The best analogy I can come up with is to Jaime Hernandez's Locas stories from Love & Rockets Valentina is Crepax's Maggie. Valentina (the main focus of this volume) offers so much more than what is implied by the erotic label Crepax is attached to. It is also lighter on the sexuality and s&m elements that might turn off some readers. The Complete Crepax 4: Private Life offers an excellent entry point to Valentina's extended suite of comics it includes the character's first appearance, as well as a number of longer, less genre-heavy stories that still feature the mystery, horror, and Surrealism that should make Crepax better known. He is a master of the comics form, creating beautiful drawings within a framework of innovative page layouts and panel breakdowns.
The heavy focus on the erotic aspects of Crepax's work has made knowledge of him in English-speaking countries too limited.
Other translations have appeared in English, primarily in the late '80s and early '90s from Catalan Communications, NBM (via their Eurotica imprint), and a handful of stories in Heavy Metal, but they have been long out of print, and represent only a patchwork of a larger whole. Previous to the Complete Crepax series, currently ongoing annually from Fantagraphics (the fourth and latest volume of which I am mostly concerned with here), the easiest English translations of Crepax's work to find were his adaptations of such titles as The Story of O, Venus in Furs, and the Marquis de Sade's Justine. Valentina's rich dream/fantasy life often features eroticism and a predilection towards s&m, and that last element is probably the main source of notoriety for Guido Crepax, Valentina's creator. The two characters became lovers and Valentina assumed the role of protagonist in subsequent stories, which were, at first, genre adventures reminiscent of American newspaper serials and mixing science fiction, horror, and intrigue, and later on, grew into tales more concerned with the reality (and the fantasy) of her domestic life.
Philip Rembrandt, an art critic with the mysterious power to stop humans or objects via his gaze.
She first appeared as a side character in the 1965 story "The Lesmo Curve", which largely focuses on the character Neutron, a.k.a. Valentina Rosselli was a Milanese photographer born in 1942, fashionable, a communist. Features Crepax: Misperceived Master of the Comics Form
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