About

What this site is for

Most writing about adult comics is either a scan dump or a moral argument. This is a history and craft site: how the medium got where it is, and how you build a page.

The history is documented or it is not printed

The history section sticks to the public record: the Comics Code and the trade body that ran it, the head shop distribution that made underground comix possible, and the laws that closed both routes. Where a date is uncertain the text gives a decade instead of a year. No comic titles are invented and presented as real ones, no cartoonists are made up, and no sales figures appear that cannot be checked, which is why this site publishes almost no numbers at all.

Everything here is written for adults and none of it is explicit. The subject is publishing and page construction: distribution, censorship mechanics, panel rhythm, scripting. Where a story problem involves sex, the writing is about how to structure the scene, not about describing it.

The craft pages are meant to be tested

The craft section covers the parts of comics that most beginners get wrong for structural reasons rather than technical ones. Pacing, the page turn, and the genre's hardest writing problem, which is showing that both characters chose the dynamic without stopping the story to say so. Each idea has a test you can run against a page you already drew.

Credits for the sample pages

The panels section holds original pages drawn for this site, one layout idea to a page. They are not historical comics, they do not reproduce any published comic, and they are attributed to no cartoonist. That credit runs in the same words on the panels index and on every sample page, so nobody has to work it out.

The structured data matches. Each page is published as an image with a credit line stating its origin, never as a comic work with an invented creator or a publication date it does not have. The scenes are ordinary and the figures are clothed, because the point of the drawing is the shape of the frames.

Who writes it

Three writers under pen names, which is ordinary in this subject area. None of them holds an academic post, a museum affiliation or a credited run at a publisher, and none will ever be described here as though they did. They are an independent comics historian and two people who make comics. That is the whole claim.

The bylines

Three writers, three parts of the same subject.

Comics historian

Hal Mercer

Hal writes the history: the underground years, the Code that pushed adult work out of the newsstand, the European shelf where it stayed respectable, and the platform era that reinvented the same fight with payment processors instead of censors.

Twenty years reading, collecting and writing about the medium.

Cartoonist

Sunny Okafor

Sunny draws and writes the craft pages: how a page breathes, why most beginner layouts collapse in the same three ways, and how to build tension in a medium where the reader controls the pace and can see the last panel before you want them to.

A working cartoonist with several self-published books behind them.

Writer and self-publisher

Bel Tarrant

Bel scripts adult comics and handles the unglamorous end: how to write power exchange that reads as chosen rather than done to someone, script formats artists can actually draw from, and where adult work can be sold once the big platforms decline it.

A decade scripting and self-publishing adult comics.

Publisher

BDSM Comics is published by Panelworks Press Ltd, a company registered in the Republic of Cyprus, at Themistokli Dervi 6, Office 17, Nicosia 1066, Cyprus. Corrections, attribution queries and rights questions go to [email protected], and a documented correction will be made.

Comics record it. They do not invent it.

Everything this site studies started with people deciding together what they were going to do. That part has never needed a publisher.

See where that happens