CREDIT: COURTESY OF ROBIN BOUGIE
Robin Bougie working in his natural habitat - most likely at 2 a.m.

The Canadian king of cartoon debauchery, Robin Bougie has been self-publishing for over 24 years including exploitation publications like Cinema Sewer and Sleazy Slice, and the non-fiction Graphic Thrills about America’s XXX film history between 1970 and 1985.

Living in Vancouver, the vintage porn connoisseur talked over the phone about an average day in a comic creator’s life, his favourite porn star and producing a low budget adult film.

Residing with his long-time wife – who works for an animation studio full time – and their two feline companions, Bougie takes on the self-described househusband role.

“I’m lucky enough,” he said. “I can’t really fathom doing what I do without having a wife who has a fairly successful career.”

“I manage to pull my own weight, but let’s face it I couldn’t do this if I was alone.”

A normal day – and it really is normal – starts at noon with filling and sending orders for his online store.

“I’m on first-name basis with my post office workers,” he said with a laugh. “Shout out to Freuen and Lolita.”

“[Next it’s] pats for the cats then I do some writing or drawing for two or three hours and [by] then it’s time for my wife to get home, so I make her dinner.”

After the SO’s gone to bed, Bougie becomes a night owl and is hard at work again.

“Around 11:30 p.m. I start really nose-to-the-grindstone,” he said. “That’s when everything’s quiet, there’s nothing really distracting.”

“That’s really when I get my comics and my writing done, so I usually work until 4 to 5 a.m.”

Every artist has influences and Bougie cites Robert Crumb, with his signature underground cartoon style, and erotica master Milo Manara as inspirations. However, Canadian talent has also caught Bougie’s eye over the years.

“Dave Cooper draws these kind of pillowy, weird looking kind of chubby girls … he’s [also] one of my biggest influences”.

A common perception of porn as a relationship destroyer had Bougie diffusing the claim. He laid it out candidly when he talked about how porn has changed his relationship with his partner.

It hasn’t.

“I think porn could ruin a marriage if you get married to someone who has [an] extremely fragile sense of self, who is really defensive about sexuality.”

He also thinks that a relationship like that probably wasn’t meant to last anyway.

“I’ve met couples who have fights about porn and come to me about what to do,” he said. “I’ve never really had that issue with my partner.”

For someone who has consumed a lot of pornography it may be hard to decide on any favourites, but Bougie answered quickly. And for good reason – he’s been researching her life now for over a decade.

“My absolute favourite of all time was an actress named Rene Bond who worked mostly in California in the 1970’s… [in] both in hard core and soft core sexploitation films.”

Unfortunately, the best interview is no longer possible. “She passed away in the late ‘90s, so I never got a chance to know her or interview her, which is one of my biggest [professional] regrets.”

Bougie’s blushing could almost be heard through the phone when he gushed about what made Bond irresistible.

“Just her face actually, seeing her face in a porno and was like, ‘Whoa, who’s that?’” he said. “It was just something simple with her, [it] was like I just got a weird little crush on her.”

Bougie’s XXX interests have also landed him his own porn producer/ actor/set designer roles back in 2006.

“[For] The Coming of Jizzus, a friend and reader of Cinema Sewer … sent me the scripts for this biblical porn movie, and I had never heard of such a thing,” he said. After showing the script to a couple friends including a filmmaker and porn star from Vancouver’s former adult film industry, they decided it was doable.

While overall enjoying the experience, he said it was frustrating at times as well.

“When I’m making the comic … I have totally 100 per cent creative control and I’ve just been spoiled by that,” Bougie said. “I love [that] if it goes wrong or it doesn’t work its I’ve got nobody to blame but me.

“When you’re a filmmaker you have to entrust all these other people with your project, and a great many of them don’t have as much passion for it as you do,” he said of his experience on a set. “I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t pay them enough to care as much as I did.”

Plans for another porn called Humpmonkey Wasteland were changed into a comic for his Sleazy Slice #6 anthology back in 2013, as the Mad Max-themed porn scenes were ultimately cheaper in print.

“I wouldn’t have had the budget for all those muscle cars.”

Bougie says he believes these types of comics will become more common in the future.

“We’re living in a golden age in terms of what’s available,” he said. “[Since the ‘80s] it’s always been fairly limited in terms of the types of artists and the types of stories available.”

“In the last 10 to 15 years it’s really been the best time … [and] sexual content is creeping more into non-porn comics.”

With recent titles like Saga and Sex Criminals Bougie says porn is becoming normalized.

“[With] art companies like Image or Vertigo, porn’s not even being ghettoized anymore,” he said. “It’s melding into other genres which is really healthy.”

“I wish that would happen in the film community to some extent too.”

Bougie’s work can be found online at cinemasewer.com.