AGAINST the full Wagnerian opera of the death of Michael Jackson, Bay Area artist Isabel Samaras provides a little commentary. Her new book, On Tender Hooks, includes Samaras' takeover of the 1594 painting Gabrielle d'Estées et une de ses soeurs—better known as the portrait of King Henry of Navarre's mistress getting her nipple pinched. (Everyone who goes to the Louvre loves to bring it back on a postcard.)

Samaras shifts the conceit to a shirtless Jackson being literally titillated by Bubbles the Chimp. This tweaking of a masterpiece is part of Samaras' beautifully stylized and funny punk-rock aesthetic. Some introductory photos include a portrait of the artist as a young punkette, looking stern and impressive. The arc of Samaras' work shows more than just a gift for punkish mischief. When you're through laughing, you keep looking. There's awe here—a serious love of myths, from ancient ones to movie-built lore to the hypnotic world of 1960s TV.

It's hard to describe the shocking effect LBJ-era television had on mesmerized kids. Suddenly, there occurred in one's living room a polymorphously perverse array of sexy monsters, masked men and learned pigs. In a glowing portrait, Samaras depicts Arnold Ziffel (fondly referenced by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction) in the arms of Eva Gabor; the porker looks as vital and tangible as a George Stubbs thoroughbred.

Samaras' earliest works, done on thriftshop TV trays and kids' lunchboxes, were, she writes, "the most fun painting I'd ever done." She rendered the hidden sex lives of TV characters. The Gilligan's Island castaways pose as the sufferers on Gericault's Raft of the Medusa; later, they live an afterlife as a polyamorous commune.

It would be easy to dismiss them as adult Mad magazine cartoons, and yet one can't draw away easily from Samaras' regular subject: the erotic side of Adam West's Batman and Burt Ward's Robin. The heroes share a velvety French kiss or tangle with the succulence that was Julie Newmar's Catwoman. It all seems so possible. Who knows what men of mystery do?

The book contains a very ornate inside joke: The Judgment of Batman after Rubens. The Dynamic Duo decide who will get the golden apple among a costumed trio of Lee Meriwether, Newmar and the late Eartha Kitt.

Samaras departs from TV after some toasted marshmallow-colored nudes; they resemble Mel Ramos' work, but they are less pneumatic, less ironic and more ardent. The reclining Elizabeth Montgomery as the witchy Samantha Stevens is titled I Put a Spell on You. It rather does.

The richness of the Renaissance oil painting strikes a strange harmony with the utter paganism of late-1960s TV. But the style also works well to depict cinema. Samaras paints a quartet of full-length portraits of the Famous Monsters of Filmland; they're iconic, like Catholic saints, and they hold the instruments of their martyrdom. Frankenstein's monster carries a daisy in one hand. In the other is a small model of the windmill where he met his fate. Or at least one of his fates.

The artist is currently in the thrall of the Brothers Grimm and with pastiches of English portraiture such as Jane Austen–era European colonialists marked with Maori tattoos, one of which appears on the book's cover.

On Tender Hooks features a portrait of the artist in the mantle of Red Riding Hood—inscrutable but curious, gazing past us into the woods. In Embrace, the red-clad girl is caught in the grasp of a standing golden-eyed wolf. One seated portrait, Baby Bear, has the creature wearing some bling and a diamond-encrusted ring. The bear-fancying Goldilocks, nude and tattooed, has her back turned to us at a riverside bathing amid her trio. "If there is a beast in man, it meets its match in women," wrote Angela Carter in her story "The Company of Wolves." On Tender Hooks charts Samaras' journey from a young girl satirizing myths to a woman making her own.

ON TENDER HOOKS: THE ART OF ISABEL SAMARAS; Chronicle Books; 160 pages; $35 hardback.

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