Barbarella is a free-spirited adventurer who crashes on various planets and, with a cheerful disregard for the conventions of 1962, has a great deal of sex along the way, with people, with a robot called Diktor and at one point with a machine designed to kill her with pleasure, which she exhausts. The French authorities were not amused, and the 1964 book edition ran into censorship trouble.
The comic is now far better known from the 1968 Roger Vadim film with Jane Fonda, a camp classic that may be the only film to open with a zero-gravity striptease. Forest's original is sharper and stranger than its reputation suggests, and it opened the door to adult European SF comics: without Barbarella, there would have been no Métal Hurlant.
