by Tim Pilcher
A close-up panel of John Willie’s Sweet Gwendoline comic strip reveals the artist was equally adept in pen and ink as he was in watercolor.
John Willie’s unique fetish-wear designs filled the pages of Bizarre magazine in the 1940s.
The cover to the second issue of Willie’s self-published Bizarre magazine.
By 1955, Irving Klaw was allegedly grossing $1.5 million a year, supposedly through mail order sales of his fetish movies, photographs, and comics. But that year also saw Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (ironically, Bettie Page’s home state) came to New York with a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, and he was out for blood. With the moral majority of 1950s America running rampant with “Red Scare” communist paranoia and public burnings of “evil” comic books such as E.C. Comics’ horror and crime titles, Kefauver set his sights on Irving Klaw’s sexploitation empire. The Kefauver Committee investigated ludicrous claims that Klaw’s material was directly linked with juvenile delinquency. The Post Office, joined the witchhunt and, on the advice of his lawyer, Klaw destroyed thousands of bondage pictures— in a bid for clemency from the judge. Fortunately, Paula Klaw secretly saved as many images as she could. Bettie Page never actually testified on Klaw’s behalf, and she was so disturbed by the government’s hounding that she quit modeling two years later.
Klaw shut up shop, but continued to supply mail order customers with material. Tragically, he found himself indicted on June 27, 1963 for “conspiracy to distribute obscene material” through the US Postal Service. Klaw was found guilty, and sentenced to two years in jail and a $5,000 fine. The verdict was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals, and Klaw was released on a $10,000 “bail”, but by then he had wearied of the relentless legal opposition. The stress and strain contributed to his untimely demise in 1966, due to complications from untreated appendicitis.
Klaw always went to great pains to make sure his photographs contained no nudity as he knew this would make the material pornographic, and therefore illegal to sell via the mail. Models were even required to wear two pairs of panties so that no pubic hair could be seen. His comics were also undefined by existing pornography laws as they had failed to keep up with society’s fast changing peccadilloes.
“My grandfather never really understood what he had done wrong. He had never knowingly broken any laws and always paid his taxes. He was just a businessman,” wrote Rick Klaw. “For the remainder of his life, Irving Klaw would collect bondage images from wherever he could find them, hoping to redeem his reputation by demonstrating that others were producing similar images without legal problems.”
This page from Willie’s Bizarre magazine had this caption: “If you are handicapped, you can still make the best of what you’ve got.”
A “Pony Girl” by John Willie. The artist was drawing these fetish images as early as the 1940s, having been inspired by London Life magazine.
A rare, but beautifully executed watercolor by John Willie, one of Klaw’s contemporaries.
JOHN WILLIE
The son of British ex-pats, John Alexander Scott Coutts was born in Singapore on December 9, 1902, educated in England, and then moved to Australia where he met his second wife, Holly. Their relationship didn’t last, and, although they remained married and on good terms, Coutts moved to New York alone in 1946.
Coutts started creating comics under the pseudonym John Willie, producing the Sweet Gwendoline stories, The Escape Artist and The Missing Princess, which he licensed the mail order rights to Irving Klaw. Unfortunately, Willie’s artwork was deemed too extreme for Klaw, who ordered fellow in-house artist Eric Stanton to paint clothes over the whip marks on the original art for The Missing Princess. Stanton reluctantly did so, and Willie was mindful of Klaw afterward.
Willie’s Sweet Gwendoline comic strip also ran in Robert Harrison’s Wink magazine from June 1947 through February 1950, but ended abruptly and unfinished. However, he continued the series in Bizarre magazine, which Willie also wrote, illustrated, took photographs for, and edited. Willie added to the familiar “damsel in distress” story, of a neophyte victim, continually kidnapped and bound in various ways by the nefarious Sir Dystic d’Arcy. Along with his fellow scoundrel, The Countess, d’Arcy was the archetypal villain—a lookalike of the popular British actor Terry-Thomas, who often played cads and bounders, but more likely a self-parody of the artist himself.
The adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, were in the same archetypal vein as the silent movie serial Pauline’s Peril, and the newspaper strip Hairbreadth Harry, and John Willie quickly became the undisputed master of sequential bondage stories at the time.
Willie’s creation Sweet Gwendoline at the mercy of The Countess and Sir Dystic d’Arcy.
Partially inked pencils by John Willie. The text can be seen in the third panel: “Oh good old Polly—I’ll never be mad at you again for undoing knots, but I wish you’d start on my wrists.”
Less than 50 of Willie’s watercolors remain, and most are in the hands of private collectors. Here, a cruel mistress demands her glove be picked up.
Occasionally Willie would hold photo shoots for Bizarre magazine, or work in friends’ homes across New York. Tragically, one of Willie’s many models, Judy Ann Dull, was the first victim of serial killer Harvey Glatman, on August 1, 1957. Glatman killed another two women before being caught in 1958 and executed the following year. He had pretended to be a fetish photographer and tied models up before strangling them with a rope. The case sent ripples through the nascent BDSM community as they feared a public backlash and misunderstanding about the scene. Fortunately it never came.
Willie constantly had money and cashflow problems, and was barely able to keep a roof over his own head—a familiar problem for all small publishers. Consequently, he often accepted personal commissions from discerning fans and friends, and created numerous works, some of which remain unpublished and in private collections. But it wasn’t enough to keep the magazine afloat and Willie sold it to a close friend known only as “R.E.B.” R.E.B continued to publish the magazine until 1959, replacing Willie with Mahlon Blaine as the cover artist, with the noble intent of getting the magazine onto solid financial ground and selling it back to Willie for the purchase price. However, shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1958, Willie developed a brain tumor. He retired to Guernsey, where he died a few years later, in 1962.
This page from The Wasp Women originally appeared in Bizarre #6–8, but remains unfinished.
The cover for the collected edition of The Race For The Gold Cup, Willie’s best-known work.
Secret agent U69 and Gwendoline find themselves in a familiar predicament in a page from …Gold Cup, Willie’s favorite strip.
This illustration mocks Gwen’s constant predicament, “Help!! John Willie! Help!!! I’ve been caught again.”
ERIC STANTON
Ernest Stanten was the son of Russian emigrants, born on September 30, 1926. He studied art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he changed his name to the snappier Eric Stanton. As a brash 19-year-old, Stanton soon found a job at Irving Klaw’s Movie Star News, boasting that he could draw better than any of the other artists working for Klaw. He was instantly hired and drew many strips as “work for hire,” not owning the stories he created.
He later studied at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, under Batman inker Jerry Robinson, where he met fellow classmate Steve Ditko. The two friends set up a Manhattan studio at 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue in 1958. Both artists obviously influenced each other, and some of Stanton’s work during this time shows a heavy Ditko hand, although the artist denied ever touching Stanton’s art. However, Stanton clearly stated they would each dabble in each other’s art, mainly spot-inking.
Sadly, when Ditko achieved a certain respectability, co-creating Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with Stan Lee for Marvel Comics, he distanced himself from his former studio partner. Possibly the Marvel artist was embarrassed by the lascivious line drawings Stanton was creating a
nd feared he would be “tarnished” as a fetish artist himself.
At the same time, Stanton worked on Lenny Burtman’s Exotique magazine, using pseudonyms like “Savage” and “John Bee.” In the early 1960s, the majority of Stanton’s earnings were coming from wealthy clients who paid for commissions.
After Irving Klaw died in 1966, Stanton started self-publishing his mimeographed (and later photocopied) Stantoons titles, and produced well over 100 issues, right up to his death in 1999. Stanton supported his work by distributing to the quasi-underground network of subscribers and patrons.
Publisher J.B. Rund was friends with Stanton from 1972 until his death: “I saw him at work hundreds of times. Generally, what he drew was for the money. Period. He had a sort of ‘patron’ who paid him well for the work he did and provided other financial support.”
After John Willie’s death, Eric Stanton continued his peer’s strip Sweeter Gwen (doline). However, Stanton took Willie’s original character and exaggerated the humor and main protagonists until they became mere caricatures.
Stanton’s trademark skintight tops, pencil skirts, and killer high heels are all present in this cartoon from Satana magazine.
The Stantoons series continued, featuring many of his best-loved characters, including the sexy Wonder Woman parody Blunder Broad and the Princkazons. Although the majority of his work depicted dominant females (FemDoms), he also produced work depicting all forms of bi, gay, and transgender motifs. A recurrent theme was strong women fighting and wrestling, either with each other or with (usually weaker) men—a favorite fetish of the artist.
“Eric was a very nice man, easygoing, generous, and, in my case, supportive,” recalled J.B. Rund. He was also incredibly prolific, as were many of the fetish artists, and drew fantastic strips like Tops and Bottoms, Bound Beauty, Lady in Charge, and Confidential TV. As Rund noted, “Stanton improved slowly and steadily and then was able to maintain a high level of quality for a long time.” Proving himself a master of the bondage and fetish strips, Stanton created an impressive number of stories, such as The Nightmares of Diana, Marie’s Extraordinary Adventure, and Phyllis in Danger. While his art style varied slightly over the years, it was always distinctive and instantly recognizable, with a unique pen and brush stroke and strong, muscular women in flimsy, torn clothing and sturdy underwear.
A classic Stanton comic strip from Satana #1, 1962, shows a Steve Ditko influence in the mens’ faces.
This statuesque dominatrix is an illustration from a men’s magazine.
Eric Stanton’s original logo design for the short-lived ’60s magazine, Satana.
GENE BILBREW
Born in Los Angeles, Gene Bilbrew made his comics debut in the Los Angeles Sentinel with the newspaper strip The Bronze Bomber. He followed this with his Hercules series, which ran in Health Magazine, before becoming an assistant to Will Eisner on The Spirit.
Bilbrew—an African-American with a pencil-thin moustache—met Eric Stanton while they were both students at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Here, Bilbrew studied under comics legend Burne Hogarth, creator of the famous Tarzan newspaper strip. When Bilbrew was short of money, Stanton suggested his friend should work for Irving Klaw’s Movie Star News, and Bilbrew made his debut for the company in 1951. He went on to create timeless characters like Princess Elaine and Madame la Bondage.
Like Stanton and many artists working in the erotic genre, Bilbrew used several pseudonyms, including Van Rod, G.B., Bondy, and the reflected nom de plume of Eneg.
After working on Klaw’s comic titles, Bilbrew freelanced on Exotique magazine, published by Leonard “Lenny” Burtman. Suspiciously close in design and feel to John Willie’s Bizarre magazine, Burtman produced his digest in New York City between 1955 and 1959, claiming it was a “new publication of the bizarre and the unusual… dedicated to fashions, fads, and fancies… The magazine of Femmes, Fiction, and Future Fashion.” The magazine included stories, articles, and readers’ letters, with photographs and illustrations, and prominently featured his wife—columnist and famous fetish model Tana Louise. Gene Bilbrew provided most of the covers and much of the artwork, with some covers produced by his cohort Eric Stanton.
Burtman also produced a number of Exotique spinoff publications, including many photo-fiction stories, some with occasional illustrations by Gene Bilbrew and Eric Stanton.
Legendary publisher J.B. Rund later reprinted large portions of Bilbrew and Stanton’s work in 24 Volumes of Bizarre Comix in the 1980s. This material collected a lot of the work published by Klaw under his NuTrix banner, including Bilbrew’s cross-dressing and enforced feminization comics that the artist had self-published in his Mutrix titles like TV Teacher’s Pet and Executive Transvestite.
One of Lenny Burtman’s later companies, Satellite Publishing Co., which published Bilbrew’s work in the early 1960s, summed up the fetish comics scene in its mission statement: “…We shall break through the dull curtain of convention and travel into the realm of fancy and self-expression wherein so many men and women find refuge from drab conventionalism.”
LA-based Fantasia magazine also published Bilbrew’s two-page comic serial Camper’s Capers from Issue 11 in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The strip featured “sissyfication” and humiliation of male college boys blackmailed into being slaves to their domineering fellow female students. However, hampered by irregular publication, Fantasia never really took off, and after Bilbrew stopped drawing his series, the magazine was cancelled at Issue 20.
Bilbrew, along with Eric Stanton, Bill Ward, and Bill Alexander, started producing a series of pulp paperback covers for a number of publishers in the mid-1960s. Sadly, Bilbrew’s work was in serious decline by this stage. Between 1972 and 1974 he produced several paperback covers for Spade Classics. Spade published gay fiction with titles such as Stud Farm, Men Into Boys, and Lust for Leather, but Bilbrew’s black-and-white covers were scrappy and it was clear that he was past his prime.
“I didn’t know Bilbrew,” recalled publisher J. B. Rund, “but his work was inconsistent and deteriorated over the years. I’ve been told he had alcohol and drug problems. That said, in the beginning, around 1950, Bilbrew was superior to Stanton, but he deteriorated rather quickly.”
Drink, drugs, and a hedonistic lifestyle were evidently taking their toll on the artist. At the age of 51, hooked on heroin, he passed away in 1974 in the back of an adult bookstore where he was living; a tragically ignominious end for one of the great fetish artists of the 1950s.
A convict takes a pasting from a farm girl in Gene Bilbrew’s Collector’s Cartoon Classics, published by Stantoons Inc.
When Petticoats Meet—an anthology of strong women.
Illustration for The Interview—a short story in a men’s magazine.
Bilbrew’s lettering sometimes lacked professionalism, but the humor was always evident.
Who’s The Boss, from Collector’s Cartoon Classics #5, has “Eneg” (Bilbrew) offering useful tips for dominatrices.
Bilbrew’s BDSM work had its tongue planted firmly in its cheek, but was arousing at the same time.
ERICH VON GÖTHA
One of the more mysterious bondage artists was Erich von Götha, a master of contemporary erotic comics who utilized numerous painting and illustration styles to recount his salacious stories. Yet despite working as an artist for over 20 years, he continually shunned the media limelight, prefering to remain an aloof enigma.
He seemingly drew himself into many of his strips as a bald, monocled, crop-wielding, self-styled “Baron.” This apparent German/Prussian aristocrat was, in fact, the British illustrator and comic book artist Robin Ray. The artist started out contributing to early editions of Dr. Tuppy Owens’ The Sex Maniac’s Diary in the mid-1970s. He later went on to produce his own groundbreaking British magazine, Torrid, in the early ’80s, much as John Willie had done in the ’40s with Bizarre. Only 16 issues of Torrid were published, but they featured the work of top erotic UK cartoonist Lynn Paula Russell,
achieved a legendary cult following, and are now highly prized collectibles. Looking back on the series, Ray reminisced, “It was hard graft, like any strip cartoon, but fun.”
Robin Ray also worked under the pseudonyms Baldur Grimm and Robbins, and the majority of his work featured bondage and sadomasochistic themes. His four-volume series The Troubles of Janice was originally written by a “mysterious Italian” whom Ray never met, and who ultimately gave up the project and returned the artwork to the English artist. The 72 pages sat in Ray’s drawers for two years before a French publisher, Lionel Roc, released it and it became an international bestseller. The story is a combination of two classic S&M tales—Justine and The Story of O—that were popular with bondage artists. After this impressive debut in France, Ray’s work was subsequently published in the erotic comic anthology BéDé Adult.
Other popular works by Ray include Twenty, its sequel Twenty 2, and The Insatiable Curiosity of Sophie. In A Very Special Prison, von Götha examines sexual slavery and how captivity can be liberating, when a beautiful blonde finds herself giving in to the whims of her captors. Cecilia’s Dream sees another beautiful blonde shocked at her treatment by the residents of two fantasy worlds—the aristocrats and savages of a medieval kingdom—while her perverse husband enlists her in modern-day sex games. As with much of Ray’s comic work, this S&M fantasy never sees Cecilia really hurt, and the dream-within-a-dream structure emphasizes that all of her adventures are just fantasies.