In 2014 the French comic publisher Dynamite started reissuing all of Casotti’s material in a seven-volume collection, starting with Oh! Giovanna, and continuing with Giovanna! Si!, Giovanna! Ah!, and four volumes of Giovannissima! Here are the first two stories from Oh! Giovanna – L’amour à mort (Love You to Death), and Lucy et Miss Dorla.
Oh! Giovanna concludes with an appreciation from one M.Z., entitled Eroticism and Fantasy:
Giovanna Casotto’s erotic stories are never pure stylistic exercises or simple pretexts for the literal pornographic representation of the sexual act. On the contrary, in the narrative mechanism of her short stories there is a sense of play, of irony, of provocation, a personal, playful, mischievous vision of eros.
Her comics touch on the profound nature of eroticism – flights of fantasy and imagination, the transformation of reality through drawing.
Although as we know Giovanna uses photographs to initiate her work, the resulting drawings are always the result of a free interpretation of reality, not a simple copy, thanks to the composition and research which determine the quality of her images.
If her vigorous and powerful style could almost be defined as ‘masculine’ – in the clear contour, the plastic sense of volume, the rendering of the muscles, in the shadows and nuances – this is not the case. Here is real innovation in the representation of her images of women. Unlike male fetishistic obsession, which tends to focus attention on anatomical detail, Giovanna’s women are complete figures. They present a dynamic and sensual whole which stimulates the imagination of those who observe their postures and attitudes, where all parts of the body become important.
Giovanna tends to avoid complete nudity, thus marking another important distancing from the tradition of the male imagination, not only in comics, but in art in general. Her women, rarely completely revealed, exhibit an eroticism of chiaroscuro, of clothed nudity, made of form and void, of shadow and light, and they thus become more exciting and mysterious. They cannot and do not want to offer themselves as completely naked to the male gaze, because if they did it would detract from the possibilities of exploration and imagination.
Women created by a woman, these figures of the author’s fantasised alter ego are constantly in search of the feminine erotic dimension par excellence – true orgasm, a plenitude which enhances the entire being.