The Blonde, originally titled La Bionda, is the central character in a series of erotic and crime-themed comics created by the Italian artist Franco Saudelli. The comic debuted in the mid-1980s and quickly gained a cult following among readers interested in adult comics with a strong aesthetic and narrative identity. The stories follow her daring adventures, often featuring elements of suspense, humor, and explicit bondage scenarios, which have become a hallmark of Saudelli’s distinctive style. The Blonde has appeared in several graphic novels, such as “Bondage Palace” and “Phoebus III,” and remains a notable figure in the adult comics genre for her boldness and the provocative storytelling that surrounds her.
The earliest La Bionda stories were published in Italy in various erotic anthologies and magazines, particularly those issued by the prominent erotic publisher Dargaud/Eurotica and Edifumetto, as well as appearances in Glamour International Magazine, which served as an important platform for fetish and erotic art in Italy. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, La Bionda began to appear more consistently as a recurring feature in these publications, often accompanied by short, self-contained stories.
The international recognition of La Bionda was significantly enhanced when the stories began to be compiled and translated into other languages, particularly French and English. In France, where Franco-Belgian erotic comics had a well-established market, the series found an especially receptive audience. Publishers like Éditions Dynamite and Dargaud issued collections that brought together Saudelli’s previously scattered stories, offering them in high-quality album formats.
Franco Saudelli was inspired to create “The Blonde” series by a combination of influences, including his interest in strong, adventurous female characters and elements of bondage and eroticism. In an interview, Saudelli mentioned that the character was not directly based on a specific person from movies, TV, books, or comics but rather emerged from his own creative vision and fascination with the themes of mystery, sensuality, and suspense that he wanted to explore in his work.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, La Bionda maintained a relatively niche yet devoted fanbase. Saudelli occasionally collaborated with other artists from the Italian erotic comics scene, including Roberto Baldazzini and Giovanna Casotto, and his stories often reflected a shared visual language and thematic preoccupations with the broader Italian and French erotic tradition.
Contents
Who is The Blonde?
The Blonde is a racy thief-indeed, blonde-specializing in grabbing treasures of great value. She wears clothing that enhances her racy figure, tight black top, high heels, and the ever-present black mask over her face.
Her blows often involve capturing beautiful shapely women, denuding them, tying them up, and sometimes subjecting them to tickling torture to gain valuable information.
It should be mentioned that this practice is also performed by other characters in the series, always against helpless and scantily clad women. Even before nudity, the protagonists of the shots are women’s feet, barefoot and sensual, in what appears to be a futuristic city populated practically only by beautiful and shapely women who are unaccustomed to remaining clothed.
According to the scant information provided in the regular comic series, the Blonde is a female thief of unknown origin, possibly from a Hungarian grandmother, who grew up in a barefoot Carmelite convent (sic.) from which she escaped by torturing the mother superior by tickling her feet.
La Bionda engages in theft of items of great value, and her exploits generally involve binding, gagging shapely women, leaving them barefoot, sometimes resorting to tickling their feet to extort information from them.
The Blonde practically lives to steal, refusing to conform to an ordinary life let alone work for a living: she has no friendships, no loves, only principals, accomplices or enemies. Despite her great talent, she is often targeted by bouts of bad luck and grotesque hiccups, nevertheless putting her own spin on things with her histrionic and narcissistic personality (in much of her dialogue she gives evidence of ignorance by mispronouncing idioms and historical references).
The Blonde – Full Story
Colpo doppio – Un colpo di sonno – Bondage Palace – Phoebus III
The Blonde kidnaps Sally Croc, the heiress of a large saltines company, and her scientist Frida Freeze. Sally’s rival, Dr. Milly, manages to capture Frida and, after stripping and tying her naked, subjects her to the torture of tickling her feet with a feather to learn the secret formula of her competitor’s saltines.
Frida, however, is an android, and in the meantime The Blonde intervenes and, depriving Milly of her footwear, subjects her to the same tickling torture, to which the woman is not very resistant.
However, The Blonde is captured, but escapes by switching places with a doctor assigned to examine her.
The Blonde is assigned by the Popess Crimilde to retrieve the formula of eternal youth in the possession of Ether Lorimar, an elderly woman who resides at the Bondage Palace, a building that is apparently inhabited only by women with a mania for denuding and gagging each other.
Unbeknownst to her, rival Generaless Prittwitt, Ether’s daughter-in-law, has also hired Crimilde’s secretary Mathilda X-15 as a spy.
The Blonde breaks into the building and stuns a fake nurse of the old woman, torturing her by tickling her feet to find out who she really works for.
The same goes for Crimilde’s secretary, who is stripped naked by her employer and repeatedly tortured by tickling her feet to sap her will.
The woman does not stop even after getting the information and continues to tickle her after gagging her again.
Popess Crimilde decides to experiment on herself with the formula for eternal youth but in doing so regresses to an infant. In fact, the formula, discovered by Ether on another planet, is extremely difficult to achieve and plausibly rejuvenates those who use it too much.
The Blonde is captured and sent to the Phoebus III rehabilitation center, a clinic that rises above a powerful psychic field that allows its guardians to mentally manipulate prisoners.
Mathilde X-15, whose psychic powers have been awakened, has learned that the Blonde is the only one who knows the formula for eternal youth, which she learned from the old woman before she died. She then allies with Dr. Milly to extort it from the thief and sell it back to Crimilde.
To do this the two women sneak onto Phoebus III where the Blonde is subjected to a mental rewriting program to make her a meek submissive worker.
To restore her memory they capture the two guardians and Milly subjects them to tickling their feet so as to distract their mental powers, but they discover that Blonde has lost her memory.
The two women, in order to find out how to remedy this, fiercely begin to torture the soles of their captives’ feet, who, gagged, can do nothing but laugh out loud.
Meanwhile, a prisoner revolt (wealthy female clients who were forbidden to eat in order to lose weight) takes place, and in the chaos, Milly betrays her partner.
What she does not know is that Matilde’s powers would be needed to make Blond recover her memory and that by doing so she will not be able to receive the reward from Popess Crimilde…
Comic series
After her imprisonment on Fobus III the Blonde is sent to the Giuliva re-education center, where she is unsuccessfully subjected to hypnotic therapy. She follows one escape attempt after another until she is spontaneously released from prison, and runs off in search of the loot she set aside. Once back in possession of her Blondemobile she retrieves her hidden loot, but is pursued by the two thugs of her accomplice Milly Cosciastorta. At the end of a series of daring chases she learns that, over the year she has been locked up, the loot now consists of out-of-date banknotes with no value…
The Blonde learns that the wealthy Del Rio possesses a pair of diamond slippers and intends to steal them. Arriving at her apartment she discovers that her younger sister has stolen her coveted footwear. After a series of daring chases and sensual kidnappings, she finally manages to fit the highly prized diamond slippers. Only to find that they are too uncomfortable. In anger he throws them into a river, thwarting all his efforts….
La Bionda commissions the theft of the Fiu-Mi-Chin fortune statuette, which, contrary to its name, causes her one stroke of bad luck after another. Returning to the fence, she learns that the statuette, if blindfolded, should lead to a fabulous treasure, but should it be without the bandages it turns into a magnet of trouble. Going to the rich woman from whom she had taken it, she puts it back in its place, but turning it over activates a secret mechanism that reveals behind the wall a room full of treasure. Inadvertently, the Blonde lets the statuette turn again locking her inside the room: she is thus forced to sound all the alarms in the surrounding area to be let out…
The Blonde is caught by the owner of the department store that she regularly robs for groceries. The woman instructs her to steal documents from her own office that reveal her corruption connections. He immediately attempts to frame her for the theft, but the thief manages to escape and make the dishonest woman pay.
The Blonde then proceeds to pull off the heist of her dreams: burglarizing an outsized mansion, only to discover that, apart from a series of grotesque traps, there is very little there, as the owner has spent everything she had. The thief then obtains only a fever, and takes revenge by blowing up the mansion….
An expedition into the fashion business has tragic effects: despite much effort, the only result the Blonde achieves is to launch a fashion in tied women, from which she derives no profit. Similarly, the theft of the Vin-Sen necklace runs into numerous mishaps that lead to the breaking of the precious necklace and getting her hands on only one of the fifteen pearls, which makes the heist useless…
Once in contact with the acting world, the Blonde has to deal with two megalomaniac actresses: after kidnapping one of them, the other pretends that she herself has been kidnapped by the Blonde. The movie production company profits from this situation and includes in its fiction a fictional version of the Blonde who is very successful, even among the Police.
After passing herself off as a real estate agent, the Blonde is caught in the act by the husband of one of her victims: he sets out to cure her of her kleptomania at all costs and begins to stalk her, ruining her every shot. Eventually, the Blonde agrees to go to psychotherapy where she reveals that her propensity for theft dates back to her youth at the Discalced Carmelite college. In reality, the woman is well proud of her vocation, and manages to escape after cleaning out the psychoanalyst and the Good Samaritan…
Later, the Blonde is hired to travel to the Zulu pygmy tribe who are rumored to have the secret of the cure for baldness, which interests her bald patron.
Their queen (an Amazonian version of Vanessa Del Rio) feels her leadership is in danger and challenges her. After a daring escape from the jungle, the Blonde manages to make it to the airport and hides the potion inside a baby’s bottle. A baby bottle she then forgets to retrieve, thus forfeiting the million-dollar reward….
While preparing to steal some valuable lingerie, the Blonde is kidnapped by a sheik who collects curvy blond women. After vain attempts to escape, she manages to get away by suggesting to an envious concubine how to look sexy by copying her look. But when all seems to be over for the better, she is arrested for trying to steal the prized panties…
As of the 2020s, La Bionda remains a reference point in the history of European erotic comics. Saudelli’s work continues to be exhibited, discussed, and collected by aficionados, particularly in Italy, France, and Germany, where erotic graphic novels maintain a stronger presence within comic publishing. The character of La Bionda endures as a symbol of playful transgression, rooted in a European tradition of erotic elegance and visual experimentation.
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