After a prolific period in the seventies and early eighties, new Farrel works dwindled to the point where most people thought he had died. Then after more than a decade Roger Finance from Toulouse published Perversions, a new collection of 24 drawings with accompanying texts. The production quality was not very good, and Perversions never reached the large readership of the earlier works. It did, however, demonstrate that Farrel was far from dead; he was in fact living contentedly with his wife Monique in semi-retired seclusion in Paris.

The violent beauty of Farrel’s work would undoubtedly have remained very marginal without Roger Finance, a renegade of the pornographic trade. Passionate about books, in the early 1970s Finance launched into erotic publishing, publishing hard-core novels, comics and illustrated novels, enough to supply all the sex shops in France. He took over from Dominique Leroy, one of Farrel’s first editors, and showed unwavering loyalty to her illustrator. Finance’s Star X shop on Toulouse’s rue Héliot managed to survive a remarkable 43 years from its opening in 1972, finally closing its doors only in 2015.

As Christophe Bier explains, ‘both Farrel and Finance were ultimately the victims of two things: first, the decline of the pornography industry to which they were linked. Fewer sex shops, fewer magazines. Both Farrel and his publisher believe that the appearance of DVDs killed the public’s taste for books, only in its turn for the internet to take over. The second element was the return of puritanism and self-censorship within French society, as in other countries. The violence and absence of taboos in Farrel’s work was no longer tolerable. He was too outrageous for our current culture of consent. Love shops had replaced traditional sex shops, and the sex trade was increasingly targeting women and urban couples.’

Perversions was published by Roger Finance for Promo Import, Toulouse, in the ‘Collection Secrète’.

If you are interested in reading the texts as well as seeing the drawings, a complete online version of Perversions with texts in French and English can be found here.