by Tim Pilcher
Wanda also took swipes at other comic strip characters, including MAD’s Alfred E. Neuman, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. An early running gag was the constant, friendly digs at the strip Little Annie Fanny (published in Penthouse’s main competitor, Playboy).
Penthouse published a compilation of the first 24 episodes in 1975, and a paperback of Mullally’s Wanda text stories was also released. Boosted by the strip’s popularity, Embleton and Mullally pitched the idea of a Wicked Wanda movie, but Penthouse refused to acknowledge the creators’ copyright, and Hollywood’s producers felt the content would have been too controversial for cinema at the time. However, like George Petty and Alberto Vargas, Embleton’s Wicked Wanda art transcended the page and briefly graced the nose of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress as part of an exhibition at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida in 1975.
Toward the end of the series, Oh, Wicked Wanda! became less of a humorous cheesecake comic and more of a political rant, and this may have been a contributing factor to its cancellation at the end of 1980. Ron Embleton moved onto Oh, Wicked Wanda!’s replacement strip Sweet Chastity in 1981, written by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. The strip ran until 1988, when Embleton died of a heart attack, aged 57.
While Penthouse’s current owners have the plates, the exact location of most of Embleton’s original Wanda paintings is unknown. There’s speculation that Bob Guccione kept many, but may have sold these at Sotheby’s in 2002. Occasionally, originals appear on eBay selling for $1,500–$3,500.
Wanda as she usually appears in the strip—as nature intended.
Famous figures constantly guest starred in Oh, Wicked Wanda! Here, Marlon Brando appears, as does Walt Kelly’s newspaper strip cartoon, Pogo, in the final panel.
Writer Frederic Mullally and artist Ron Embleton guest star in their own comic strip. Note how Embleton depicts himself disparagingly. There’s also a guest appearance from Sophia Loren.
PENTHOUSE COMIX
George Caragonne was passionate about comics—perhaps too passionate. Caragonne’s old friend and fellow comic writer, Mark Evanier, recalled, “George was a big guy—he made me look anorexic—with incredible energy and passion. The phrase ‘nothing in moderation’ was not inapplicable.”
Caragonne soon achieved his dream of working in the comic industry as a writer, primarily for Marvel Comics, throughout the 1980s on titles like Starbrand and He-Man, Master of the Universe.
In 1988, after hearing that former Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief, Jim Shooter, was starting a new comic book company, Valiant, Caragonne drove from California to New York and knocked unannounced on Shooter’s door, saying, “I am your dog. Use me as you will.”
Shooter hired him and Caragonne did all the grunt work for Valiant while holding down a full-time job. When the company was on its feet, the writer/editor developed computer-game-related titles as Captain N, Link, and Punch Out.
When Shooter left Valiant, the fiercely loyal Caragonne walked away rather than work for the new administration, and started Constant Developments, Inc. (CDI), his own comic book company.
With his partner Mark McClellan, Caragonne came up with a startlingly simple business plan. He took a notepad to the largest magazine stand in Manhattan and wrote down the address of every magazine published in America. He then sent a business proposal to each magazine, offering to create a comic book version of their publication.
Eventually Caragonne hit gold with Penthouse Comix. Publisher Bob Guccione had a soft spot for comic strips and instantly saw the potential. In 1994 he invited Caragonne to discuss the proposition, although Guccione was allegedly warned not to get involved with Caragonne by a powerful financial expert.
Guccione repeated the warning to Caragonne and said, “I respect people with powerful enemies—it shows character. If I had any doubt before, I have none now— Penthouse Comix will exist.”
The new line of titles included Penthouse Comix, Penthouse Men’s Adventure Comix, and Omni Comix. Caragonne was determined to produce the finest adult comic magazines ever created—and he succeeded. His vision for the magazine was simple: to make an adult comic so good that readers were afraid to miss an issue; a magazine that would be the template for all future adult comic books. His witty slogan, “Comics so good that you’ll read them with both hands,” struck a chord, and, paying four times Marvel Comics’ page rate, Caragonne unsurprisingly attracted top comic talent including Frank Frazetta, Adam Hughes, Kevin Nowlan, and Garry Leach. Stories he created included Young Captain Adventure; a superhero parody, Hericane; and Escape From Lezbo Island.
“George wanted nothing more in the world than to be important in the comic book industry and, for a brief shining moment, he sort of made it,” Mark Evanier remembered.
Steve Pugh’s sexy art for Young Captain Adventure: Mars Needs Men! from Penthouse Comix #13 is instantly recognizable as that of the artist of Animal Man and many other mainstream superhero comics
Garry Leach’s cover to Men’s Adventure Comix, a Penthouse spin-off from 1996.
Penthouse Comix #9 had a censored cover painted by Mark Texeria. Inside, the nipples were revealed.
Legendary sci-fi artist Jim Burns painted this cover for Penthouse Max #1, the short-lived spin-off.
The cover to Penthouse Comix #1, painted by Luis Royo, featured Caragonne’s sexy superhero character, Hericane.
After a while, things started going wrong for Caragonne. Once a man who’d refused to smoke, drink, use drugs, or engage in premarital sex, Caragonne was suddenly doing all of those things to excess—particularly drugs. He had a “friend” who could get cocaine, and they were both heavy users. The arrangement they had was the “friend” got coke for both of them and Caragonne paid for it. “Friends tried to rein him in but it was like trying to recall a surface-to-air missile,” wrote Evanier on his blog, 10 years later. “When you told him he was out of control it made him frantic and he’d veer even more wildly off course.”
Caragonne also began spending huge amounts of cash, buying guns, expensive toys, and gifts for friends. He went drastically over budget on his magazines, and, as big as his salary was, it wasn’t big enough for his lifestyle. There were rumors that he was embezzling from Penthouse—and one evening, in July 1995, he arrived at work to discover he’d been locked out pending a full audit of his books.
George Caragonne disappeared for a few days, resurfacing at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York. He asked the bellhop, “Is it true this is the tallest hotel in Times Square?” The bellhop confirmed it and Caragonne took the elevator to the top floor, where an indoor atrium looks down on the lobby 45 floors below. He put on a Walkman containing a cassette of his favorite James Bond theme tunes and jumped.
His 400lb-plus body landed in a buffet spread, to the great surprise of the assembled diners. Amazingly no one else was killed, but many witnesses suffered severe emotional trauma that required years of treatment.
Despite the allegations of fraud, his extravagant lifestyle, and his tragic demise at the age of 30, Caragonne is still fondly remembered by former co-workers. As Penthouse cover artist Garry Leach recalled, “George was like an infectious, excitable force of nature… I really liked the big-ol’ fanboy.”
Without Caragonne’s driving force and passion, the Penthouse Comix line withered on the vine and the great dreams turned to dust in America. However, the Penthouse brand continued to boom in Spain, and Penthouse Comix remains a successful title there.
A beautifully rendered strip by Alfonso Azpiri, from the Spanish edition of Penthouse Comix.
Enrique Necio y el Amor, an erotic ménàge à trois strip by “Milk.”
A panel from Action Figures by George Caragonne and Tom Thornton, drawn by Jason Pearson and Karl Story.
The final issue of the US edition of Penthouse Comix, with a cover by the Italian maestro Milo Manara.
The cover to Spain’s Penthouse Comix #81, by “Milk.”
HUSTLER COMIX
Hustler was a latecomer into the world of men’s magazines and erotic comics. First published in 1974 by Larry Flynt, a strip-club owner, the magazine had a shaky start, but eventually reached a circulation high of around three million copies. It was one of the first major men’s magazines to show explicit photos of female genitalia, as opposed to the relatively modest “softcore” approach of Playboy.
A year after launching Hustler, in 1975, Flynt hired a 30-year-old, black-coffee-drinking, Marlboro-smoking motormouth as the magazine’s cartoon editor. His name was Dwaine Tinsley and he would become a highly controversial figure in the world of erotic comics.
Hustler was always self-consciously more lowbrow than Playboy and Penthouse and it frequently featured hardcore depictions of penetration, the use of sex toys, and group sex. Under Tinsley’s guidance, Hustler’s cartoons became infamous, often featuring blatantly violent and misogynistic themes. Gang rape, botched abortions, incest, child sex abuse, and racism were all recurrent motifs in the magazine’s cartoons. Tinsley also satirized the lives of “niggers, faggots, dykes, kikes, fat people, rednecks, and Jerry Falwell.”
Outraged by a particularly derogatory cartoon published in Hustler in 1976, Kathy Keeton, then girlfriend of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, filed a libel suit against Flynt in the state of Ohio. Her lawsuit was dismissed because she missed the deadline under the statute of limitations. Keeton filed a new lawsuit in New Hampshire and Flynt ultimately lost the case.
Hustler cartoonist George Trosley recalled, “If I did a drawing [of] someone with their guts ripped out, Dwaine would appreciate it if there were little veins and other things that had come out with the spleen. He would always say, ‘Hey, that’s good. Do more of that. Let’s see her kidney bouncing off the wall.’ He managed to see the sick part of you, and bring it out.”
George Orwell once wrote, “The reason why so large a proportion of jokes center round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.” It was almost as if Flynt and Tinsley were using these words as a manifesto.
Hustler has always been a political animal—as well as a dirty one—and its left-wing editorial stance on economics, foreign policy, and social issues distinguished it from other pornographic magazines that tended to embrace progressive ideas about free speech and morality, yet remain conservative or libertarian in other areas. Every month Hustler is mailed—uninvited and for free—to every member of the United States Congress. The practice started sometime between 1974 and 1983, and as Flynt explained, “I felt that they should be informed with what’s going on in the rest of the world… Some of them didn’t appreciate it much, but I haven’t had any plans to quit.”
In the late 1970s, Hustler ran a comic strip entitled Honey Hooker, about an unrepentant prostitute. Honey would have graphic sexual encounters with any male (or female) she came across. Her sexploits were set anywhere from the Super Bowl locker room to Colonial America, and Larry Flynt hoped the strip would successfully compete against Little Annie Fanny and Oh, Wicked Wanda!. In keeping with Hustler’s ethos of “seediness sells,” Honey Hooker was explicitly portrayed as being a prostitute, unlike Fanny and Wanda. Various artists worked on the series, including Jim McQuade, Mike Toohey, Fred Fernandez, Alfredo Alcala, and Chester Massey.
The subtle cartooning by Al Ellis looks like it would be stylistically perfect for the New Yorker—until you look a little closer.
The back cover to a Hustler humor collection from 1975, featuring the very ’70s-looking work of Jacke Schneider.
“But I can’t stop doing it dog fashion, Doc! That’s the way Fido fucks.” By Arnold Miesch.
Landau’s style harks back to Jack Cole and Bill Ward, but with a more explicit approach.
Dwaine Tinsley, Hustler’s cartoon editor, was always coming up with intriguing and inappropriate comic ideas, but he reached a new low with his own highly controversial comic strip, Chester the Molester. The “tongue-in-cheek” comic strip showed scenes where the main character Chester (and later his girlfriend Hester) tricked or attempted to trick people—mostly women and prepubescent girls—into sexually compromising positions.
Chester’s ongoing misadventures as a child molester, and his attempts to coerce young children into sexual activity with him, earned Hustler, unsurprisingly, huge criticism from all sides. Feminists and advertisers like the National Institute of Health claimed Chester served “as a disservice to a serious social problem.”
“Chester was always standing there with a baseball bat, trying to trick a little girl behind a bush or a fence,” recalled Hustler cartoonist George Trosley. “I used to say to Dwaine, ‘What’s the baseball bat for? To knock her out so he could sexually abuse her?’ I always had a little problem with that.”
But Flynt and his supporters defended the cartoons as bawdy social satire. When Larry Flynt briefly converted to evangelical Christianity in 1977, Chester was toned down. He became Chester the Protector and his bat was reserved for clobbering abusive parents or drug dealers. But the change didn’t last for long.
Things took a very surreal turn when, in 1984, Tinsley himself was accused of molesting his 13-year-old daughter Allison during a five-year period. She claimed that her father had sex with her over 100,000 times during this period (over 50 times per day). Defense attorney George Eskin argued that Allison’s account was unreliable as she was a suicidal cocaine addict.
Ironically, it was Tinsley’s own cartoons that damned him. Over 3,000 of his strips were introduced as evidence and, hoisted by his own petard, the jury found him guilty and the cartoonist was sentenced to six years in prison.
“I hope it was all a cartoon,” recalls Bruce David, who followed Tinsley as Hustler’s cartoon editor. “Dwaine always said he was innocent. Of course, being the creator of Chester the Molester, when he went into the courtroom he was already convicted.”
Tinsley continued to produce Chester the Molester artwork from his prison cell, but after serving 23 months of his sentence, his conviction was overturned on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment, because it was partly based on his comic strip.
In 2005 Tinsley suffered a massive heart attack and died. Flynt was visibly emotional and somber as he eulogized at his friend’s funeral in Beverly Hills. “Dwaine spoke out of contempt for the life he had to live,” Flynt said. “Thinking of Dwaine being gone is just tough to deal with. Maybe it’s reminding myself of my own mortality.”
But as dark as these men’s magazines were, with their tales of sex and death, they were just the tip of the iceberg compared to what was being sold under the counter. The fetish comics lived on the fringes of publishing, like the Tijuana Bibles before them, and their content was just as mind-blowing.
Underground cartoonist Don Lomax’s joke horror strip from Hustler, featuring a zombie with a giant penis.
3
Bondage Babes
IRVING KLAW’S CARTOON SERIALS
Irving Klaw was born in Brooklyn on November 9, 1910. Of his two brothers and three sisters, Irving was closest to his younger sister, Paula. Irving’s first business venture was as the owner of a book and photo shop at 209 East 14th Street in Lower Manhattan. By 1939, the photos were outselling the books, so Irving expanded the business and opened Irving Klaw Pin-Up Photos, which flourished after World War II. Paula had joined her brother’s enterprise at the start, and they sold publicity photos from Hollywood through their newly named Movie Star News mail order catalogue. Public demand for more fetishistic material soon drove them to set up their own studio above the shop. Customers would often ask Klaw for “specialist” girlie pictures, which they were unable to come by in the magazines on the newsstands, and he would create photosets for them.
An up-and-coming model—Bettie Page—met Klaw in 1952, just as she was starting to make her debut in
Robert Harrison’s “gags ’n’ girls” magazines, such as Eyeful and Whisper. Page would eventually become a comic book icon herself, over 30 years later, thanks to the efforts of artists like Olivia De Berardinis and comic creators like Dave Stevens.
Klaw photographed Page in various states of bondage and most of the photos were sold on a lucrative subscription basis, with customers often making specific requests regarding the scenes and layouts. Many of the bondage scenes were inspired and financed by “Little John,” a customer and attorney who remains anonymous to this day.
Klaw’s photographs and films have a bizarre, fresh innocence about them, thanks to Page’s down-to-earth approach to the work: “I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.”
While Klaw’s relationship with Bettie Page—and their subsequent films and photos—are what the publisher is most famous for, he also published and distributed stacks of illustrated adventure/bondage serials by fetish artists Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew, John Willie, and others. These booklets had higher production qualities than the Tijuana Bibles, and were distributed by a more sophisticated mail order service.
This beautifully painted cover from French Frolics magazine shows that there was an interest in bondage artwork as early as 1933.