Eric Stanton's STANTOONS : a History from the 1960s to 1999, With Mention of Spider-man Co-creator, Steve Ditko ....
Eric Stanton and Spider-Man co-creator, Steve Ditko, shared a working studio from 1958 to 1968 off 42nd Street, and it was during this time that the original incarnation of Eric Stanton's "Stantoons" appeared. These were story fragments really, episodes of longer comic narratives with titles like "The Kinky Hook" and "Bound Beauty" and "Confidential TV." And if you're thinking these sound a bit like kinkster comics, you'd be right, because that's what they are. Eric Stanton was a fetish artist. That's not to say he was a pornographer. Yet. It wasn't until the 1970s and the end of the sexploitation era with the birth of (XXX) hardcore, that he would begin to stray in that direction (and then never in a conventional way); at this time, while sharing working space with Ditko, the comics and illustrations were really just PG-rated. The only thing that suggested they might be pornographic were the themes, which might venture into exploitation territory ("exploitation" as it's often used to define movies), themes that were then considered taboo by more mainstream comic publishers (who were, after all, in the business of providing "entertainment for kids"). These scenarios leaned toward various subdivisions within the sub-genre of sexploitation that first emerged from cheesecake magazines like BEAUTY PARADE and WINK—all specific fetishes that have long since broken into the mainstream (some dated and silly, some not): "battling women" or girlfighting/wrestling, psychodramas involving femme-fatales or dominatrices (the leather-clad/armed variation which could have easily doubled as prototypes for future comic book super-heroines/villains), "damsels in distress" aka rope-'n'-bondage scenes (a favorite of overheated pulps since the beginning) and finally transvestitism (a la Ed Wood)....
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