Kinky Superman!

I love it when different worlds like fetish art and comics collide...

As ptupper72 notes in his post Superman's creator's bondage art comes to light (on his blog Beauty In Darkness: the History of BDSM)

"There are a number of connections between fetish art and American comics history. There's the well-documented perviness of William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman, whose stories fairly dripped with bondage and capture scenarios, not to mention subtextual sapphism. Classic-era Marvel artist Steve Ditko, who had his own sideline in fetish comics, shared office space with the great Eric Stanton. DC Comics heroine the Black Canary was originally a fishnet-clad bad-girl-turned-good, the heir to a tradition of morally ambiguous (anti-)heroines in black that goes back at least as far as Irma Vep in the French Les Vampires silent serials"

Some of these were documented in Craig Yoe's Clean Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings:

"By day their cartoon creations included Mickey Mouse, Superman, Beetle Bailey, Betty and Veronica, Wonder Woman, Batman, Nancy, Betty Boop, Krazy Kat, and Blondie. But when night fell, they abandoned their pursuit of heroic deeds and good clean fun to draw the risque—slinging ink to make kink"

Yoe is described as:

"the freaking Indiana Jones of comics" and a "twisted archivist of the ridiculous and the sublime." Publishers Weekly, while they call his work "brilliant" and Yoe "a madman/ visionary," say he is "ruining America's youth"

Now comes Yoe's latest book: Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster, published by ComicArts (the new graphic novel imprint from publisher Harry N. Abrams) with an introduction by Stan Lee. Here's the book's description:

"Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster showcases rare and recently discovered erotic artwork by the most seminal artist in comics, Joe Shuster. Created in the early 1950s when Shuster was down on his luck after suing his publisher, DC Comics, over the copyright for Superman, he illustrated these images for an obscure series of magazines called "Nights of Horror," published under the counter until they were banned by the U.S. Senate. Juvenile delinquency, Dr. Fredric Wertham, and the Brooklyn Thrill Killers gang all figure into this sensational story.


"The discovery of this artwork reveals the "secret identity" of this revered comics creator, and is sure to generate controversy and change the perception of the way we look at Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, and Jimmy Olsen forever. The book includes reproductions of these images, and an essay that provides a detailed account of the scandal and the murder trial that resulted from the publication of this racy material".

It was pretty racy back then, but these days kinkster may find the images less exciting. "The sample images I've seen so far actually look pretty mild", writes ptupper72, "at least compared to the kind of torture and gore you could see in some pre-Comics Code Authority comics". Still, you can definitely recognize some of the characters drawn ... ptupper72 muses:

"Considering the amount of time Superman spent rescuing Lois Lane from various deadly traps and captivity, was it a relief to draw a malesub/femdom scenario?"

You can order from the preview site here or preorder from Amazon here. That is, if the April 1 2009 release date doesn't turn out to make the book an elaborate April Fool's Day joke!

Thank you:

ptupper72
Superman's creator's bondage art comes to light
on Beauty In Darkness: the History of BDSM

Graeme McMillan
Man of Steel Woman of Bondage
at 109.com

http://www.secret-identity.net/

Photos:
courtesy: http://www.secret-identity.net/