Maria Fidanzata - The Comtessa

Maria Fidanzata is the attractive, dark-haired, bespectacled fiancée of Marco Promesso and a Janet Weiss parody from The Rocky Horror Show. Prim, proper, and initially naïve, she and her clean-cut fiancé become stranded on a stormy night and seek help at the secluded home of the sexually uninhibited Countess Flavia. Even Maria’s name is a gag—fidanzata means “fiancée” in Italian—emphasizing her role as the stereotypically respectable young bride-to-be whose propriety is about to be tested.Maria appears in the early three-part La Contessa storyline by Horst Dounichdy-Glokken, originally serialized in Germany in Weissblech Comics’ XXX-Comics and later collected in French as La Comtesse in Insatiable. The story is a bawdy erotic send-up of Rocky Horror: a stranded engaged couple, a remote mansion, an unavailable telephone, a bizarre servant, an aggressively seductive aristocratic host, and the deliberate separation of the couple for the night, recasting the familiar setup as an exaggerated European adult-comics farce.