Dark, sensual comic strips by French artist Marie Jacotey

If Marie Jacotey’s work were a film it would be a sexy, sinister love story based in Paris in the 1960s, with a precocious and beautiful protagonist whose passion in life was to drive her male peers wild with lust. It’s not, of course – it’s illustration, or more accurately a series of comic strips created with richly toned coloured pencil and underpinned by a concise and debauched narrative – but I can still imagine them read in torchlight under the covers by an adolescent girl.

Richly textural in its execution and often overtly sexual in its subject matter, Marie’s comics are designed for a new generation of women. These femmes fatales are beautiful and assured, and can speak frankly about their love affairs – and this makes for completely riveting reading. Mills and Boon eat yer heart out.