Hey Maxxx and solJAris,
thanks for all the info.
Maxxx, if you see Pontello in Berlin in October try and find out if he also owns rights to the mags, or if he knows who does, because there could be a market for a CD-Rom with scans of all of the originals. ESPECIALLY if someone translated the dialogue into English. You might also suggest he do a book about ?how we filmed Supersex?, talking about all the stars he worked with.
For all the fellows out there who have heard about Supersex magazine but either haven?t seen any, or else don?t read Italian (they were filmed in France, and some in Amsterdam and Germany, but so far as I know they only came out in Italian) here?s some background.
The plot premise is that an alien crashes and is stranded on Earth. He comes from a planet that values justice ? hence a crime fighter ? but where males must have sex often or they lose their strength. Luckily he is equipped with various superpowers, among which is a ?mental force? that makes any woman lose all resistance and succumb to sex. The alien has to find a ?host? body which he borrows to solve some crime and meantime have sex with nearly every woman who appears in the episode. The male hosts came from ?all walks of life?: professor, photographer, doctor, etc. But since Earth humans have less resistance, he ?discards? the body once it gets exhausted at the end of each episode.
That?s why the first few issues rotated the male actors. Some hugely hung guy named ?Otto? was Supersex in issue 1, which hit the stands in October 1976 (in Italy you can get hard porn in the news kiosks right next to family magazines and sports papers), Ghislain Van Hove in issue 4, Alban Ceray in issue 6, etc. Pontello first appeared in issue 3. After issue number 6, whoever was producing the mag hit on the intuition that readers would prefer a single actor who got to shag all the women, so from issue 7 Pontello returned, they made him a special forces agent of the French secret service (later, a private eye), and the series continued with him for almost 200 episodes. The exception occurred about issue 50 or so, when they replaced Pontello with another cocksman named Patric something-or-other for a few issues, but they brought Pontello back in an issue entitled ?Supersex si riprende il corpo di Pontello?. I assume Pontello was chosen for his circus-act talent of keeping hard long after a cumshot (as you can see in his movies), since one of the premises is that Supersex is always hard and apparently cums half a dozen times with each woman. (Of course you see only one or two pop shots, the others are ?simulated?, though in at least two episodes I recall, he managed 3 actual pop shots with one actress. Occasionally there are faked cumshots, and I was told that was because in the 70s these actors might do 5 or 6 scenes a day for various mags. But the fake shots are few over a total of several hundred sex scenes).
The classic issues for situations were the first 30 or so (from 1976 to mid 1979), and most issues were top quality up through issues 60 or 70 (mid 1982; a couple of these later ones are on the deltadivenere site). After that the premise got too repetitive and above all most of the really fabulous actresses stopped doing porn. Bear in mind that in France it became trendy to do porn in the mid 70s, so suddenly the same actresses who were doing ?B? movies or softcore T&A films, and some fashion models, also started doing hardcore. For instance, nearly all the women who acted in the softcore ?Six Swedes? movie series also did hardcore. Looking just as fresh and perky and cute. There was no comparison in the USA in those years, where some girls doing porn in the 70s were ?fairly good looking? by comparison but not enough to have a career as models or mainstream actresses. In France, alongside the ?girl next door types?, there were some spectacularly beautiful girls (think of Helen Shirley aka Nicole Segaud, who always looked like a model from a perfume ad, or Martine Semo aka Barbara Moose who had the most perfect legs nature ever created, or Marilyn Jess, Elena Righetti, Brigitte Lahaie, and a dozen others) getting shagged on camera.
Besides that, what made the stories fun were the top-level back-and-white photography and the sometimes clever dialogue. Over the years many dialogue writers for comic books made a few extra bucks moonlighting for Supersex and so the dialogue often had as many cute lines and dreadful puns as a James Bond novel. (Apart the classic shout ?Ifix Tcen tcen? when he cums, some of the phrases were so over-the-top ?campy? that they made the rounds at school or at the office, and were doubly exciting because of course NO ONE could admit where they read them ? but everybody knew.) Not to mention the outrageous situations: after dictating a letter, an Arab sheik asks his secretary ?Excuse me? Aren?t you forgetting something?? and she responds ?Of course not, every secretary knows the chief task of her job description?, then spends the next few panels smiling away as she merrily gives him a blow job. In another, Supersex is on the phone to a police chief with the chief?s wife listening in on Supersex?s other line while Pontello rams her and she whispers ?this arsefuck will live in history?. In another, Supersex gets Obaya Roberts to screw him while her husband watches, to whom Supersex says ?I must say you really are a very gracious host?. In another, he talks to a bishop while getting the bishop?s niece (Marilyn Jess) to jack him off (his back is turned so the bishop can?t see the hand job going on). Or he stops an elevator between floors to get a blow job from a stranger, who then walks off the elevator wiping the dribbling cum from her chin.
Among the standard plot fantasies was having Supersex use his superpowers (with the phrase ?I?ll release the Erotic Fluid?) to screw women who, according to the story line, would ?never? otherwise have sex with him. He might be screwing mother and daughter together, or two sisters, or four widows at the same time, or an on-duty nurse or lesbians or nuns or spinsters or female public officials. Or sending the director of a funeral home off on an errand while he shags his wife in the back room, on top of a casket (?You?ll kill me? she screams as he pounds away, ?Good lord you?re macabre? he answers. In that scene he comes three times, on camera, at one point saying ?Don?t worry, I have a prehensile cock?). Another standard was tying up the conquered bad guys and then shagging their wife, lover or relative in front of them as additional punishment.
Another great idea, in the early episodes, was the occasional outdoor shag that left you wondering ?How did they get away with that?? like a blowjob in a car (this idea reappears in the movie ?Martine, Venus der vollust? where Dominique Aveline circles the Arc de Triomphe in broad daylight in a convertible Volkswagen while Martine Semo blows him). One great scene is set in the back row of a Paris tourist barge where a woman blows Supersex to a popshot while they cruise the Seine; another was shot in a country church. But the all-time classic was one where Supersex punishes a belligerent feminist carrying a protest placard (played by the wonderfully cute Odette Burel, who must have appeared in at least a dozen episodes) by getting her to screw and blow him in broad daylight on a riverbank sidewalk in Paris.
In the early episodes the cumshot was not focused on as obsessively as today and was sometimes poorly lit, but as the episodes went on the ?money shot mania? started getting more important in porn, and they started using rapid-sequence shutters to capture some spectacular pops. Which showed off Pontello?s other talent, because on a good day he shot like Peter North (a few outstanding shots are immortalized in some of the on-line episodes at the deltadivenere site), as in one issue where he shoots a huge thick stream straight into the back of Chantal Nora?s throat.
At one point the producers realized that a female star would work well as a standard character so they introduced an assistant for Pontello, at first Flore Sollier aka Ella Rose (who was forever blowing him whenever he was on the phone or taking a bath, and often shagged an occasional secondary character as well; in one episode she brings him her virgin sister so he can deflower her because the "boys at her school are all boring"; at the end of another he takes her to visit a horse farm and Flore says: ?Oh, I get it, you expect me to screw the whole herd?. Pity it ended there...), then Dani Gary (who I never saw elsewhere), then a big busted, gap-toothed actress named Jessica something-or-other (who was always asking Supersex to screw her but he would refuse ? perhaps while screwing other women in front of her ? because ?shagging your assistant isn?t a challenge?. Finally, after a few issues, he let her blow him as a ?bonus? and while a strand of cum streams down her cheek, she thanks him profusely), and finally, for several issues, Marilyn Jess.
The series was so popular that after the first 25 issues or so they started reprinting the first episodes, with different covers titled ?Gold Series Replay?, but something must have got screwed up in production, since some pages went missing. (For instance, the extra views of the facial popshot on Joan Koehler aka Dawn Cummings in issue 3 disappeared in the reprint). I once read that the Italian producer, who went by the name ?Remo Gherardi? (real? fake?) apparently got into a rights dispute and started reprinting them on his own, changing some of the dialogue and images.
As solJAris has described, after the ?classic? first issues they started adding variety by going kinky: introducing gay sex scenes (which they didn?t really need, since there was a collateral magazine by the same group called Golden Gay), then bloody rape-and-battery scenes, turning up the violence (in some of the late episodes Pontello turns evil, sports an eye patch, and sometimes kills the women after he screws them), the occasional transvestite actor. In one episode a woman had sex with a snake, though I don?t recall seeing other bestiality. In one issue Supersex tells a newly married, pregnant secret agent she must get an abortion for a mission, then visits her in the hospital afterward and shags her; when he describes the mission and it isn?t clear why she needed to abort to carry it out, he answers ?Because I don?t like fucking pregnant women?. I suspect the increased violence and kink turned off some of the customer base (at least, in the early 1980s), the average guy who just wanted to see pretty girls screwed in fantasy situations. But there was also an occasional episode that could NEVER be reprinted today: one issue had a scene where a mother and her little daughter are kidnapped. The girl is played by an actual 7 or 8 year old. Pontello rescues them and captures the woman who kidnapped them, then screws the mother and the kidnaper together, WHILE the little girl watches. Only after several hardcore panels while the girl watches from just a few feet away, does Supersex?s assistant (Dani Gary) say ?maybe I better take the little girl away? and he answers ?Yeah, maybe you better do that? then blows his wad all over the mother. I can only assume the little girl (who looked a little bored) was the daughter of the producer or maybe of the actress so was used to that stuff at home, but as a scene in a magazine sold in news kiosks, it was certainly beyond the pale.
About 1995 a few dozen issues were reprinted, first monthly then bi-weekly, but changing the character name to ?Homerus Callaghan? and changing any of the dialogue that involved the ?Erotic Fluid? so that the women all became just horny broads. That was a mistake: by abandoning the original premise, where Supersex often fucked ?impossible and unobtainable? types or enemy women who had sworn they would never succumb to him, and instead portraying the women as sluts any guy could screw after a couple of drinks, where was the challenge? The ingenious ?fantasy? premise was sabotaged. The reprints removed the cast lists (so people with only those issues can?t identify the actresses) and after the first few issues the producer switched to cheap newsprint rather than glossy paper so the black-and-white images didn?t print as crisply. They even reprinted a few of the same issues with different titles. The reprint series died after a couple of years.
To answer solJAris: issues DO show up for sale from time to time. They had huge print runs, so there must be hundreds of sets scattered around basements and garages. Issues appear for sale sometimes on the Italian ebay site,
www.ebay.it (which doesn?t seem to censor its sales the way other country?s ebays do ? oops, now that I?ve said that, they?ll probably start cracking down) and if you try various used-comics shops in larger cities like Turin or Rome (go when they aren?t busy and ask the manager directly) you?ll find that many shops have copies in the back shop. Running prices on ebay are around 5 to 10 euro now, unless you find a good-condition issue with one of the big stars ? like Brigitte Lahaie (spelled ?Lahaye? in Supersex), even though those aren?t necessarily the best episodes ? which can run 25 euro or more.
Good luck, and, hey Maxxx: DO try and convince Pontello to scan all his issues on CD-Rom, for sale to members of the Egafd forum or else, if for no other reason, to donate it to some library: this is a part of history!