Friday, Jul 25, 2008
John Willie's bondage illustrations made hurting look so good.
Mar 11, 2000 | My college roommate was Mistress Domino. She was also Carrie, a freshman from upstate New York who didn't drink or do drugs or sociology assignments. Every day after class Carrie strolled down Fifth Avenue to a club near Wall Street, where she traded her sneakers for stilettos. She lounged on a satin sofa until a stockbroker tickled her Chanel vamp toes. Then she led him downstairs to a dungeon, called him a pig and swatted his behind with a horsewhip. That was all. Or that was all she would say after my jaw dropped when Carrie first told me about her extracurricular activities.
Like Carrie, J.B. Rund makes no apologies about a fondness for flagellation. "I'm not a pervert," the Manhattan-based publisher declares in a scotch-and-cigarette voice. "So I get excited by high heels? And women tied up?"
For more than two decades, Rund has been publishing fetish art, books and cartoons in an effort to bring fetishism to the mainstream. "My friends look at these cartoons and say, 'How can you get a hard-on from that stuff?'" he says. "But they only get turned on by ladies with big knockers. If they were normal, other things would excite them as well. I'm not sick; I'm different. Thank God for pistachio ice cream; it would be boring if everyone liked vanilla!"
His idol, the subject of his latest book, is John Willie, considered by many to be the father of modern fetishism. Rund encountered the erotic art of the British illustrator and photographer as a teenager in the late 1950s. "The first time I saw Willie's work," Rund says, "I knew he was the Rembrandt of pulp."
Willie flirted with various mediums and styles, from comic art featuring flint-eyed Amazons with projectile breasts to coy damsels reminiscent of Esquire magazine's Varga girls -- only Willie's girls preferred leather gags to linen hankies.
In the 1940s, Willie created an obscure fetish magazine called Bizarre and produced four cartoon serials, of which "The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline" was best known. He contributed to gentlemen's magazines such as London Life, Flirt and Wink -- publications with Cosmo covers that enticed readers with headlines like "Spanking for Wives" and "She Strips to Conquer." He also created private fantasy stories commissioned by mail-order customers.
Willie's real name was John Coutts. He was born to an upper-middle-class family in 1902 and flitted between London, Australia and the States, making drinking buddies on every continent, before dying of a brain tumor in 1962.
While John Willie was a name in his day, he is obscure to most artists today, except for the fetish artists who consider him a legend. With the publication of "The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline," a collection of Willie's life's work, Rund wanted to acknowledge what elevated Willie above other erotic artists.
"I used to just look at the pictures," Rund recalls. "But when I finally read the Gwendoline serials, I realized that Willie's humanity made him better than all the others. His characters have dignity, which is very rare in pornography."
Typically, slapstick comedy underscored Willie's serial cartoons -- with the villain Sir Dystic D'Arcy drawing Gwendoline into "spine chilling melodramas placing her in pungent peril." In Willie's "Diary of a French Maid" series and depictions of D'Arcy's upper-crusty companion, a vixenish "Countess," it's clear the illustrator defected from his bourgeois homeland. The facade of breeding and etiquette is bared; underneath their couture, the "Ma'mselle" and the Countess are sadistic nymphos. The French maid and the farm-raised Gwendoline may be wild, but they stand by their man and you can bring them home to meet Mom.
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