Barbarella

Forest Jean-Claude

Published by Grove Press, Inc New York


Translated by Richard Seaver

"Two art forms, the comic strip and the female nude—one only half a century old, the other an hour older than human history—come together with a BANG! in Barbarella, lushly imagined and liquidly drawn by French painter Jean-Claude Forest.... In his blend of sensuous science fiction and witty mythology, luminous hallucination and perverse melodrama, Forest has achieved a mutation of the imagination; he has created in Barbarella the very apoptheosis of eroticism." —Playboy

Barbarella, with her long hair and sonorous name, her baby face and disdain for needless clothes, finds herself on the planet Lythion, where she has made a forced landing while traveling alone thirough outer space in her rocket. She is a creature of the future who is confronted with the monsters and robots of the strange planet, and she is put to one test after another. She vanquishes evil in whatever form she finds it, and rewards, in her particular fashion, all the handsome men that she meets during her adventures. And, whether battling sadists or turning her ray gun on gelatinous monsters, she cannot seem to avoid losing all or part of her skin-tight space suit.

Jean-Claude Forest was born in 1930 in Perreux, France. A painter, he exhibited at the Galerie Schmidt in Paris in 1965. Barbarella was originally intended as a game, privately done for the amusement of himself and his friends, but it was immediately successful with the French public and later in several other European countries and in the United States. Monsieur Forest is currently engaged in fabricating further perils—and rewards—for his handsome heroine.

A major Paramount picture starring Jane Fonda
Produced by Dino DeLaurentiis
Directed by Roger Vadim
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