NEAR MYTHS: LANN (1984)

Frank Thorne's space-opera spygirl LANN enjoyed just one serialized adventure in the pages of HEAVY METAL during 1984. While LANN is primarily another sexy-adventure comic like the GHITA series, Thorne changes things up a bit by placing this heroine's adventures in your basic routine space-opera setting, and by giving the new girl a look distinctly different from both Ghita and Ghita's more famous predecessor Red Sonja.

The plot for LANN is fairly simple. Lann, who works for an intergalactic agency called "C.I.," is charged with finding the two grown daughters of a skeevy crime-lord. This gives Lann the chance to show off her capacious charms while seeking information in all manner of bawdy space-bars and bordellos. Ghita traveled with two helpers-- an older man and an obedient troll-- and Thorne alters the latter to a mute droid named Glitch, while keeping the same basic template of "dirty old man" in the person of Lann's mechanic Shard.

Rigorous character definition isn't exactly on the menu for these sort of quasi-Rabelaisian hijicks, but Lann is more than just a boobalicious blowup-doll. From the first page of the story, Thorne makes clear that Lann is some years older than her twenty-something bod. He apparently doesn't want to rain on any reader's parades by revealing just how old she was before she received a "recycled' body. Still, the dialogue between Lann and Shard on page 2 suggests that Shard has already seen Lann's previous body, and that said body was perhaps closer to his own age, since now he claims that "you've made me into an instant dirty old man." Thorne doesn't make the age-discrepancy central to the story, but it becomes a leitmotif throughout, with Lann herself opining, "It's vanity that chose youth over morality." When Lannn has a random hookup with a middle-aged reprobate, he remarks, "This is the first time I've felt easy with a dame young enough to be my kid." She merely hints that they may be closer in age than he thinks. The intrepid sex-agent also hooks up with a genuinely younger conquest, but this doesn't turn out well for him or for her.

Simple though Lann's sole outing may be, Thorne's work is distinguished by his ability to suggest the interactions of sex and violence as comprising a single vision of total excessiveness for its own sake. I wonder sometimes if any comics-artists in this politically correct era has even attempted to follow in Frank Thorne's impressive footsteps. I would tend to think that his only rivals might be Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, but even their sexy work is often hamstrung by their catchpenny politics.