This collection of Serpieri’s more explicitly sexual artworks, appropriately titled XXX as a follow-up to Druuna X and Druuna X2, is one of two produced by the combined publishing divisions of Glénat in France and Lo Scarabeo in Italy, the other, safer volume of Druuna lookalikes, being titled Eros.

Like Eros, this is clearly a scouring of Serpieri’s work, some of it previously unpublished, to produce another collectable volume for his many doting followers, and is inevitably a mishmash of variable quality, including some work in progress and preliminary material.

The three-page introduction by Daniele Bevilacqua, ‘Pleasure without Sin’, is a history-cum-apologia for Serpieri’s world of rather conventional and often bordering-on-rape sex, interesting but rather predictable. Though she comes down on the side of Serpieri’s more explicit output as erotica rather than pornography, many of the images are so close to being truly pornographic the call is a very close one.