Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster

[RamboLiberal]

In the new book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster (Abrams ComicArts, $24.95), page after page of lascivious panels are reproduced from underground comics that Shuster drew in the early 1950s when the artist was down on his luck. Titled Nights of Horror, the crude, stapled pamphlets of erotic horror were sold under the counter at drugstores for $3.

Within are naked women with whips, brutish men brandishing red-hot pokers, exotic torture and politically incorrect spankings. What makes the illustrations more than simply a curiosity of the times is the disturbing fact that many of the characters look exactly like Shuster's Superman and Lois Lane.

"Yes, they look like Lois and Clark," Yoe says. "Joe obviously had some very dark fantasies. There's a panel in an early Superman comic book where he has Lois over his knee and is spanking her. But certainly nothing of this depth or extremeness."

Artist Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel created Superman in 1938 but didn't benefit when the character exploded in popularity in the 1940s. By the 1950s, Shuster was barely working. He died in 1992.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-04-12-shuster-comics_N.htm

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Lois Lane? Looks like Betty Page with a whip to me.