Recent controversy over at Goodreads over arbitrary nudity violations has spurred many in the GLBT romance and erotica reading community to open Leafmarks accounts. And in an effort to welcome the group Leafmarks have implemented mature and spoiler tags to hide sexy and spoiler-ific content behind a clickable link, giving one the choice to view it or not.

Two custom tags: spoiler, and mature – can now be used in reviews, status updates, and comments. These tags collapse content into links “[VIEW SPOILER]” or “[VIEW MATURE CONTENT"] until clicked on to expand.

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen (and scoundrels). For those of you who can understand French, German or Dutch, and have a soft spot for either fairy tales, beautiful artworks or graphic novels, there's a series I must recommend.

Warning : Keep in mind my tags. However beautiful and smart, this graphic novel is definitely not suitable for everyone, especially not children. Warning for explicit sexual content, explicit violence, rape, murder...

Who is the monster, and who is the man ?

***

Everything starts with a wedding. Or I could be accurate, and say that actually, everything starts with a war. Humans and Beasts have been opposed in a barbaric feud for an immemorial time. To put an end to its disasters, fair Aube is promised to Loup De Feu (Wolf Of Fire) to seal the truce between her father, Seigneur Maitre d'Arcan, and the powerful Beast leader, Loup De Traille (father of Loup De Feu). Only treason strikes, the celebrative night goes terribly wrong, and Aube must flee for sanctuary to the Bois des Vierges (Virgins' Woods) to avoid death for her crime.

This is a story of loss, of love, of grief, and consuming hate. This is a story about accepting yourself in order to accept the other.

The original plates are hand-drawn and painted. Béatrice Tillier's colours set each mood nicely.

Self-published author Teri Brooks just had the cover of her second book filtered (censored) by Amazon after uploading it to print/publish. After several tries, and after adding a red stripe across the offending buttocks, the cover went through. But then she lost her status as a new release and that in turn put a big damper on her sales. To date she has only sold one copy. Her story can be found on her Google+ posts. 

In 1972, another author had a similar problem. Mickey Spillane wrote a book called The Erection Set with an end-to-end color photo of his nude wife (Sherri Malinou) on the cover. Thousands of copies went out to bookstores and, after some major controversy, had to be recalled costing thousands of dollars. They re-issued the book with a black strip across the offending nipples and it went on to sell thousands of copies.

According to Mrs. Spillane, it was her idea to do the photo nude. Spillane opposed the idea at first but finally consented, saying "Okay, I was tired of dogs anyway." None of my research has yet to produce a single Spillane cover with a dog on it. 

2013:

1972: 

Dogs? What dogs? I don't see any dogs...