It’s pretty well known that DC editors sometimes swiped ideas for comic covers from old pulps. Editors would actually come up with intriguing cover images this way, and then have the writers do scripts based on ‘em-a neat way to work! Wish there were people still doing that-coming up with the covers first, then scripts, that is, not stealing ideas!)

Above is an old pulp and the rip-off Jimmy Olsen cover below…

While trolling through the blogosphere this weekend, I happened on this image below from, of all places, the Chicago Spanking Review blog, which, among other NSFW things, hosts a repository of fetish comic strip and book images.

Discovering this comic book cover below I was flabbergasted how incredibly similar the scene on this Lois Lane (#73; artist Kurt Schaffenberger) is to the image from Nights of Horror that Joe Shuster drew a decade and a half before, and that I used on the cover of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster. On the Lois Lane cover (entitled Shock Story of the Year!) there’s Lois with her whip, Superman bound to a bench, and a figure, this time not a girl, strapped to a wall.

(click for a closer look)

It could be all certainly a coincidence, of course, or the product of my very overactive imagination. But the parallels are uncanny. And it opened up a thought to me that I had never considered, even while spending a year writing Secret Identity. Were people at DC aware of Joe Shuster’s activites in p()rn? As my book makes clear, as does the most excellent book published before mine, Men of Tomorrow - Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones, the roots of DC Comics, just before the comics, was with p()rn publishing. There had been, and probably were, people at DC that took a professional, and maybe even a personal, interest in published p()rn. And the DC offices were in walking distance of the Times Square bookstores that sold Nights of Horror. And it was the talk of the town and press because of the Brooklyn Thriill Killers. Besides, the art world is a small world and gossip carries far, especially something so juicy like Joe Shuster, the artist behind Superman, their caped cash cow, was drawing fetish art.

So, t’s not at all out of the question that people at DC in the period of the 50s and early 60s knew about this fetish material drawn by Joe Shuster-and maybe even were inspired to create a cover idea for Lois Lane and the resulting story from one of Joe’s sado-masochistic illustrations! At least they weren’t inspired by Nights of Horror like the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, the Jewish neo-Nazi juvenile delinquents that were inspired to horse-whip girls and to murder bums, according to Dr. Frederic Wertham. More on that in the book and more details on the blog later…

Be sharp as a whip, order right now the book, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster here, and it’ll be in your mailbox in a few short weeks.