Photo comics—if we define them as narratives built from sequential still photos with captions and/or speech bubbles—have been with us since probably the 1940s, when the earliest examples emerged in Italy. By the ‘60s, the popularity of the form had spread across the Atlantic, finding one of its foremost expressions in Help!, a satire magazine founded by MAD founder-in-exile Harvey Kurtzman, which, among many others, once ran a memorable photo comic starring a young, pre-Monty Python John Cleese.

In 1995, the form took a huge visual leap with the publication of Diatom. Taking advantage of the increasingly accessible image editing power made possible by the digital revolution, Photographer Couto and art director Glen Hanson started with uncommonly high-end photography for photo comics, and applied the new image editing tech to create then unheard-of fantastic dreamscapes, in the service of a sexed-up, futuristic tale of innocents debauched. Juxtapoz Erotica Volume II described it thusly:

Couto and Hanson spared no expense and went to incredible extremes to get their photos just right. Each set took between one and two weeks to construct, and professional models were employed. After Couto developed the photographs, Hanson took the scanned images and superimposed mystical backgrounds to create simultaneously bizarre and realistic scenes of battle and seduction.

Paris and Apollonia are two chaste and immaculate lovers from Halcyon, a pristine world of light, chosen as emissaries to retrieve an antidote for the contaminant in Halcyon’s spring water that could render their people extinct. Their quest takes them to Skuld, a world of carnal excess ruled by Salatia De Voura, the evil but alluring epitome of dangerous sexuality and temptation, with help from her dwarf assistant, Ruderich.

Couto continues to work as a digital photographer, and the images that follow are from his Behance portfolio.
 

 

 
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