The Convent of Hell begins in apparently conventional surroundings, a quiet Spanish convent where a community of nuns devote themselves to the service of God. But the tranquillity is deceptive. Beneath the routines of religious life are suppressed sexual desires, and when a workman accidentally breaks through a cellar wall he discovers an ancient door which does not appear on any of the convent’s plans. One of the less devout nuns dreams of what lies behind it and, despite the terrifying nature of her vision, curiosity eventually gets the better of her. When she opens the door, the convent becomes the site of an extraordinary eruption of demonic forces, sexual transgression and supernatural chaos.

Written by the Argentine writer Ricardo Barreiro and drawn by Noé, the story is an exuberant collision of erotic fantasy, horror and irreverent religious satire. The enclosed world of the convent provides an obvious setting for a story about repression and forbidden desire, while the supernatural elements allow Barreiro and Noé to push the premise far beyond conventional erotic comedy. Once the door is opened, the distinction between religious imagery and erotic fantasy progressively breaks down, producing the deliberately outrageous mixture of nuns, demons, angels and sexual excess for which the book became notorious.

The book occupies an important place in Noé’s career. He had already worked with Barreiro on European comics, but The Convent of Hell became one of the first of his erotic stories. In an interview, Noé explained that he and Barreiro had originally produced the material for the Italian erotic magazine Blue. Before they could publish it, however, Blue collapsed. The pair subsequently offered the material to Josep Maria Berenguer, publisher of the Spanish Kiss Comix. Berenguer liked it, but asked them to make the eroticism considerably stronger; the result was the much more explicit El Convento Infernal.

El Convento Infernal was serialised in Kiss Comix in 1996, and the success of the series helped establish Noé as an important new erotic-comics artist. The work was subsequently translated into several European languages, and into English as The Convent of Hell, published by NBM’s Eurotica imprint in 1998. It was later collected in Spain by La Cúpula, whose Colección X edition appeared in 2003.