The Mink

The Mink is a long running action/adventure story created, drawn, and written by Kjartan Arnorsson (Karno) that ran in the pages of Genus and Savage Funnies for nearly a decade.

Plot
The story centers primarily around Laura Waller, better-known as the magically adept and exceedingly well-endowed superheroine "The Mink". Laura was once a gawky, unimpressive teenager, winding her way through college without much of a plan for the future, until she found a grimoire of exceptional power in a rare book shop. Abandoning her studies, all her money, and most of her thoughts for the outside world, Laura threw herself head-first into learning magic, quickly finding that she had an amazing latent talent for spellcraft.

One of the first things Laura chose to do with her new abilities was to change herself: gone was the thin, flat-chested, overlooked recluse, replaced with a build that can only be described as "amazonian". Now well over six feet tall, exceptionally strong, and with a body that no man seemed able to resist, The Mink set about to being a far stronger woman than she had ever been as "Little Laura".

Change in focus
The Mink ran as a serial-format story, beginning in the original issue of Genus in 1994. The first story, Do You Believe In Magic?, had The Mink saving her old friend Shelly from an alleyway mugger. The rest of the piece was primarily backstory, establishing Laura's acquisition of the Grimoire and her changes.

When Genus changed from a "mature audiences" comic to "adults only" after issue #4, the flavour of the story changed dramatically. No longer bound to a "soft R" rating, Karno was free to include quite a bit of violence and, even moreso, his trademark over-the-top sex. SEX! is exactly what the title indicates and not much more, and while later chapters would certainly not be page after page of copulation, Laura's alarmingly active sex drive would feature highly throughout.

Details
The first major story arc presented The Mink fighting a demon who had rampaged throughout the minds of mages for centuries, and who was steadily eating away at her own psyche. Aided by Karno's earlier creation, the brazen, gun-packing sociopath Savage Squirrel, and through judicious application of magic, 9mm rounds, high explosives, and The Mink's own enhanced "assets", the demon was put to rest in Kill A Demon?.

Since that early story arc, The Mink, along with Shelly, Savage Squirrel and his fiance, have dodged a magic-hungry techno-wizard, fought off zombies, tried to manage the responsibilities of her powers, and even dealt with a troop of angry giants who lost their leader (this last story was not printed in Genus, but only ran in the long out-of-print Savage Funnies). The last major storyline began with The Toy Boy and centered around The Mink's discovery of a group of genetically modified "children", built-to-order for the sexual fantasies of the buyer, after one attempted suicide to escape his "owner". Laura travelled far and wide, tracking down the few "children" she could and taking the three -- Toy (later renamed Toby), Huundrat, and Bovie -- as a sort of surrogate family of her own.

Hiatus
After that final entry, the twenty-third of the serial, the curtain unofficially closed on The Mink. While Karno has not stated that the story is over as it stands, there have been no new chapters in a number of years; Karno's primarily focus as of late has been on his barnyard sex romps in the pages of MU's Wild!. Whether or not this is final is yet to be determined, but with Karno no longer appearing in Sin Factory comics and the sudden discontinuation of Wild!, it looks like Laura will spend her days quitely with the "children" and Shelly.

For the reader who would like to catch up with the adventures of the gang in all their violent and carnal glory, the best overall book to begin with is Genus's Greatest Hits' #2, which while out-of-print is not difficult to come by, and features the original seven chapters. Other chapters appear through various issues of Genus proper, and are moderately rare. There is also a The Mink portfolio based on the chapter "SEX!"; it simply features all of the art panels without any of the binding text or bookend segments between Shelly and Laura.

It should be noted that, beyond the first two chapters, there is extremely graphic sexual content in nearly every chapter. This material is intended strictly for adult audiences, and even they should understand Karno's propensities before reading.