SUPERMAN AND SECRET IDENTITY
Craig Yoe, who is a master of various kinds of cartooning and
other idiotic behavior but who is also a passionate and caring student of the
art forum, wrote, recently, on a List online: “I'd like to tell you about my
brand spanking new book.” And then he explained: “I recently discovered
incredible, previously unknown, fetish art by the creator of Superman, Joe Shuster. The artist and his writing
partner, Jerry Siegel, had sold
Superman for 130 dollars. When they sued to get the rights back they lost and
got drummed out of the comic book industry and Shuster fell on hard times. It
was unknown that to get by and/or because of a personal interest in the
subject, Shuster then did S&M porn for under-the-counter booklets called Nights of Horror, sold in Times Square
As I
mentioned lately in announcing a Harv’s Hindsight installment about
girlie cartooning (which you can find at the usual place in the Hindsight
department), the art in the Shuster book is sensational: drawings of
barenekidwimmin being spanked or spanking (hence the wonder of Yoe’s double
entendre), being whipped or whipping, being tied up and otherwise abused, all
produced during the last heyday of suppression of all things sexual, the
mid-1950s in the U.S., just as Hugh Hefner was about to convert the national
voyeurism into a personal fortune. But the scandalous part of the book erupted
not so much from its drawings as from the name of their creator, whose identity
as well as the fixation of the interior art was proclaimed in the book’s title:
Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s
Co-creator, Joe Shuster. Craig Yoe, whose passion for the history of the
comics medium led him to the discovery of this furtive art and then to the
creation of the book itself.
Yoe goes
on: “The back story I uncovered involves the Mob, showgirls, neo-Nazi Jewish
juvenile delinquents, inspired by Shuster's art, known as the Brooklyn Thrill
Killers, the famed anti-comic book crusader Dr. Frederic Wertham, Senate
investigations, cops on payola, the books being banned by the Supreme Court,
teenage girls being horse-whipped in the park, two murders...and dare I say more?”
You can find more in the usual place, www.RCHarvey.com — a veritable hodge-podge of information about comics, cartooning, and the controversy about Secret Identity.
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