The outrageous kinkiness of classic comic books and their BDSM-inspired creators.
You might not expect the classic juvenile comic book to be a hotbed of kink and perversion, but there is a long, if not exactly noble history of comics using images of women in bondage to attract readers. American Comic books – at least superhero, crime and action comics – were, until relatively recently, pitched almost exclusively at adolescent boys and so it is unsurprising that these comics would go out of their way to produce covers that stirred both the imagination and the libido of the target audience. It was, perhaps, a subconscious appeal – certainly, the readers who snapped these books up were unlikely to be making a deliberate choice to buy a particular comic because it featured a sexy but helpless woman on the cover, but may well have been driven by urges that they barely understood.
The artists and editors almost certainly knew what they were doing – indeed, many of them were clearly indulging their own private kinks. Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston’s personal interest in BDSM is well known and yes, we could fill up an entire gallery just with Wonder Woman covers where she or some other woman is tied up or otherwise restrained, often seeming to enjoy the experience. Similarly, Superman creator Joe Shuster was also the artist behind the BDSM series Nights of Horror. But even artists with more vanilla tastes probably knew that a cover image of a woman who is tied up – her hands either above her head or, more often, behind her back, thrusting her breasts forward – probably triggered a certain excitement in teenage boys.
Anti-comic book campaigner Frederic Wertham – the man who essentially killed the horror comic in America during the 1950s – certainly recognised the sexual subtext of these officially innocent scenarios and claimed without a scrap of evidence that such imagery was creating violent sexual sadists. Certainly, the cover images might have helped awaken certain kinks within readers, but that’s a long way from actually corrupting them unless you actually do believe BDSM to be inherently abusive – in which case, why are you reading this?
After his campaign against comic books resulted in the forming of the Comics Code Authority, the more overtly sexy covers were soon banished to history. However, publishers would still slip the odd bit of rope and chain bondage onto covers when they could, though the blatant cleavage and kink was a thing of the past. In the post-Comics Code era, a few superhero comics again played with this sort of imagery, but now there was a new set of censors out there who condemned the covers as sexist and exploitative and the idea of the scantily-clad, put-upon female superhero soon became very unfashionable. Bondage imagery is, these days, restricted to more openly erotic, adults-only comics.
Here, then, are a handful of bondage covers from wholesome comic books. How sexy you’ll find them will depend on your own personal kinks, just as it probably did at the time.
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