Casa HowHard is one of Roberto Baldazzini’s most distinctive erotic comics – a fantastical apartment block populated almost entirely by glamorous, highly sexualised women who combine exaggeratedly feminine bodies with male genitalia. Rather than treating this premise as something shocking or transgressive, Baldazzini presents it with an extraordinary lightness and visual elegance. The residents, their lovers and their neighbours move through a world of sexual rivalries, seductions and extravagant adventures that is as much fantasy playground as conventional narrative. The result is erotic, playful and deliberately artificial, with the polished surfaces of fashion illustration and glamour photography continually colliding with the unabashedly pornographic nature of the stories.

The series emerged from Baldazzini’s collaboration with the Italian erotic magazine Blue, where his work had appeared from 1995 onwards. Casa HowHard began serialisation in Blue with issue 55 in September 1995. La grande sfida (The Big Challenge) followed in issues 97–101 in 1999, and a further story, Intimità (Intimacy), appeared in issues 122–4 in 2001. Later instalments continued to appear in the magazine, including Le adoratrici del grande fallo (The Worshippers of the Great Phallus) in 2005, Casa HowHard 4 in 2007, Inserzioni (Advertisements) in 2008, and Casa HowHard 5: Ritorno a casa (Return to the House) in 2009.

The first Italian book edition, collecting this early Blue material, appeared from Castelvecchi in 1998. A second volume, collecting La grande sfida, followed from Mare Nero in 2001, while later material was collected in subsequent editions. The series also began to travel internationally. In France, an early edition appeared from Geisha Éditions in 2000, while Dynamite subsequently produced much more substantial colour editions, beginning with Casa HowHard 1 + 2 in 2007 and Casa HowHard 3 + 4 in 2009. The fifth and final volume, Casa HowHard 5, followed in France in 2012.

For English-language readers, the series was published by Eurotica, the adult imprint of NBM Publishing. Casa HowHard Vol. 1 appeared in July 2001 as a 64-page paperback and included Mœbius’s celebrated introduction. Volume 2 followed in 2002, Volume 3 in 2004 and Volume 4 in July 2007; Casa HowHard Vol. 5: Manga Dreams appeared in 2010. Eurotica subsequently published 1 + 2, 3 + 4, and 5 all in coloured versions.

Colour became increasingly important as Baldazzini worked on the series. The original stories were predominantly black and white, allowing his exceptionally controlled line to do most of the work, his women constructed from sweeping, economical contours, immaculate curves and sharply defined areas of shadow. Colour became increasingly important as Baldazzini revisited the series, and the later French editions of Volumes 1 and 2 were specifically promoted as definitive, large-format colour editions, with Gian Luca Raimondi credited with the colouring of the first volume in the 1 + 2 edition.

By the final fifth volume Baldazzini was deliberately taking his drawing in another direction altogether. Manga Dreams applies Japanese manga-influenced aesthetics and panel design to the Casa HowHard characters, demonstrating that the apparent simplicity of his line was never a fixed formula but something he could adapt to radically different visual languages.

For this portfolio we have selected the first forty or so pages from the opening volume, where the visual world of the Casa HowHard is established, while the final pages come from Volume 5, allowing the reader to see how far Baldazzini had taken the same characters and basic erotic fantasy by the end of the series. Seen together, the two selections make Casa HowHard more than a collection of erotic episodes – they document more than a decade of experimentation with line, colour, composition, and the visual possibilities of erotic fantasy.

The series’ most famous contemporary endorsement came from the French artist Mœbius (Jean Giraud), who contributed the introduction to the first volume. Rather than treating Baldazzini’s work as merely pornographic, Mœbius responded to its extraordinary lack of shame, anger or moral anxiety. For him, Casa HowHard presents a sexual fantasy world with an almost dreamlike serenity, a paradise that has not so much been lost as yet to be found. His complete introduction is reproduced below.

Visions of a possible paradise

We do not yet know the limits of the imagination when it comes to sexuality. Literature has a tradition, and even a Bible, in the person of the ‘divine’ Marquis. His Sadean prose, although archaic, retains all the vigour of a tree capable of providing majestic shade. As for the other arts, they are generally still only at the stage of first faltering steps, still imprisoned by the corset of censorship.
     Comic art, for its part, enjoys a kind of impunity (which is the good side of the relatively low regard in which it is held), and it would take too long to draw up the list of artists who have plunged into the hells of perversion. But now along comes Roberto Baldazzini, master of an imperial graphic technique, nourished by a thousand visual-art references, but utterly original in his representation of the world, an originality that stands out in the willingly melodramatic universe of comics.
     So here he is, with an understated manner of expression, placing himself at the service of a fantastical vision, without any restraint, untouched by anger, guilt and, I would finally say, torment. We find ourselves in a sexual world of such serenity that it takes our breath away, as though we were confronted by the spectacle of a paradise not lost, but not yet found.
     Baldazzini is an angel who allows us a glimpse of the blinding dream of our desires.