Voyage en profondeurs (Journey into the Depths) was actually Olaf Boccère’s first extended foray into erotic comics, though the collected series was not published by Dynamite until 2012. A crazy mix of history and genre with borrowings from Jules Verne, Conan Doyle and Jonathan Swift, the entire series extended to some 150 pages. The strip was originally commissioned by the Spanish erotic publisher La Cupola in 1995, and was published in the Spanish and French-language Kiss Comix magazines – the French branch was renamed La poudre aux rêves in 1997. The original series ran until 2001.
The back-cover blurb from the 2012 collected Dynamite edition explains the narrative succinctly: ‘The charming professor Linda Lidenbrock engages with the bowels of our planet in the company of Vincent Ledanoy, an experienced expert of deep orifices. A tribute to tales of adventure and travel from the end of the nineteenth century, Journey to the Depths is also a nod to burlesque cinema and Anglo-Saxon humour, but with the difference that the protagonists fornicate on each page – in the capsule taking them to the centre of the earth, on the beaches of a lost continent, on the island of Lilliput – even in the world of the Amazons.’
Though the cover states ‘By the authors of Chambre 121’, Igor and Boccère are of course one and the same.