Secret Identity: The Fetish Art Of Superman’s Joe Shuster
by Craig Yoe
Abram’s ComicArts
Anyone with more than a passing interest in comics knows the sad and shameful tale of Joe Shuster, co-creator of one of the most iconic and enduring of all superheroes. He drew that big read S, made comic history and never received anything amounting to even a tiny percentage of the financial rewards his character should have given him. He died in 1992, the recipient of a modest salary and health benefits from a DC Comics publicly embarrassed at last into doing something barely recognisable as the right thing.
The sad tale of Joe Shuster and his life post Superman is fairly well known. But Craig Yoe’s new book takes this sad tale and somehow makes it worse. Because Yoe has uncovered the obscure fetish art Shuster produced in the 50s after unsuccessfully suing DC Comics for the rights to his character. Produced for an obscure series of badly designed, poorly reproduced fetish magazines called Nights Of Horror, these illustrations are obviously Shuster, worthy of documenting but also may be perhaps the worst indictment of DC Comics you could produce, as they say so much about Joe Shuster’s frankly desperate and rather pathetic life post Superman. This is not how such an important figure in comics should have found himself.
And that’s the problem. Do we really want to know how bad it got for Joe Shuster? Do we really want to know what a really terrible mess he was in that led him to make the S&M erotic horror stuff in Secret Identity? My answer would probably be no. Yours? I have no idea.
(The artwork we’d probably all prefer to remember Joe Shuster by. A Superman piece by Shuster circa 1939 and the man himself circa 1941. Both images from Secret Identity)
However, despite the dubious subject matter and the sense of desecrating the memory and legacy of a comics pioneer, Craig Yoe’s book is certainly exhaustive, well researched and with a good sense of design. It’s well put together indeed. It starts with a long and detailed introduction to the topic from Yoe, giving us a potted history of both Shuster and the comic industry of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It looks at Shuster’s childhood, the incredible success of Superman and onto the leaner, desperate times that the book illustrates so well. By 1954, Shuster had lost it all. Superman was no longer his, DC declared him (and Siegel) persona non gratae, his name was removed from the character and Shuster found himself competing against newer artists in a medium where Shuster’s clean, simple style was considered passée and uncomercial. From here Shuster took any job he could, which is where the fetish art comes in. Along the way we touch on the dark times of US Supreme Court bans, Dr Frederic Wertham and the murderous neo-nazi Brooklyn Thrill Killers gang who claimed that much of their motivation came from comics generally and this sort of work in particular.
(Unmistakably Joe Shuster artwork from Nights Of Horror Volume 1. And those figures on the receiving end look awfully familiar as well; throughout the book, there are recognisable images of Superman, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor and Jimmy Olsen, albeit in very unfamiliar poses.)
Like Yoe states in the text; his work is still recognisably Shuster and may well rank as some of his best: “The art was technically some of Joe’s best. It was pure Shuster work, without assistants or ghosts. It employed fine pen-and-ink work embellished by a favourite tool of the artist’s, lithographic pencil”. But technically good or not, it’s still a sad sight to see Shuster’s lines illustrating some really badly put together fetish magazines.
After Yoe’s lengthy introduction the remaining 120+ pages exist to reprint Shuster’s fetish art of the time, mostly from the notorious Nights Of Horror series. And Yoe presents the imagery simply, with little embellishment or comment beyond a small text piece at the start of each new issue and minimal commentary in the captions for each of Shuster’s pictures.
(More Shuster art from Nights Of Horror, images from Craig Yoe’s Secret Identity.)
There’s no doubting that Shuster’s work is technically good here, no matter what the subject. But throughout it all the art evokes feelings of pity and sadness in me, with the thought that Shuster must have hated what he was doing; from the pure and all-American tales of the world’s finest hero to the sordid and nasty little illustrations on show here is a horrible fall from grace.
In the end, it’s not really a book for me. It seems a little too much like raking over the private pain of a great pioneer of comics. It’s well designed, the text is well written, well researched and informative certainly, but in the end it’s just not really something I wanted to know.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Frankly, I think this article tells me more about the prejudices of the writer than it does about the book.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Our friends at http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk on Secret Identity:The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-creator Joe Shuster: http://tinyurl.com/m24hjt
August 11th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Thanks Richard,
If you mean prejudices as in the stance I take on the treatment of Joe Shuster then guilty as charged. But if you mean in a more general sense about the book and the art – then surely this is something you can say about every review of everything by everyone?
Strictly speaking the book could be described as:
Part 1: Craig Yoe’s long intro: very detailed, informative, interesting
Part 2: Shuster’s art: technically good, but unless you believe he really decided that knocking out fetish artwork in some shoddily produced magazine was a major goal for Shuster at this stage in his life then surely there’s an element of sympathy, even pity to be shown?
But that’s probably a little short and a little dry for a review?
August 11th, 2009 at 11:31 am
I haven’t read this – and probably only will if I pick it up cheap as never being much of a Superman fan it doesn’t really interest me much. What I do find kind of amazing is that we can say recognisably Shuster. I’ve a decent eye for artists styles and a goodish memory of them but I would struggle to pick a Joe Shuster out of a police line-up myself.
August 11th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Interesting review.
My immediate response is “But maybe he *liked* that kind of thing?”
Not that I’m excusing DC, but y’know some people enjoy doing fetish art.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
I thought the book was a very thin piece of work – a magazine article with the fetish art to bulk it out. Or alternatively, a reprint of some old fetish art with a bit of scandal and pseudo-sociology to help it sell. (There is, by the way, NO concrete evidence that the art is Shuster’s work.)