At this point in the story, Rodrigo Borgia (in the red) is campaigning to become pope and he’s visiting his rivals to bribe or threaten them into voting for him. The other man is a gay cardinal who has bragged of sleeping with some 150 influential men. This conversation is about those men.

As you can see, two of the panels in this confrontation are heavily censored and it’s not clear what is going on at all. This censorship is not uncommon in Heavy Metal. They’d been facing charges of glorifying sexual violence since the early 90s and several of their issues had been challenged by Canadian customs authorities. So they started censoring certain panels – just enough to get away with saying that they didn’t depict sexual violence.

In this day and age, it’s ridiculously easy to go out and find digital copies of the original art to compare and contrast with the censored panels. I was astonished at what I saw when I looked up this page. It’s a bag full of dicks. Cardinal Borgia is presenting a bag full of what he claims are the penises of the 150 lovers that his fellow cardinal brags of. And not just penises, severed penises. Milo Manara is such a skilled artist that he lovingly rendered the severed penises falling out of the bag in such a way that it’s beautiful and grotesque all at once. No wonder Heavy Metal censored those panels.

(Heavy Metal issue #218, March 2005 – Page 115 Borgia – Blood for the Pope by Manara and Jodorowsky)