Rather than attempting to manipulate the erotic sensibilities of an unseen crowd of onlookers, Crepax focused on isolating those of the people in his panels, and specifically on building up his gorgeous young fashion photographer Valentina Roselli into a woman so real that to read the comics is to believe that the pleasure her ink body derives from being stroked by ink fingers or massaged by ink tongues is as real as the pleasure one's own body has been given by real-life sexual experiences. From even the most cursory look at Valentina, it's obvious that its artist wanted to do more than just draw sex. At his best, Crepax uses the comics medium itself as a sexual organ, wracking limbs and exploring orifices with nothing more than sequenced drawings. To do this, though, he had to create someone real enough to do it to. Hence, Valentina.

Crepax's almond-eyed, soft-lipped, bob-haircutted nubile was born into a milieu similar to what most comics characters answering to her physical description inhabit: the teasingly sexy super-spy strip Neutron (1965), which Jim Steranko would rip off wholesale a few years later in creating his classic run on Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, which still stands as the quintessential psychedelic superhero comic.