Hustler Honey Buns # 25, Taboo Illustrated # 4

6 LETTERS 7 DEATH IN THE HAREM Graphic Novel by Ferres—Part Four 16 THE GREAT REBELLION Graphic Novel by Fernando—Part One 26 PONY LIFE Graphic Novel by Doval—Part Four 34 HARD LINES Like Kink Itself, Hardcore BDSM Illustration Wasn't Born Yesterday Special Feature by Ernest Greene 42 YAKUZA SLAVES Graphic Novel by Roberts—Part Four 58 SLAVEMART Graphic Novel by Erenisch—Part Four 66 SIBERIAN MADHOUSE Graphic Novel by Templeton—Part One 76 HELL'S BROTHEL Graphic Novel by Tryten—Part One EDITORIAL NOTE STRICTLY SPEAKING Sade called his epic novel Justine "A Tale of Vice Rewarded and Virtue Chastised" and that's what you'll see in TABOO ILLUSTRATED. In these pages, innocent babes are cruelly mistreated by sadistic degenerates. The good girls are rarely rescued and the bad guys usually get away with it. Why is this so? Because when it comes to certain unfortunate realities about our own kind, we speak the sooth. Artists hold up mirrors to the world in which they live, and what's reflected, however beautifully rendered, isn't always pretty. Good doesn't always triumph over evil. In that way, the wild flights of extreme fantasy filling this book are more "realistic" about the moral universe we all share than is comforting. Redemption, uplift and the defeat of vice at the hands of virtue may be the raw materials of Hollywood's dream factory, but the dreams here are as dark as the world outside. In that world, the defenseless often suffer at the hands of the powerful without relief. Righteous retribution does not descend upon the vile perpetrators vile debauchery. Any unblinking overview of our modern world reveals that great technological progress has not been accompanied by moral advancement over much of the globe. Sade's observation that "the history of humanity is the history of its crimes" holds as true today as it did two hundred years ago. If only evil people did evil things, evil would be in short supply, which clearly it is not. It is the recognition of this harsh reality that gives the work of our artists such power and impact. They reveal something fundamental about human nature that resists all attempts to tame it. The truth they tell isso subversive, it can only be rendered in pen and ink. But to recognize the evil that men do is not necessarily to embrace it. While the bad guys in our harrowing fables may be identifiably human, they are never sympathetic, unlike their victims. To quote a favorite character from a much brighter comic universe, The Tick, we must oppose evil "because evil is just plain wrong." We may indulge ourselves in its fictional representation but we may never allow ourselves to fall under its seductive sway in our treatment of others.