A Story of love and blood: the strange connection between Ludwig II, Luchino Visconti and Italian pornographic comic books

Luchino Visconti's 1973 film Ludwig exploited the biography of Ludwig II of Bavaria, a notorious homosexual. In turn, Visconti's film became an erotic tale primarily intended to arouse heterosexual male readers in the form of Ludwig, il folle di Baviera, a porn comic book conceived as a spoof published while the film was still in post-production. As well as considering the general relationship between mainstream cinema and pornographic comics and their representation of homosexuality, this article analyzes Ludwig, il folle di Baviera as a re-adaptation of Visconti's film that exploits the director's peculiar image in order to handle its ambiguous sexual content.