Franco Saudelli was born in Lazio, Italy, but moved to Rome to study. His comic book debut, in the mid-1970s, was a collaboration with fellow artists such as Massimo Rotundo and Rodolfo Torti—using the group pseudonym Tortelli—on the erotic comics series Rudy X, for Playmen magazine. Saudelli also worked with Ugolino Cossu, and all the artists were part of an emerging generation of Italian creators that included Roberto Baldazzini. This new wave was inspired by predecessors like Magnus and Crepax and ultimately became part of the establishment in the 1990s, working for Italy’s biggest comics publisher, Bonelli, on popular, non-erotic titles like Dylan Dog and Martin Mystere.
In 1977, Saudelli drew Western stories for the magazine Lanciostory and his work started to appear in several mainstream Italian and French publications, including Orient-Express, Libération, and Charlie Mensuel. In the 1980s, Saudelli started creating short comic strips for erotic magazine anthologies such as Comic Art, Glamour, and Diva.
Saudelli’s fascination with bondage developed early on and became a central theme throughout much of his work. His masterfully rendered mistresses and damsels in distress featured in titles like Tied and Gagged Nurse and Pedicured Sexy Lesbians. He would often work from photographs of bound models, and among them was his future wife Giovanna Casotto, who herself went on to become a respected erotic comic artist.
A page from the story Bondage Palace, with Matilda at the mercy of La Bionda (The Blonde), circa 1989.
Matilda apppeared in her own spinoff comic in 1991, in which the artist used a single yellow color to great effect.
The cover to the Spanish edition of the first collection, The Blonde: Double Blow, reveals Saudelli’s skill with full-color work.
Saudelli’s most famous creation, La Bionda (The Blonde), saw a clinically insane but statuesque and beautiful female thief getting into numerous scrapes that generally involved the entire, mostly female, cast being hog-tied at some point. The tone is extremely tongue-in-cheek, but Saudelli’s elegant, clear line style tempers the ridiculousness of the scripts, making the stories silly, yet sensuous. Another theme of the great Italian creator is foot fetishism; he cleverly focuses on the feet for panels, and even whole pages, while the rest of the off-panel action is decoded through the dialogue and position of the feet.
Saudelli and another classic bondage/ erotic fumetti (the Italian word for comics) artist, Roberto Baldazzini, teamed up to produce BIZARRERIES: Bondage Feet Wrestling Fetish—an anthology that featured their strips, illustrations, and bondage photography. “Everything began with an interview Franco Saudelli gave to me a couple of years ago,” Baldazzini revealed. “We soon found out we agreed on many topics and had so much in common: the pleasure to create our own artwork out of photographic images; the love for such authors as Willie, Stanton, Batters, Eneg, and pin-up models like Bettie Page; the nostalgia we felt for magazines like Bizarre and Exotique; our attraction for bondage and fetishism, the figures of the dominatrix and the submissive women, fighting girls; and the desire to create new female characters.”
Saudelli’s respect for the early pioneers of bondage comics was highlighted when he called one of his early strips Dedicated to John Willie and Irving Klaw. Saudelli continues to produce beautiful art and has also begun publishing more of his highly specialized ropework photography.
Another of The Blonde’s victims, Amita Berg, is a homage to the actress, Anita Ekberg. This was drawn in pencil.
Saudelli’s full-color painted cover for the Spanish anthology of Totem El Comix from 1990.
Two pages from the 24-page comic L’Apatica Matilda La Dieta Di Veronica (Lazy Matilda and Veronica’s Diet), which was given away with Nova Express #15 in Italy in 1991.