana a few years back, when a friend and I dared to enter a sex shop on Peachtree to boggle at the elderly crippled dwarf porn. Naturally I ended up retreating to the comics counter, where I boggled still further at the number of non-pornographic Tundra comics inexplicably on display. The comic I picked up was issue three of Eros' YUPPIES, REDNECKS AND LESBIAN BITCHES FROM MARS. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

The story (because it's important, you understand) takes place in 2021, and involves a lesbian hegemony dominating Mars while Earth falls to civil war, with rednecks controlling the drugs supply and yuppies living underground with one inflatable doll between them.

'Eros is the reason Fantagraphics has stayed in business all this time.' Needless to say, it's rubbish. The J Scott Campbell-esque art is appalling, the writing is horrible, and, in my humble opinion, the erotic content is negligible. It's about as far beneath the quality threshold of a Fantagraphics book as you can imagine getting. So why is Fantagraphics publishing it, and other books like it?

The answer is no surprise - and, to Fantagraphics' credit, no secret. The powers-that-be at Fantagraphics have freely admitted for years that Eros is the reason Fantagraphics has stayed in business all this time. While things are changing now, and Fantagraphics is beginning to see a nice return on its trade paperback sales, without porn the company could easily have gone under some time before SAFE AREA GORAZDE ever saw print. As Fantagraphics' Gary Groth admitted in an interview with Sequential Tart last year, "Publishing porn to subsidize literary work is practically a tradition in lit publishing."

See, there are two things we know unequivocally to be true. Sex sells, and comics don't. Sex is irresistible. Comics are immovable. Philosophers and scientists have often wondered what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. In this case, sex clearly wins, and the comics start moving. In fact, sex almost always wins. Paul O'Brien recently pointed out that if there's one thing that people know comics can do, it's comedy, and comedy will sell comics. The same may not quite be true of sex, as the wider audience doesn't readily associate comics with sex. But that doesn't mean they can't be won over by the idea of dirty pictures.

And in fact, sex and comics have a venerable past together. After all, pornography wasn't invented by the camera. There was a time when all dirty pictures were illustrations, and there has never been a time when pornographic art wasn't doing a healthy business. Taschen, publisher of all things arty, has published two huge cow-stunning collections of the works of Eric Stanton and Tom of Finland. Stanton created fetishist dominatrix comics from the 1960s onwards, which he self-published in The Stanton Archives, while Tom found fame through 'modelling catalogue' (and early gay flesh mag) Physique Pictorial back in the late 1950s. And then there's the DROPSIE AVENUE of erotic comics, LITTLE ANNIE FANNY, Harvey Kurtzman's 1960s creation for Playboy, which was recently reprinted by Dark Horse.

'Pornography wasn't invented by the camera.' Sex sells comics. We know this as much from the popularity of T&A comics as from the history of brown paper bag comics. I met Joe Phillips at San Diego. He used to draw SUPERBOY. Now he does erotic calendars, erotic web cartoons, erotic comic strips for magazines like XY, and even erotic fridge magnets, almost all for a gay audience. I'm not his accountant, so I don't know how well he's doing out of it, but I dare say there's a reason he's almost completely turned his back on mainstream comics.

Not everyone can do good erotica, but those who can - and do - are probably grateful for its rewards. Phillips is now working on an erotic comic called ARTHUR, and a DVD release of his web cartoons. He has at least two calendars in the pipeline for 2002, plus a book collection of his art. He's become a one-man industry. Quite why there aren't more artists like him, I can't imagine.

Porn - or erotica, call it what you will - does not have the same stigma today that it once had. The kitsch appeal of Russ Meyer movies, the name recognition of Traci Lords and the coffee-table tomes of Taschen have all chipped away at the taboo. X-rated 'hardcore' movies are no longer illegal in UK sex shops. (In fact, it's difficult to believe that, until very recently, they still were.) While no one is putting their porn videos in the front room next to their Scorsese collection yet, and folks still don't have a place for their vibrators on the mantelpiece, the old social objections to the existence of a sex industry are dropping away. Few would still argue that all porn is exploitation. No-one sane would maintain that porn leads to deviancy. Now we've come to accept that all men masturbate, it's a short hop and a skip to accepting that most men own some kind of porn. And men do love their porn to be visual.

'Porn does not have the same stigma today that it once had.' Frank Rich of The New York Times recently conjectured that the pornographic film industry has annual sales of around $14 billion. Forbes magazine argues that the industry as a whole - including the Internet and pornographic magazines - is only worth $3.9 billion at most. Either way, that's not a bad slice of pie, and comics really ought to be a bigger part of it. Why aren't more publishers following the Fantagraphics model, and churning out porn to underwrite the quality product that hardly anyone is buying? I'm not suggesting it would go down well with Joe Liebermann if Marvel were publishing PornoHeroes, but there are small time publishers out there that could do with a kick.

There's another potential benefit, as well. Comic publishing remains an expensive process, and the technology behind it has hardly progressed in leaps and bounds. If there are still technological breakthroughs to be made in the comics industry - and advances in computer illustration would seem to suggest there are - then porn is our best chance for discovering them. Like war, porn is responsible for a phenomenal number of technological advances, but unlike war, everyone gets out alive. Technology companies are forever using the 'adult entertainment' industry as the testbed for their new products and services. According to Susan Struble, a spokeswoman for Sun Microsystems, "The way you know if your technology is good and solid is if it's doing well in the porn world."

More porn comics could mean cheaper comics, or better online distribution. It would almost certainly mean more money to pour into quality product for the grown-up (as opposed to 'adult') bookshelf market. And even without those advantages, there should be more porn comics simply because it's a good business to be in. We live in a wah-wah world. Why fight it?

But, you ask, will there be a crossover audience? Will all those BOFFY THE VAMPIRE LAYER readers set down their porn and pick up a copy of SAFE AREA GORAZDE?

Can't you people get your minds off normal comics for just five minutes?

Andrew Wheeler is a London-based entertainment journalist.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.