Technological obsolescence was the heavyweight theme of deep thinkers in the 1950s. Mad #1 appeared almost exactly contemporaneously with Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, which also asked what worth humans had if they did nothing. Kurtzman couldn’t have known about the book, but he surely read E. M. Foster’s classic “The Machine Stops” because his hands were busy stealing from it. “Blobs” ends by asking “what if the machine that repairs the machine … breaks?” [italics in original] Answer: all humanity dies. Fun for everyone! Little wonder that Mad needed time and a different focus before its sales started zooming.

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Kurtzman was a stellar parodist because he was steeped in white bread middle class American culture. His 1,000,000 A.D. future is 50s America with better gadgets but exactly similar social norms. (Exactly like 1950s print sf, admittedly.) That America was equally steeped in the norm that females were eye candy, housewives rather than doers, interchangeable and disposable, expressed only as cheesecake. Kurtzman’s sexbots are representative of the type, at first glance the ultimate expression of male fantasy, compliant and silent through unspeakable lewdness. That speaks only of humans. Robots themselves have no inherent sexuality. They are merely tools adaptable for the purpose at hand. A reimagining was inevitable and the rebellious 1960s the time. The place? You can guess the answer. France.

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Jean-Claude Forest, born in 1930, was only six years younger than Kurtzman but lived in a different world. France imported only a small fraction of the vast numbers of comic books that were Kurtzman’s lifeblood and disdained those, producing a censorship law against comic book excesses years before the American crackdown. Forest moved into science fiction illustration, first for Fiction magazine, the French edition of The Magazine of Fiction and Science Fiction, and then cover art for Hachette’s science fiction imprint Le Rayon Fantastique.

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The years of immersion in science fiction led almost inevitably to the comic strip that made Forest world-famous. Georges H. Gallet was editor not only of Le Rayon Fantastique but also the adult, male-oriented V-Magazine. He solicited a comic strip from Forest, “no holds barred.” The Spring 1962 issue  featured the first serialized segment of “Barbarella.” The unearthly beautiful earthgirl is fearless and unconquerable, battling evil in all its guises, championing the downtrodden, and dethroning tyrants. No man can successfully oppose her, although some women are her equals. She is the emancipated woman ahead of her time, before Modesty Blaise and Emma Peel, free of spirit and of body. Michael O’Donoghue’s adventure spoof “The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist” was birthed by Barbarella when the editor of Evergreen Review asked for a strip in a similar vein. (Phoebe goes through a randomly episodic series of captures and tortures exactly like Barbarella’s except that she actually dies from them. Halfway through. Her dead body becomes the heroine of the second half. When people refer back to a Golden Age of “black humor” Phoebe Zeit-Geist is the darkest example. Dissertations could be written about what and who the focus of the satire is. and whether O’Donoghue is or isn’t as culpable as his evildoers, a discussion that needs to start with Forest.)

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As with these other strong women, Barbarella’s beauty of face and body is constantly remarked upon and used for the male gaze, yet internally presented less for vanity than as a useful tool to seduce and infiltrate as well as provide herself pleasure. Compare her, though, to Harvey Kurtzman’s creation in late 1962, Playboy’s Little Annie Fannie. Kurtzman’s Annie is a naive airhead floating often naked and unaware through a technicolor wasteland of cultural satire; Forest’s Barbarella is brilliant and sophisticated in black and white, often lost on a hideously menacing alien world, but always quick to take command and turn the tables.

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Consequently, she often requires rescue. A convenient air taxi swoops down to take her away from evil Queen Slupe. The pilot is Diktor, a robot, who reacts to Barbarella exactly like everybody else on the planet who is not trying to kill her.