Scarlett Takes Manhattan

Scarlett O'Herring: Dancer, fire-breather, courtesan, and the star of Molly Crabapple's first graphic novel from Fugu Press.

Written by long-time collaborator John Leavitt, "Scarlett" follows the rise of Miss O'Herring from tragedy (her mother crushed by copulating circus elephants) through her grand entrance on the stage (accidental and sans costume) to her triumph as the fire-breathing queen of burlesque. It's a sexy, decadent romp through the slums and palaces of New York's Gilded Age.

Scarlett Takes Manhattan brings to life a character from Molly and John's long-running web comic "Backstage" from the collective Act-i-vate.

As Molly says, "It has Tammany Hall and bad politics and early-lesbian culture in it. And it's very dirty."

Molly Crabapple is THE artist of our time. I am desperately in love with her vision, her world, her characters, her art—and I want to live there!

— Margaret Cho

With its tongue in several cheeks at once, Scarlett overheats the Victorian erotic memoir into a madly funny firepit of debauchery. Disgustingly wonderful.

— Warren Ellis, author of Crooked Little Vein, Transmetropolitan, etc.

If we look below Molly Crabapple's exuberant colours and pretty, sensuous linework, at its heart Scarlett Takes Manhattan is pure punk: ebullient, bawdy, irreverent and libertine.

— Bryan Talbot, writer/artist of Grandville

Scarlett Takes Manhattan is erotically charged, funny, imaginative and stylishly antiquarian. It makes me want to climb inside the pages and close the book behind me forever.

— Trav S.D., author of No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book that Made Vaudeville Famous

What can a pair of retro-eyed hipsters do with our long-hidden, nasty, turn-of-the-century world of popular entertainment and its wondrously depraved political environs? Well, they could have concocted some limp-legged fantasy novel with Dickensian touches and 19th-century slang. But that's not what Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt's approach: they have created an outré graphic novel series about a saucy waif vamping her way through the stagedoors of the Big City vaudeville scene. Their Scarlett Takes Manhattan nods knowingly to the phantasmagoria and transsexualities of The Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay, Little Anny Fanny, and R. Crumb. It is an erotic and historical visual hoot. We can only hope that their twisted storytelling and nipple-bearing characters continue to appear in print form. Get it before the cartoon censors lower the curtain on their orgasmic heroine or it manifests itself in Off-Off-Off Broadway production.

— Mel Gordon, author of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin