In a compelling feat of literary sleuthing, Craig Yoe’s new book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-creator Joe Shuster, manages to shed light on an obscure segment of a seminal comics creator’s career while simultaneously unearthing long-forgotten illegal works that played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, an agency created by the comics industry in 1954 that aggressively censored and monitored comics content for many years. Abrams ComicArts publishes Secret Identity this month and will support the book with a series of signing events with the author in New York City and the Washington D.C. area.
Along with writer Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster created a cultural icon in Superman in the late 1930s only to naively sell away the rights to their epochal brainchild for a pittance to the company that would later become DC Comics. And while the co-creators were highly paid for their work during Superman’s early years, the pair’s subsequent misfortunes—the two watched as their creation reaped millions—have become part of cautionary lore for each successive generation of comics creators. What has remained lost to the public due to the passage of time was Shuster’s dire financial straights leading in 1954 to his participation in the creation of Nights of Horror, an illustrated sixteen-booklet series of lurid and illegal S&M pornography. Fronted by racketeer Eddie Mishkin, a Jewish pornographer with alleged ties to the Gambino crime family, Nights of Horror spun wild tales of discipline, torture, lesbianism and all manner of activities universally referred to as perversions at the time of publication, and Shuster, working uncredited, provided the illustrations.
But while it may be shocking to find the co-creator of the comic industry’s most wholesome heroes working for pornographers, it’s downright fascinating to take note that many of the Nights of Horror characters, depicted in Shuster’s instantly recognizable style, bear more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, Lois Lane, and even Superman himself—each administering or receiving the usual S&M-style punishments delivered with bullwhips, heated tongs and all the rest. And this considerable resemblance to his well-known co-creations leads the observer to wonder if this work was Shuster’s way of striking back at the industry that had elevated him to wealth and then unceremoniously returned him to near-destitution.
A longtime collector of cartoonists’ artwork and ephemera, Yoe first discovered the Nights of Horror books in “a dusty box at an antique book sale in New York City and then spent the next few years tracking down the rest from rare erotica dealers from London to Paris.” He even found one at the Kinsey Institute for Research In Sex, Gender and Reproduction in Bloomington Ind. “Once I’d found out there was work like this done by the co-creator of Superman I had to do some digging,” Yoe said. “It took me a couple of years and a lot of money and trips around the world to get all sixteen books.” Yoe said he has not heard officially from anyone at DC Comics about the book.
He was also able to contact the Shuster family. Yoe said that Shuster’s only sister, Jean, to whom he was very close, wrote to him about Shusters work on Nights of Horror. He said, she was “surprised by the work”, ascertained that “Stan Lee was right in his evaluation that Joe would not be involved with anything so low except out of desperation”, and said that nonetheless, while Shuster must have hated the story lines his “drawings proved that he had a great imagination and was a wonderful artist”. Yoe noted that Jean concluded that that he did a “great job in putting the book together”.
Yoe follows his in-depth account of Shuster’s post-Superman foray into the underworld of smut with dozens of reproductions of the ultra-rare artwork in question, an illuminating gallery of darkly sinister renderings instantly identifiable to most comics fans as the work of Shuster. These pieces cap off the book’s curiosity value and the whole package adds up to what’s certain to prove an eye-opening coffee table tome.
Secret Identity also provides an important window into 1950s American life, the rise of teenage youth culture and the public’s agitated response to it. While Shuster brought Nights of Horror’s S&M scenarios to visual life, post-WWII America found itself caught up in a general hysteria over communism and, a bit later, rock ‘n’ roll—both perceived as threats to the status quo and general decency. One of the biggest bugaboos was the supposed menace of juvenile delinquency, and chief among the perceived causes of this societal blight were comic books. Although once hailed as a morale-booster for our fighting men overseas, comic books came to be known as vile disseminators of baleful ideas that corroded the moral fiber of children, spurring them to acts of violence and sexual depravity.
With famed psychiatrist Dr. Frederick Wertham spearheading the anti-comics witch hunt over several years, the case against comic books was given more credence by an incident in 1954 that was committed by the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, a gang of four Jewish teens who idolized Adolf Hitler, flogged girls in Brooklyn parks with a bullwhip and murdered vagrants during evenings of “bum hunting.” The shocking crimes of these disturbed youths lead to interviews with Dr. Wertham and the revelation that the leader of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers was inspired by horror and crime comics, including most damningly, the Nights of Horror series.
By conveniently lumping the hard-to-obtain S&M porn material in with comic books, Wertham now had “proof” of the mind-warping contents found between the covers of comics and easily convinced high-ranking government officials that such publications were easily obtained by children. Thus it was that Joe Shuster, the co-creator of Superman, unwittingly helped bring about the Comics Code Authority of America, a comics industry agency essentially devoted to censorship—the code had a rigid set of rules for comic book content—that nearly brought down the American comics industry and destroyed the careers of many comics artists and writers while leaving the medium itself in a state of wholesome albeit creative stagnation for years.
Abrams will be sponsoring a series of book signings and tongue-in-cheek S&M events to promote Secret Identity. Signings will be held on April 14 at the Comic Book Club in New York City; April 24 at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C.; April 25 at Big Planet Comics in Bethesda, Md.; and on May 21 at the Happy Endings Lounge in New York City.
The discovery of Nights of Horrors opens a new window into the life of Shuster, 1950s American culture and into the comics industry’s development. “It’s pretty wild and crazy to have this fetish erotica kind of artwork out there, and nothing much had been written about what happened to Joe after his lawsuit [Shuster attempted to sue National for millions] in 1948,” Yoe said. “His career has usually been seen as trailing off into nothingness after that, but in researching Shuster’s work on Nights of Horror it turns out I discovered an important piece of the puzzle of comics history.”
