I’ll finish the sequence of posts on comic book artists and 50’s fetish with one of my favorite artists of that or any time – Eric Stanton. The image below is from a sequence called ‘Bruised and Battered‘. It’s not often you see a chamber pot and sock suspenders in fetish artwork. If the text is a little hard to read then let me reproduce his speech bubble – “Karin! Honestly! I don’t know how to boogie! I’m doing the very best that I can do!”
Stanton of course wasn’t a mainstream comic book artist, but in the late 50’s and early 60’s he shared a studio with Steve Ditko, the creator of Spiderman. It’ll never be known how much of a role Eric Stanton played in the creation of the famous wisecracking webslinger, but as this blogpost makes clear, he was definitely involved to some extent.
I love this image. Very imaginative. For some reason, the music notes floating up from the oldschool radio are very funny to me.
Pulp art from this time period is very interesting to me, and I just read part of a book, “Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography,” by Robert Rosen, that contains a long chapter about comic book art & artists and the history of ‘men’s magazines.’ A LOT of comic book artists and writers did smut. I had no idea.
If I was alive back then, I definitely would have read those corny ‘Men’s Detective’ magazines.
One last thing that occurred to me: when did guys mostly stop buying and reading written smut? They used to publish lots and lots of written pornography. You don’t see that anymore. You can still buy erotica, of course, but it’s different.
Thanks for blogging.
Margo
Very nice drawing indeed.
We – over here in the Netherlands – guess an ever growing number of guys stopped consuming and reading printed smut after porn became more widely available on VHS and cable TV. But we could be wrong.
Regards from Marga
Margo, the short answer to your question is that people never stopped reading written smut, but they stopped buying it when it became available free online. I write about this, too, in Beaver Street. See pg. 180.