Hustler Honey Buns # 25, Taboo Illustrated # 4

6 LETTERS
7 DEATH IN THE HAREM
Graphic Novel by Ferres—Part Four
16 THE GREAT REBELLION
Graphic Novel by Fernando—Part One
26 PONY LIFE
Graphic Novel by Doval—Part Four
34 HARD LINES
Like Kink Itself, Hardcore BDSM Illustration Wasn't Born Yesterday
Special Feature by Ernest Greene
42 YAKUZA SLAVES
Graphic Novel by Roberts—Part Four
58 SLAVEMART
Graphic Novel by Erenisch—Part Four
66 SIBERIAN MADHOUSE
Graphic Novel by Templeton—Part One
76 HELL'S BROTHEL
Graphic Novel by Tryten—Part One

EDITORIAL NOTE
STRICTLY SPEAKING
Sade called his epic novel Justine "A Tale of Vice Rewarded and Virtue Chastised" and that's what you'll see in TABOO ILLUSTRATED. In these pages, innocent babes are cruelly mistreated by sadistic degenerates. The good girls are rarely rescued and the bad guys usually get away with it. Why is this so? Because when it comes to certain unfortunate realities about our own kind, we speak the sooth.
Artists hold up mirrors to the world in which they live, and what's reflected, however beautifully rendered, isn't always pretty. Good doesn't always triumph over evil. In that way, the wild flights of extreme fantasy filling this book are more "realistic" about the moral universe we all share than is comforting. Redemption, uplift and the defeat of vice at the hands of virtue may be the raw materials of Hollywood's dream factory, but the dreams here are as dark as the world outside.
In that world, the defenseless often suffer at the hands of the powerful without relief. Righteous retribution does not descend upon the vile perpetrators vile debauchery. Any unblinking overview of our modern world reveals that great technological progress has not been accompanied by moral advancement over much of the globe. Sade's observation that "the history of humanity is the history of its crimes" holds as true today as it did two hundred years ago.
If only evil people did evil things, evil would be in short supply, which clearly it is not. It is the recognition of this harsh reality that gives the work of our artists such power and impact. They reveal something fundamental about human nature that resists all attempts to tame it. The truth they tell isso subversive, it can only be rendered in pen and ink.
But to recognize the evil that men do is not necessarily to embrace it. While the bad guys in our harrowing fables may be identifiably human, they are never sympathetic, unlike their victims.
To quote a favorite character from a much brighter comic universe, The Tick, we must oppose evil "because evil is just plain wrong." We may indulge ourselves in its fictional representation but we may never allow ourselves to fall under its seductive sway in our treatment of others.