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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.