Comic Book / Red Ears

If you wondered where the "red ears" came from...

Red Ears (Blagues Coquines in French) is an erotic Franco-Belgian Comics series. The series was created in 1990 by Belgian Comics strip artist Dany, but since him several other comic book artists have continued the series. This has resulted in wildly different art styles across the comic, many of which are collections from multiple artists.

Red Ears is a Sex Comedy gag comic. The jokes are almost never original material, but mostly bawdy comedy you probably heard before on the playground, in the office or in bars. Expect every possible sex cliché to turn up in this comic strip, from adulterers hiding in the closet to black guys having bigger penises than other races.

It's one of the best selling comic book series ever and a veritable Cash-Cow Franchise, inspiring calendars, magazines and animated cartoons. It has been translated into many languages including English. For home consumption, there also appears to be a Flemish-language version, Rooie Oortjes.

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Tropes:

• Admiring the Poster: Parodied. A young woman puts up a poster of a Hunk in her bedroom, then presses herself up against it and starts touching herself on her bed. Eventually, the guy in the poster pops a boner, freaking out the girl.
• All Women Are Lustful: Most girls in this comic book series really enjoy having sex all the time.
• Anorgasmia: Played for Laughs.
• Art Shift: This series is drawn by different comic strip artists, so the drawing style can differ album by album. Not just in how cartoonish or realistic it looks, but also often in terms of anatomy. For instance, one particular artist always draws women with very long legs compared to men, whereas another might keep the relative proportions about the same.
• Auto Erotica: One gag has a young couple having sex in a car. The girl then says the guy was great and she adds that the fact that it was "their first time" was the most exciting part. The next shot shows the guy tick off another stripe on the side of his car.
• Bedroom Adultery Scene: Several gags have this scenario. Usually it's a husband who comes home to find his unfaithful wife in bed with another man, with the amorous guy trying desperately to hide somewhere. Often the husband will have a rifle at the ready.
• Bed Trick:
  • One gag has a man ordering a costume in a store. He tells the owner he wants to disguise himself as a famous actor in order to have sex with a girl he fancies a lot and who will be present a costumed party. His plan works and after having doggystyle sex with her he reveals his true identity. The masked girl then takes off her own mask and turns out to be the owner of the store, who happens to be gay!
  • In another gag a women suspects her husband from having an affair behind her back. As he goes to a costumed party she decides to sneak in there too, unrecognizably dressed in costume, in order to see whether he would agree to have sex with another woman, not knowing that it's her. They indeed have sex with each other and she sees all her suspicions confirmed. Back home she waits until her husband returns and then asks him how the party was? He answers: "Awful! I lost my costume to someone else in a bet!"
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Played for laughs. A man who has just joined the French Foreign Legion arrives at his new posting in a remote fortress in the Sahara. When he asks the other soldiers how they manage without the opposite sex, his colleagues tell him they just use their dromedary. The new soldier scoffs off at the suggestion, but he eventually starts fantasizing about the dromedary after several weeks. His colleagues stumble upon him after he finishes the deed, and clarify that they meant they use the dromedary to travel to the local brothel.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: According to the girls in this comic.
• Black Comedy Rape: Employed occasionally.
  • One comic featured a tubby guy getting exercise from his female trainer by having her strip nude and run around the room on the first day saying he can have sex with her if he can catch her. However, on the second day the trainer is replaced by a Scary Black Man who tells him to start running before he catches him.
  • Another has a woman who's been kidnapped by a rapist, who takes her to the woods, forces her to strip and ties her to a tree. A hunter appears to scare him off, and the woman is elated and thanks her rescuer... only for him to zip open his fly and snark that fortune isn't smiling at her.
  • A Bad Santa manages to trick a woman who's about to commit suicide after experiencing the worst day of her life into giving him a blowjob by promising her a Christmas Miracle.
  • A man traveling through Corsica is stopped on the road by a local man with a shotgun and forced to jack off in front of him. After he finishes, the Corsican tells him to do it again. After about seven times and being too tired to get up, the Corsican calls over to his sister who's been hiding in the bushes and says that the nice man will drive her to town.
• Black Is Bigger in Bed: One gag shows a black man having sex with a girl on a deserted Island. His name is "Snow", which causes the girl to say: "I just can't wait to get back home and tell people I was stuck on a tropical Island by 40 centimeters of snow."
• Bros Before Hoes: Downplayed when a guy catches his wife in bed with his best friend. They're not even really angry at each other, and decide to settle the dispute over a card game instead of fisticuffs. Just to keep it interesting, the best friend suggests they put in 10 bucks on the side.
• Burn the Witch!: #33 has a play on this. A mob is ready to sentence a woman to death, she then asks what she's been accused of. The leader of the mob screams out that she loves sex, multiple men at once, women, sodomy, fellatio.....cue the mob tying up the leader instead, freeing the woman and having a huge gangbang.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: A lothario who has an affair with a married woman every other day receives a letter from a man telling him to stay away from his wife or he'll kill him. When one of his friends offers the simple solution of just complying with the demand, the guy notes that the letter isn't signed.
• Calling Your Orgasms: Couples do this a lot.
• Captured by Cannibals: Subverted. In one comic set in Darkest Africa, a father and his son from a cannibal tribe are sent out to hunt for food by his fat, foulmouthed wife when they stumble across a pretty young European woman. After they capture her, the son asks his father if they'll take her home and eat her. The father replies that they'll take her home and eat his mother instead.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: Parents or partners often interrupt couples in the middle of sex.
• Celeb Crush: The set-up to a vulgar joke involves a married man who is a huge fan of Brigitte Bardot. His wife knows that he loves doggystyle and wants to get him a birthday present, so she has the initials "B.B." tattooed on her ass. She tells him to close his eyes while she "gets him his present", but when she tells him to open his eyes he just angrily replies "BOB? Who the hell is Bob?"
• Celebrity Resemblance: One gag features a man who looks like Frank Sinatra. Everyone he meets notices the resemblance and it annoys him beyond belief. Then, an attractive young lady says to him: "Say, you look a lot like Frank Sinatra." Whereupon the man bursts out singing "My Way".
• Cheating with the Milkman: Various strips feature scenarios where housewives cheat with the milkman, the mailman, etc. Possibly the most over-the-top one was where a husband who just departed for work started fearing this outcome when he saw the plumber pull up. He drives back home and finds out that there's a line in front of his house—with the last guy telling him to wait his turn!
• Cheek Copy: One gag involves an office manager having an affair with his secretary on top of the copy machine for fun. Cut to his wife and her lawyer handing him the divorce papers along with a mountain of photographs displaying his infidelity.
• Chocolate Baby: In an African village a local Chief accuses the visiting European scientist of getting frisky with one of his wives when the baby comes out white. The scientist tries to convince him otherwise by pointing to a flock of white sheep which, thanks to the miracle of genetics, has an unexplained black sheep in its midst. The Chief then whispers that he'll stay quiet about the scientist's escapades if he'll return him the favor.
• Christmas Miracle: Hilariously subverted in a comic where a distraught young woman is about to jump off a bridge after a rain of misery that day, but then Santa Claus shows up and promises that when she returns home, her house is no longer burned down, she has her old job back, and her boyfriend (who ran off with her best friend) is waiting for her. He asks for a blowjob, and she returns the favor. After asking her how old she is, he walks off while muttering "27? Aren't you too old to believe in fairytales?".
• Comically Missing the Point: In one gag a woman is performing fellatio on a naïve guy. When she asks him: "Well, do you enjoy it?", he answers: "How would I know? You are the one having it in your mouth!"
• Coming and Going: Men sometimes do this in this comic.
• Darkest Africa: Strips set in Africa will generally present it as a mysterious continent filled with tribal chiefs (possibly cannibals), exotic women, and dangerous jungles.
• Did the Earth Move for You, Too?: A regular question.
• Dirty Communists: Subverted—A rather attractive woman has a day in court because she stands accused of being a communist, having visited China on three separate occasions. After flirting extensively with the judge, and even secretly exposing herself, she rhetorically asks him if he thinks she's a virgin because she's visited the Virgin Islands four times.
• Do You Want to Copulate?: Also a regular question.
• Dumb Blonde: Double Subverted in a comic where a very drunk guy in a bar offers to tell a dumb blonde joke to three blonde women who then threaten him by describing how the three of them are experts in various martial arts disciplines. He just shrugs it off with "Never mind. I'm not going to tell the same joke three times".
• Entendre Failure: The comic has done numerous gags of this sort. For instance, one comic has a woman take a hunky man for a car ride, then stops in the woods, steps out, strips down, and tells him he can have "whatever he wants". He turns the key and drives off with her car.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Well duh!
• Excuse Plot: Every gag is simply there to provide cheap erotic thrills or cheap Sex Comedy.
• Explicit Content: It's not suitable for minors, though not that explicit either. Most of the time it's comparable to soft porn.
• Fanservice: This comic book series gives horny readers exactly what they want.
• Fan Disservice: On the other hand, you'll occasionally encounter scenes where unattractive people are seen having sex.
• Femme Fatale: Several characters portray this function.
• Force Feeding: An average-looking wife whose hunky husband has been cheating on her with a more beautiful woman catches them having dinner at a restaurant by storming in with a loaded gun. Afraid that she'll shoot them both, she instead forces the other woman to eat an entire wedding cake at gunpoint to ruin her figure.
• Gallows Humor: A man is told by his doctor that he has less than a day to live, so he goes home and has a last night of drunken sex with his wife until they're both so exhausted that they collapse from the effort. When he wakes up and wants to continue, she tells him to stop complaining because at least he doesn't have to get up in the morning.
• Genie in a Bottle: Parodied when a guy just walking down the street stumbles upon a genie in a bottle and wishes for the most erotically desirable woman imaginable. The genie conjures a stunning concubine, but after a prolongued bout of intense sex, the genie asks the guy for money, then punches him in the face when he can't pay up.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: Though most jokes are mostly aimed at a heterosexual audience, lesbian scenes can be found too.
• The Grunting Orgasm: A popular trope.
• Guilt by Association Gag: In one comic a ridiculously sultry woman is dragged into a courtroom because she's being charged with being a communist infiltrator as she's visited the People's Republic of China several times. After putting on a show for the judge and even teasing him by Going Commando, she retorts that she's visited the Virgin Islands even more often than China, and surely the judge isn't naive enough to think she's still a virgin?
• High-Class Call Girl: Played with in a comic. A john visits a dignified woman's lavish apartment, who is soon revealed to the reader to be a prostitute. Looking around the place while she changes into a nightgown, he realizes that she's very cultured, intelligent, and rich. She just chose to be a hooker because she likes it.
• Home-Early Surprise: The husband arriving home early is frequently used as the set-up to a Bedroom Adultery Scene.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Prostitutes are always nice women willing to go along with anything as long as they get paid.
• Hot Guy, Ugly Wife: The punchline to a comic where a young woman sees a hunky guy standing in front of an expensive sports car and logically assuming him to be the owner, starts imagining an elaborate, whirlwind romance before approaching him. Then an old, unpleasant-looking Rich Bitch returns from her shopping spree and yells at her trophy husband to stop philandering.
• Hot Men at Work: A bored woman tries to seduce the handsome young window washer who's hanging outside her window by stripping in front of him. However, he's Not Distracted by the Sexy.
• Huge Girl, Tiny Guy: Due to the differing art styles. Gürcan Gürsel in particular tends to emphasize women's legs, drawing them as towering amazonians compared to the shorter men they're paired with.
• I Ate WHAT?!: There's a comic in which a soldier and his buddies are going out on the town and when they get back to the motel open a package with some cookies that the soldier's wife sent him. Included is a video in which she admits that she's cheating on him, fellates the guy in question and spits out the result in the cookie dough. Cut to the soldiers face down on the toilet.
• Idealized Sex: Definitely. Not always to the level of being a Sex God, but most characters have sex like professionals. This is usually only subverted for laughs.
• The Immodest Orgasm: Several gags have very vocal girls sexually climaxing in the loudest way possible.
• Incompatible Orientation: The punchline to a comic where two men and a woman are sitting in a train cabin and the woman starts to agressively hit on one of the guys, who flatly ignores her advances. After she angrily storms off, the other guy asks him how he could possibly resist and notes that the woman turned him on so much that he's ready to jump a fly. The first guy starts mimicking buzzing.
• Intercourse with You: The whole sale premise of the series.
• Interrupted Intimacy: Of course the classic "oh no, my husband is home" situations are here too.
• Jizzed in My Pants: One comic has a streetwalker give such a vivid description of what she'll to a passerby if he purchases her services that he ejaculates right in front of her and just walks off.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: Also a recurring joke scenario. Like the one where a guy boasts about having sex with his wife every single night, but when he is in need of viagra and complains about the price, his wife calls him a cheapskate because he'll only need three pills a year.
• Lover's Ledge: This trope is played with a bunch of times in comics involving a cheating spouse that don't use the Closet Shuffle instead. One of the balsier examples has the lover crash into the apartment below where an Abhorrent Admirer is ready and waiting.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: A shamelessly adulterous woman tells her husband that she's having an affair with his best friend during a car ride, declaring her intent to divorce him and demanding possession of their house, their bank accounts, and full custody of their children. He's fine with it, since he only needs one thing (as he's driving up at full speed towards a concrete wall): he's got his seatbelt on.
• A Man Is Always Eager: Whenever the occasion is presented men will have sex. Unless the punchline of the joke is that they are Comically Missing the Point.
• Mermaid Problem: One strip addressed this when a sex-starved sailor stranded on a "Far Side" Island catches a mermaid while fishing. After several comically failed attempts to have sex with her, he just decides to eat her instead.
• Minimalist Cast: There is no protagonist or recurring character. Each gag has its own set of one time-characters.
• Model Scam: The current page image shows a sleazy-looking guy approaching a young woman and her boyfriend and promising her a big career in films. What he fails to mention is that he is a porn director, which the woman only realizes when she shows up to the set.
• Muscle Beach Bum: Parodied in a comic with a tall bodybuilder and a short guy walking up to a sunbathing woman on a beach, with the bodybuilder doing some impressive flexing while the other guy just waits patiently until he's finished. Then the short guy simply pulls down his pants, causing the woman to gasp in amazement and walk off with him instead of the muscle guy.
• My Girl Is a Slut: The female partners always have sex.
• Nameless Narrative: This gag comic has no recurring characters and thus many remain nameless.
• Naughty Nuns: Usually played straight, with nuns being objects of desire. Subverted in one strip, where a nun plays up to the stereotype when she's sexually assaulted by a rapist. When his pants are all the way down she runs away so he falls flat on his face.
• No Plot? No Problem!: First of all, this is a gag comic strip series. So there's no continuing story or recurring characters. Second of all, the plot and even the comedy aren't as important as the erotic scenes.
• One Thing Led to Another: A lot of gags start this way.
• Open-Fly Gag: There's a comic that uses this gag when a man flirts with an attractive waitress who passes him several notes. It says that his "fondness" for her was apparent because his fly was open and asks him to zip it up. The second note adds when her shift ends.
• Peace Pipe: One gag features two Indian Maiden bickering with each other. To end their argument they are given the "peace pipe", which is literally a Native American named "Peace" whom they can give a blowjob. (Note "piper" ("to pipe") is French for "giving a man oral pleasure".)
• The Peeping Tom:
  • There's a gag where a woman in a hotel sunbathes nude underneath several big lights in her room. The bellhop spies on her through the keyhole, which leaves a keyhole-shaped mark over his eye. When she goes down to the lobby, every man in the hotel has a similar mark.
  • There's another gag where a voyeur spies on a naked woman through a keyhole. When she notices him but decides to let him in, he ignores her and proceeds to spy on the empty hallway.
• Platonic Prostitution:
  • Parodied. A hooker is approached by an unknowing John in a bar and gives him an offer of "anything he wants" if he can express it in three words only. He ponders for a moment before replying "paint my house".
  • Another strip had an insomniac hire a streetwalker to read him a bed-time story. She obliges, but is rather non-plussed.
  • One strip featured a truck driver paying a ridiculous sum at the local brothel for "the ugliest prostitute you have, wearing a bathrobe, no make-up and flip-flops, calling me an asshole while I eat a grilled cheese sandwich and drink beer in front of the TV". No sex. The woman he hired is naturally curious what's up, so he admits that he's just homesick.
• Power Perversion Potential: Played for laughs in a pinup page parodying Pinocchio where the Blue Fairy suggests that Pinoccchio lie a lot to make his nose grow.
• Primal Scene: One gag has a child witnessing his mother and father having sex, and later asking them what they were doing. Since he's still too young for The Talk, the mother explains that she was sitting on the father to make his belly flatter. The child then says that wouldn't help anyway, since their female neighbor comes over when the mother isn't home to blow it up again.
• Print Long-Runners: In publication since 1990.
• Professionals Do It on Desks: When a gag starts in an office, this is usually what happens next.
• Purple Prose: Parodied when a posh Upper-Class Twit visits a brothel and gives the madam a very verbose, melodramatic description of his wishes. She relays this to her working girl, but just sums it up with two words to explain what this john wants: "to fuck".
• Quicksand Sucks: One comic involves a young woman wading through the Thirsty Desert before finding herself sinking into a pool of quicksand. Three travellers happen to chance upon her in quick succession. The first two demand fellatio in exchange for rescuing her, but she refuses. Near death, she begs the third traveler to rescue her in exchange for letting him use her body. Upon hearing this, he angrily stomps on her head—he would have gladly rescued a brave young woman, but he preferred to let a skanky woman die.
• Rape by Proxy: Played for laughs. Two Little Green Men land in a park in the middle of the night and force a random man and woman to show them human procreation under threat of being subjected to their Disintegrator Ray. When they decide to leave, the man asks them if they can come back the next day.
• Really Gets Around: Everybody!
• Russian Roulette: One gag features a variation on this after the standard use. A European explorer challenges an African chief to play a game of Russian Roulette with him. The Chief agrees, but then dares the explorer to a local variant: the explorer must pick one out of a row of six native girls to give him a blowjob. When the explorer notes that this doesn't seem like much of a challenge, the Chief informs him that one of the girls is a cannibal.
• Serial Homewrecker: A lothario is shown having sex with multiple different married women in a Sex Montage, then shows him handing his male buddy at a diner a note from an angry husband who is threatening to kill him. His friend suggests simply calling off that affair, but is rebuffed: the guy who sent the note didn't sign it.
• Sex as Rite-of-Passage: Women are willing to help virgins get deflowered.
• Sex Comedy: Summarizes this comic strip best.
• Sex for Services: In one of Dany's original comics, a rather buxom woman in a fur coat orders a taxi for a very long (ergo, expensive) drive. When they arrive at their destination, she says she doesn't have any money, but isn't wearing anything underneath her coat and offers to pay him another way. The driver rejects the offer because he doesn't have any change.
• Sex God: Sometimes.
• Sex Is Cool: Most sex scenes feature young and sexy people and the atmosphere is always naughty, but amusing.
• Sex Is Good: Certainly for comic book sales...
• Sex Montage: One comic shows a montage of couples having sex around the globe, except for the last one.
• Sexual Extortion:
  • One comic features a boss who keeps getting away with demanding sexual favors from his female employees throughout his career. The last however is smart enough to blackmail him after he's done.
  • Another one features a man in 1955 or so confessing to his priest that he saved a Jewish woman from the Gestapo during the war, but demanded sexual favors for giving her food and shelter. The punchline of course being that he asks the priest if he should tell her the war is over.
• Shout-Out:
  • One classroom-set comic strip is a thinly-disguised Expy of Le Petit Spirou and sends up the relative innocence of the target. The teacher, who looks like Spirou's kindly Miss Claudia Chiffre, is a Sadist Teacher who takes pleasure in spanking pupils who look a little like Spirou and his mates. When the parents come to complain, she gets them to drop charges by offering sexual favours, but only if the boy gets over 70% in his exam. The father then spanks the boy even harder as an incentive for him to pass the exam.
• Sleeping Their Way to the Top: In one strip a young woman who has been turned down on many occasions when applying for a job as a secretary decides to change up by just barging into the employer's office, stripping nude while explaining her credentials, and asking if he'll hire her. Another woman then crawls out from under the desk and asks her if she can wait her turn.
• Sleeping with the Boss: A female office worker keeps getting called in by her boss every hour for a "special meeting" until she finally gets sick of it. The last two panels show her with a sticky white substance in her hair that one of her colleagues comments on, leading to the punchline "See, I don't just swallow everything from him!"
• Sleeping with the Boss's Wife:
  • A one-page gag has an office worker feeling dismotivated with his work, so his boss tries to cheer him up by telling him how great it felt when he had rowdy sex with his wife a week ago, and suggests that his employee do the same thing. The next morning, the employee waltzes into the office full of energy. Only a passing comment about his boss's curtains reveals that he took his advice rather literally.
  • Another joke has a guy walking up to a housewife, slowly coaxing her to undress herself for massive sums of money, before convincing her to sleep with him for an even larger sum. She agrees because her husband's business is apparently in dire financial straits. When her husband comes home later, he asks her if anyone came over. When she says no, he curses "that lazy employee of mine" for not delivering the cash money he ordered him to earlier that day.
• Something Else Also Rises: One gag has three old men watching a young girl. They are really excited, but depressed since they are physically unable to have sex anymore. One of them starts giggling, despite being apparently unable to get a Raging Stiffie except for once a year. He acknowledges this, but at least he has this annual erection at that very moment.
• Streetwalker: Streetwalkers make pretty regular appearances, but never played straight. Either the john is an idiot, the streetwalker is a Gonk, some sort of misunderstanding of the Need a Hand, or a Handjob? sort, etc.
• Suspect Is Hatless: Parodied. A woman filing a police report gives an incredibly precise description of her rapist's appearance (muscular, balding, red beard, black glasses, yellow bowtie, striped green-maroon jacket, beige trenchcoat, grey fedora) to the police officer interviewing her, but he doesn't seem to notice that she's talking about his lieutenant.
• That Came Out Wrong: Three women are discussing going down on their husbands, and two of them noticed something unusual, namely that their balls are cold. The third woman (who happens to be blonde whereas her two friends are brunettes) arrives with a black eye the next week. She explains that she went down on her husband, but then stopped to remark that his balls are warm, whereas those of the two other guys are cold.
• Their First Time: Also a lot of gags.
• There Is Only One Bed: A catholic priest and nun are traveling towards the same convention and become acquainted on the journey, but are forced to share the same hotel room, which turns out to have only one bed. Before they go to bed, the nun grabs a handful of snow from outside and puts it up to her crotch, claiming that it's to "freeze her abstinence". The priest does the same with a small crucifix and similar religious regalia, claiming that he's "putting on his snow chains".
• Trojan Gauntlet: There's a gag where various men buy condoms from a female cashier. They don't know their own size, so she has to, ehm, manually check them by putting her hand down their pants, then broadcasting stuff on the loadspeaker like "Size XL! Aisle 3!" or Size M Aisle 3!". The punchline comes when an nervous teenager goes to buy condoms: "Cleanup! Aisle 3!"
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: The women tend to be drawn more attractive than the often dopey looking men.
• Unproblematic Prostitution: There's a comic where a High-Class Call Girl brings a john to her apartment, who is amazed by her collection of classical paintings, academic literature, and refined taste in music. He asks her why a beautiful, intelligent, educated young woman like herself became a prostitute. Her response: "I guess I was just lucky."
• Unprovoked Pervert Payback: Played with in a particular strip. A beautiful woman is eating at a bistro when a young man takes notice and asks her if he can offer her some coffee. She reacts incredibly outraged as if he treated her like a hooker, causing much embarassment to the guy. She takes a few notes, then gets up and approaches him to apologize and explain that she's a student who was using him for a social experiment on shame in a public setting. He angrily shouts at her so everyone can hear him say "1000 bucks for an hour?! Are you flipping mental?!"
• You Are Who You Eat: One gag feature a couple in a restaurant. Each time the man wants to order something the woman interrupts him and orders carrots or carrot related dishes for him. Eventually the waiter asks her why she does this, to which she answers: "He fucks like a rabbit, so he should eat like a rabbit too."
• You Need to Get Laid: One strip had a guy at an office telling his boss that he feels despondent and unmotivated. His boss says that he feels the same way on occasion, so what he does is go home and have wild sex with his wife to cheer himself up, and suggests that his employee try the same. The next day, the guy walks into the office feeling energized and thanks his boss for the advice before complimenting him on the curtains in his living room.
• Your Mom: Subverted in a comic where a guy in a bar repeatedly gets approached by a drunk man who loudly tells him he screwed his mother. The punchline: "Dad, just go home. You're drunk."

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