CarnalNation

Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster
By Craig Yoe. Illustrated by Joe Shuster. Forward by Stan Lee.
Abram ComicArts
160 pp, $24.95

Like Superman, Joe Shuster's greatest contribution to the Western pop culture canon, this book has two distinct personas. Craig Yoe's reporting on the history of his subject is worthy of Clark Kent. Fans of Michael Chabon's fiction will recognize the real-life dynamic of heroic Jewish artistic idealism versus the ultimate arch-nemesis of creativity-crushing capitalism. But it would be short-sighted to ignore the heroic appeal of the book's main content—the crisply reproduced drawings from Shuster's career as an illustrator for sensational pulp paperbacks—to connoisseurs of fetish art. Whether you're interested in superheroes, American visual tradition, or kinky wank material, Secret Identity is certainly an engrossing coffee-table conversation starter.

Yoe sketches out Shuster's life from a childhood spent honing cartooning skills on butcher-shop paper to the high school friendship with Jerry Siegel that begat the iconic man of steel. Of particular interest to pulp connoisseurs is an inquiry into the popular paperback comics and fantastic stories that influenced the burgeoning creative team.

The duo's "rags-to-riches-to-rags" tragedy is recounted, as they were shut out of the profits and bylines of their creation's considerable legacy. From there Shuster began drawing sordid stories for booklets like Nights of Horror; which presented sordid stories with very cheap production values. Nights of Horror ended up playing a key role in the legal drama associating comics with juvenile delinquency that resulted in the Comics Code Authority. Dr. Fredric Wertham rears his ugly head in this tale, spearheading the push for censorship. Wertham accused comics of influencing sadistic behavior in impressionable youth and noted somewhat hilariously that "girls' buttocks are drawn with careful attention."

A well-researched historical document, to be sure. However, if it's your prurient interests that need appealing to, you're in luck, especially if you're into bondage, discipline, voluptuous ladies or strapping young men. Reminiscent of Eric Stanton in both content and style, Shuster's lithographic pencil drawings are eye-opening artifacts that expose American sexual fantasies. Collections of Tijuana Bibles shed light on pre-Playboy, pre-Internet pornography, but many of those eight-pagers were characterized by the shoddy work of amateur artists. Shuster was no hack. These illustrations showcase his mastery of idealized proportions, both male and female. The action and expression in a single panel imply far more than they actually show. Whips crack and lips are bitten. Muscles strain against chains and buxom chests are thrust forward in ecstatic anticipation.

As a confirmed expert in BDSM, kink, and fetish tropes, your humble reviewer can verify Shuster's impressive eye for the dynamics of such fantasies. The most impressive appeal of this book is the sheer breadth of kink represented.

There are dominatrix types here for certain, in sleek catsuits and dark severe hairstyles, tormenting vulnerable men. But there are also muscular dominant men in domestic punishment scenes.

The Kinky eye will recognize spanking, slavery, foot and shoe worship, strappado bondage, predicament bondage, forced prostitution, voyeurism, lesbian seduction, age play (by which I mean pictures of mature-bodied females dressed and treated like little girls), medieval device torture including an iron maiden, waterhose torture, loads of corporal punishment, corset punishment, humiliation, pony play, electrical play, blood play, hot irons, weights, hoods, floggers, hairbrushes, singletail whips, spiked beds, and even a Rube Goldberg paddling machine!

Lovers of high fetish and vintage lingerie will drool over garters, pumps, cinchers, and conical bras, and anyone with a pulse will be driven to distraction by the full-bodied feminine forms that fill out these skimpy costumes.

There's some delightfully shocking content, too, violent scenarios that depict characters who are closer to supervillians and damsels in distress than libidinous lovers. One unfortunate damsel is lowered into a crocodile pit and another has honey and red ants poured into her panties.

Some tropes date the genre and characters of the action. Hardboiled detectives, EC-style horror, racist jingoism, Refer-Madness-style drug paranoia, the anxiety of conservative gender roles abound.

Great pains are taken by the author and even in the introduction by comic legend Stan Lee not to condone the BDSM content. Perhaps I'm biased because I find the spanking scenes as intriguing as the comic history, but I can't help but feel a little skeptical about Lee's insistence that the illustrations in this book aren't "the sort of material that rings my bell" and his speculation as to the questionable state of Shuster's morale. Lee and Yoe both feel the need to paint their subject as a downtrodden man who resorted to desperate measures.

The angle that the crew behind this book seems to miss, even as they present it, is that they are archiving not only the underbelly of the American commercial canon, but of human erotic desires as well. These pictures were created to sell magazines, and it seems pretty clear that the fantasies depicted therein were a reflection of what the people wanted rather than part of someone's agenda to distort the minds of the young.

Censors like Wertham seem to forever underestimate the people's capacity for imagination, and for distinguishing fantasy from reality. There is a difference between producing or consuming pictures of torture in an erotic context and desiring to carry out those stories with non-consenting people.

I am, as always, interested in the artist's own proclivities. Was he, as the book takes pains to insist, a down-on-his-luck, under-appreciated artist forced to depict scenes he himself found repulsive? Or did he take these gigs as an outlet for his own desires? Or are we all reading too much into it? Did Shuster just want to get paid however he could?

Whatever his motivations, it should be evident to anyone thumbing through this book that Shuster's style was perfectly suited to the bold steamy illustrations necessary for erotic sequential art.