Bill funding expired, he worked in a nightclub with his stepdad (his mother having divorced Ernest Sr. Bill, which paid $20/week for a year to finance vets’ search for jobs he was actually loafing, living at home, and playing softball and shooting dice with friends. Discharged in 1946, Stanton took advantage of the G.I. enlisted in the Navy upon graduation from high school in June 1944. was the result of a fling his mother, Anna, had in the early years of her marriage. Ernest Sr., it turns out, was not his biological father. Stanton (birth name, Ernest Stanzoni, Jr.) was born Septemin Brooklyn. A photograph of an attractive middle-aged woman we determine is Stanton’s mother only because the text nearby is about her.

The book’s only scholarly flaw is Seves’ failure to caption the illustrations they are usually explained in the adjacent text, but you have to look hard for it. Reproduction throughout is high quality.Īmong the illustrations are three consecutive pages from his celebrated Sweeter Gwen, a retake of John Willie’s classic Sweet Gwendoline. It’s also a detailed biography, a sketchy history of “the bizarre,” and an exhibition of Stanton’s ladies. The book is virtually an extensively annotated bibliography of Stanton’s life work. His text is accompanied throughout by lots and lots of illustrations, many in color, and Seves gives the histories of several of Stanton’s serials and tells their stories. The book has an index and is copiously footnoted in the back by page number, which notes add substantial information to the narrative as well as citing Seves’ extensive sources. And he interviewed many persons who either knew Stanton or others of the fetish milieu. The details of Stanton’s life and some representation of his work I’ve taken from Eric Stanton & the History of the Bizarre Underground by Richard Perez Seves (288 7x8-inch pages, b/w and some color 2018 Schiffer Publishing hardcover, $29.99).Īuthor Seves, who says on the book jacket’s back flap that he is a collector “obsessed” with vintage American fetish art, musters impressive research in the book: he dug into FBI reports, court records, Navy documents, the New York State Census, previous books about Stanton (Eric Kroll’s The Art of Eric Stanton and other tomes), as well as such obvious sources as Belier Press publications and many obscure periodicals ( Comics Buyer’s Guide!?). Stanton also worked with pioneering underground fetish art publishers, Leonard Burtman, the notorious Times Square publisher. Commissioned by Klaw starting in the late 1940s, his bondage fantasy chapter serials earned him underground fame.

While Stanton began his career as a bondage fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, the majority of his later work depicted gender role reversal and proto-feminist female dominance scenarios. Wikipedia sums him up this way (avoiding Ditko):Įric Stanton was an American underground cartoonist and fetish art pioneer. The other fascinating aspect to Stanton is that he probably helped Steve Ditko invent Spider-Man. I’m more fascinated by his work than his psyche. Why he did that is a question for his psychoanalyst, not me. First, he could draw beautiful sexy women but chose to portray them in physical combat or bound, strapped, and gagged in the best dominance tradition. STANTON IS A FASCINATING FIGURE in cartooning for at least two reasons. Features Eric Stanton: Master Fetish Artist

Blonde bound and gagged bondage