Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The fetish art of Superman’s co-creator Joe Shuster HNA Books, 2008
Nights of Horror, a series of cheap pulp paperbacks published in early 1954 by an outfit known as “Malcla”, was the intersection point of three different stories.
The first is the declining career of Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman, one of the most widely known fictional characters in the world, but owned by DC, leaving Shuster and his partner Joe Siegel out in the cold. At some point, Shuster started drawing for the publisher of Nights of Horror, a series of cheap pulp illustrate novels. They had poor production values (not even justified type) and pulpy storylines borrowed (if not stolen) from old spicy pulps, usually of the “virtue in distress” type, particularly with women menaced by Chinese or Negro men, though there were some predatory lesbians and hillbilly patriarchs too.
What’s interesting is that many of the characters are recognizably based on Shuster’s Superman characters: Clark Kent as tough guy detective, Lois Lane as damsel in distress or dominatrix, Lex Luthor as sexual sadist and Jimm Olson as reefer-pushing, co-ed pimping juvenile delinquent. The choice of names for people and places in some of the stories suggest that Shuster was one of the writers, or at least the writer knew who would illustrate his story.
(Personally, the art isn’t that great, especially compared to the American fetish masters of Willie, Stanton and Bilbrew.)
Why Shuster did these illustrations is hard to say. Other comics artists had branched into other illustration work, and Nights of Horror likely didn’t pay very much; perhaps $100 for the illustrations for an entire book. This makes it unlikely that this was a pure work-for-hire. Was this Shuster taking some kind of fantasy revenge on those who he thought had cheated him, by parodying the characters he had created and then lost control of? On the other hand, Shuster was known to date showgirls and that might have brought him in contact with the proto-kink subculture of models, photographers and publishers of the period.
The introduction by Marvel Comics founder Stan Lee takes a clearly negative attitude. “Whereas everything about the stories and artwork of Superman was positive and morally uplifting, the pages of Nights of Horror that appear in Secret Identity cater to the basest of man’s character and morals…. [Shuster had] become so disillusioned and desperate that he was later forced to accept commissions to draw what amounted to S&M erotic horror books…. the most sordid of projects.” Another academic quoted in Yoe’s essay it was “obviously something done in loathing and despair….”
Lee and others seem invested in a “virtue in distress” narrative of their own: to explain the dissonance between the deeply Romantic Superman comics and the Gothic pulp of Nights of Horror, Shuster must have been in dire straits, an innocent victim driven to porn by the craven profiteering of the publishing industry. That might very well be true, but that’s also likely not th whole story. It’s important to remember that the very early Superman had an ambivalent edge that made him closer to Neitzche’s ubermensch than the sterling role model of the later years. The cover of his debut in Action Comics shows him lifting and smashing a car while people scramble away in fear. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Will he save a world besieged by evil, or will he tear down a corrupt society? One early story showed Superman dragging a war-profiteer to the front line of a battle to show him the wages of greed.
It’s not clear that Shuster was exactly “forced” to draw Nights of Horror. It also wasn’t quite as big a leap as you might think. Squeaky clean Superman’s publisher was Harry Donenfield, a mob-connected guy who published pornography in the 20s and 30s, mainly “art photos” and story magazines sold under the counter. He combined the nudie cutie magazines with the pulp detective stories and created a potent combination of sex and violence.
The second story concerns Senator Estes Kefauver, carrying on the American tradition of paranoid censorious epitomized by Anthony Comstock. Kefauver worked with Dr Frederic Wertham, who wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, blaming comic books for crime, effeminancy and homosexuality in today’s youth. Kefauver found a perfect test case in the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, a quartet of young men whose idea of a fun evening was beating up women and homeless men. The youths supposedly were inspired by comic books and magazines like Nights of Horror (which shouldn’t have been sold to minors, but ….) They showed advertisements for things like bullwhips, with copy that said, “Train animals, ets. [sic]” One wonders what exactly the “et cetera” was.
The Brooklyn quartet was led by a guy named Jack Koslow. Like Shuster, he grew up a poor Jewish kid. Koslow rejected his Jewish identity and claimed to be a white supremacist. His violence was directed at women and the homeless, people weaker than him. There’s an interesting reflexivity here, not unlike Jean Genet’s psychosexual identification with criminals and fascists; if you can’t be a person (i.e. a white American gentile), better to be a threatening monster (i.e. a Nazi) than a victim monster (i.e. a Jew). Yoe reprints a page from a pre-CCA horror comic about a hunchbacked man observing a vampire attacking a Victorian gentleman and empathizing with the aggressor. Yet fascism itself is built on an aggressive ideal of normality and purity, threatened by an impure, invasive force. (One could see Shuster’s Superman as another solution to the same dilemma: assimilate (become Clark Kent), but use your alien-ness (your Kryptonian heritage) for good.)
How much of this psychoanalysis is true and how much of this is Wertham’s confirmation bias, or just Koslow figuring out what Wertham wanted to hear, is uncertain. (Note to those pushing the pornography-causes-violence agenda: do you really want perpetrators to get off by claiming “porn made me do it”?)
All of this contributed to the Comics Code Authority in 1954, which pretty much hamstrung, castrated and lobotomized American comics. Much like the Hays code for American film two decades earlier, this was an industry censor group, intended to keep the government from a direct censor role. For our purposes, the following excerpts give a taste:
- Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.
- Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested.
- Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.
- Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable.
For Shuster, Nights of Horror was a quick buck and possibly a way of giving the world the finger. For Koslow, it was more likely a convenient excuse than a blueprint. For Wertham and Kefauver, it was the symptom of a disease.
Wertham was right about a few things. Comics were about fantasies of power, whether violent or sexual.
