Club exposed to decadent pictures

Our guest speaker at the April club meeting was member Darcy Sullivan. Darcy has previously delivered a talk on Comics for Chaps, and this time his subject was Decadence in Comics. (Honestly he does do more than just read comics all day—he's press officer for the Oscar Wilde Society and plays humorous country music as The Arkham Hillbilly. I believe he also has a job.) Darcy's talk this time covered attempts at transferring decadent literature to the comic form, from A Rebours to Dorian Gray to Gabriele D'Annunzio (more often D'Annunzio himself as a character, rather than anything he wrote), assessing how successful they were and how faithful they were to the original text. It won't surprise you to hear that they were seldom very faithful, feeling the need to introduce fights, murders and crime sprees to keep things exciting. Even a tortoise gets shot. The talk also took a peep at horror comics and offered some reflections on what decadence actually is. You can see a video of the full lecture on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/NsiTsmjcWzk. You can see more still photos from the evening in this album on Flickr.