cover image How to... Make Money Like a Porn Star

How to... Make Money Like a Porn Star

Neil Strauss, Bernard Chang, . . Regan, $19.95 (116pp) ISBN 978-0-06-088405-5

Strauss's first graphic novel—named after his Jenna Jameson collaboration How to Make Love Like a Porn Star —could be called a well-intentioned failure if its intentions weren't so hateful. A desperately unfunny satire of the porn industry, it follows the rise and fall of generic skin-flick queen Claudia Corvette through a convoluted time line littered with guns, knives, violent perverts, fiendish Middle Eastern types and breast implants. Strauss's plot makes almost no sense, and it's soggy with insiderish gags, rape jokes and sneering contempt for every one of his characters, whether they're the (inevitably venal) producers or (inevitably pathetic) consumers of pornography. Whenever the story threatens to develop some parodic bite, he spoils it with a batch of fizzled gags or, worse, overwrought scenes of degrading violence. The book runs through a catalogue of formal tricks, letting Chang cleverly switch his art style scene by scene—there's a "Dark Knight"–style video-screen montage, a big-head comic strip, some spoofs of X-rated video boxes, a mangafied high school scene, a mock centerfold, a sketched-out storyboard for a movie and (naturally) a whole lot of slick titillation. But even Chang's versatility and smooth, graceful line can't clarify the book's garbled storytelling or redeem its ugly attitude. (Oct.)