XXXenophile

This is a comic book series by artist Phil Foglio of What's New? with Phil & Dixie, Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire and Magic: The Gathering artwork fame.

As the title would suggest, the main themes of the stories in each issue centered around encounters with those that are different. The xenoforms in the stories were usually aliens, but would also include unusual natives, gods, and sometimes just other human beings.

Most of the stories were very humorous (one story included a double bed that would double the people sleeping upon it each night) and others had morals to them. The original title ran for 11 issues, with the first featuring a cover with an Asian woman in bed with little paper pagodas over her naughty bits and a man pulling up the zipper on his 'Zilla suit. It seems that all but issues 3, 6 & 7 are available for purchase from www.xxxenophile.com. The 10th issue is The Collectable Trading Card Game (And Why Not?). (although there are 11 issues mentioned on the XXXenophile site, the site itself says 10 issues. I don't know why)

The XXXenophile Collection is up to its 6th issue so far and is a current series. It started out as a reprinting of some of the more popular stories from the original series along with some new material by Phil as well as other humorous adult artists. It was so popular that they dicided not to stop at the originally projected 5 issues. Plus, the lack of availability of some of the original issues and the fans' desire to see all of their favorite stories reprinted played a part.

The collectible card game is one of the most amusing card games I've played in a long time. Plus, with skillful manipulation, even a deck thrown together in 20 minutes can defeat a deck that was carefully crafted for hours, so it does not require that you spend a lot of money, as with some of the other games available. My husband's favorite part (and no doubt the favorite of many others) is the inclusion of cards with the designation "exhibitionist" as one of their attributes. Every exhibitionist card involves the removal of clothing. Needless to say, this particular part of the game is non-functional when playing at conventions. The cards are varied, most having been inspired by the comics (Cordelia's Double Bed) and others just bad puns (The Hatchback of Notre Dame, Count Pointercount) and some just are (Plot Device, Sneevax: Cute but Evil Spacebabe). The game itself is fairly simple, easy to play, and can be a lot of fun. As for the scoring, nowhere in the rulebook does it mention orgasms. At least, not in relation to winning the game.

There is also a ButtonMen set based on XXXenophile art. I don't know much about this game, but I believe in involves buttons that you spin, yours and your opponent's, side by side, and the one with the higher number facing the opponenet wins.

The XXXenophile site goes on to mention the upcoming RPG and a possible future poker deck.

The first five "XXXenophile Collection" books reprinted stories from the first ten issues of the comic series; however, there isn't a two-to-one correlation between them (collection 1 is not comics 1 plus 2, it's got two stories from each of issues 4 and 9, and one story from each of 1, 2, 3, and 7, if I've counted right.). Each collection also had one new story, not previously seen in the comic series. These new stories were later collected into issue 11 of the comic series. So in some ways 11 was an afterthought, and I'm not surprised that the XXXenophile web site has sections that were either written before it was published or overlook it. Regardless, you can either go the 11 comics route or the 5 collections route and get all the stories; you get more covers and letter pages and bios of the inkers and so forth with the comics though. (Collection 6 is a completely new, full length single story, with no corresponding comic series entry.)

Phil Foglio wrote and pencilled every story, but different inkers did the finishing work on the art on each story; I don't think there are any repeat appearances by inkers until Collection 6. If there's no other reason that the series is interesting, it is a demonstration of the effect that the inker, in many ways the unsung hero of the comic art form, has on the look of the final product. (Well, colorists are more unsung than inkers, but all of XXXenophile is black and white, so no songs for them here. And letterers don't get sung about much either...)

Phil Foglio's current work is the steampunk comic Girl Genius.