Secret Identity - The Fetish Art Of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster
                                             (2009 - Abrams ComicArts)  

     (by Craig Yoe)     Not appropriate for children or adolescents.    "Sad" is the first word that comes to mind.  For me, it's not the standard line of an admired artist sunken so much in life as to have to do work considered morally reprehensible, but rather that some segment of our society felt a need that was somehow satisfied by amateurishly written S-&-M stories accompanied repetitively by such simple, uninspired illustrations.  Yes, the work is done in a workmanlike fashion, with clear, clean lines, delineating desirable women and chiseled, stoic, men, but everything else in the images are depressingly crude, with, say, backgrounds of blank walls, unbroken by doors or windows, unless the portrayed action requires one.  The same goes for furniture - if you are lucky, a table or a chair alone is depicted - no need to point out a lack of ornamentation.  Ultimately, everything has the feel of a decrepit back alley or a Tijuana hovel that you would never venture to on your own, but would have to be dragged to by some disreputable friend.  It is a 8.5-inch square book with 160 pages, 108 of those being full-page presentations (including 13 double-page-spreads, most, but not all, basically o.k. with the split of the central gutter).  There's another 22 pages with two images on display.  The rest is the introduction and Yoe's text on how the art supposedly came to be and the context within which it was all 'dropped', as well as a four-page comic story by the same artist in a related publication. Most things are captioned with the descriptive phrase for the illustated story.  The work just tip-toes along that adults-only line, really only because so much more graphic work has been produced since the 1950s.  This collection made me more closely define that line right now - bound subjects with 'threatened' fetish harm is acceptable, bound individuals showing the evidence of that harm already inflicted, not.  This volume had a couple of images that crossed the line.


other collections of prurient interest

                                                   SQP books

               SQP's Flirt books

              Treasured Chests  vol.3 & 4

              SQP's 'Lust' books

              Jungle Tails  vol.4

              Wet And Wild

              Devil Dolls vol.1

              Eternal Temptation  [vol.1]

              Dangerous Curves

              Spanking Tails  vol.2

              Drakaina Masters

  Sexy Dreams

  Men's Adventure Magazines In Postwar America

  It's A Man's World

  The Blue Book

  Feral House's paperback cover art books

  Strange Sisters - The Art Of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949-1969

  Graphic Thrills - American XXX Movie Posters 1970 to 1985  vols.1 & 2

  Young Lusty Sluts - A Pictorial History Of Erotic Pulp Fiction

  Erotic Comics  vols.1 & 2

  Chronicle's paperback cover art collections

  True Crime Detective Magazines

  Solson's Gary & Al books

  The Art Of Eric Stanton - For The Man Who Knows His Place

  Baldazzini & Saudelli's Bizarreries Book 1  [BELOW THE LINE]

  Sex In The Comics  [BELOW THE LINE]


other Abrams releases

  The World Of M.C. Escher / The Infinite World Of M.C. Escher

  Worlds Beyond Time - Sci-Fi Art Of The 1970s

  Abrams' Norman Rockwell books

  Erotic Comics  vols.1 & 2



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