If you’re not a frequent and active user of adult webcam sites, their bewildering profusion these days and the wide variety of different business models under which they operate is likely to be at least a little bit confusing. So much so, in fact, that when you do feel the urge to spend a little time with a camgirl, you’ll probably benefit from using a reviews-and-ratings link like the one that opens this paragraph.

Just a few days ago I was thinking about how far the cams industry has come in the last twenty years, while I skimmed through Milo Minara’s classic camgirl graphic novel from 2000. It’s an adult comic book that’s very rarely seen and extremely hard to construct internet searches for, because it has the orthographically challenging title of “WWW.” Yes, “doubleyou-doubleyou-doubleyou-dot” is really the title!

Of course Manara’s 20th century vision of erotic camming is — in some ways — laughably quaint. It’s not just the tech, with its single camera the size of a grapefruit, snapping still photos that refresh every twenty seconds. There’s also major plot tension between the cam girls and their employer about whether they are just going to show tits and ass, or whether they need to show the camera some fully-exposed pink pussy as he is demanding. He also wants them to use sex toys for the customers, but — at least at the beginning of the book — this is unthinkable!

Economically, there’s no hint in this story of the ladies being independent, or having any share of the subscription money coming in. It’s made plain that they get well paid and kept in a nice Venice apartment. But their boss hectors them via the telephone with threats of bouncing them out of there, in an effort to get them to do racier stuff for the camera. It’s a far cry from the cheerfully-raunchy independent cam performers of today!

Of course pretty girls alone in a nice apartment along a seedy canal in Venice eventually attract attention from some unusual characters. Before you know it our exhibitionist heroines are doing all kinds of sexy shenanigans on camera to distract the subscribers from the odd goings-on in their apartment. Pussy shots are just the least of it:

That twenty-second refresh on the webcam becomes a plot point. The ladies learn that if they are doing something sexy enough when the camera redraws, nobody will question what happened previously. In order to hide various misdeeds and mishaps from their boss and the police, pretty soon it’s not just pink shows! They get out the sex toys, they do lesbian sex shows, they even stage a sort of “Weekend At Bernies” style posed orgy with a badly-the-worse-for-wear apartment intruder that they have conked on the head and are trying to discretely chuck out a window into the canal.

All in all, I’m glad that modern cam shows are so much more interactive, personal, and explicit (if that’s what you want and are willing to pay for) than they were a generation ago. But Manara’s vision of 1990s camming is comical, sexy, and (if you’re prone to that sort of thing) could make you nostalgic for the 20th-century internet.