Back in October of last year I started collecting different editions of the Barbarella comics. As my collection grew and my personal documentation–by language, year, format–expanded, I decided to create a public website to share all of that information, along with details from items I don’t own, and so created The Barbarella Library. The website is a work-in-progress because, as I’ve found while chasing various and more rare editions, Barbarella has an unexpectedly rich bibliography.
The comics, written by Jean-Claude Forest, first appeared in eight chapters from 1962 to 1963 in the French magazine V and then collected and published in 1964 by Le Terrain Vague in oversized hardback. Eric Losfeld was the publisher of both the magazine and the book. The stories were first translated in English in 1965 and 1966 in the American literary magazine Evergreen Review–along with works by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, and Alain Robbe-Grillet–then compiled in an oversized hardback edition. Both magazine and book were published by Grove Press.
