GENE BILBREW REVEALED: The Unsung Legacy of a Fetish Art Pioneer: 1 (African American Artists)

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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. Commissioned by Klaw starting in the late 1940s, his bondage fantasy chapter serials earned him underground fame. Stanton also worked with pioneering underground fetish art publishers, Leonard Burtman, the notorious Times Square publisher.

They pulled off our wigs. The girls shrieked with delight, while the fellows flushed crimson realizing that all the pretty things they had said to the three ‘cousins' were actually said to boys.

And Ditko was completely accepting of Stanton: ‘He thought my stuff was funny. We’d laugh a lot,’ Stanton said, as he fondly remembered years later. ‘Every experience that I had with Steve was terrific, as far as I was concerned.’”

We had a great working relationship,” Stanton recalled in a 1988 interview. “We were the only guys who could have gotten along with each other.” Seves quotes Ditko about the full-face mask: “I did it because it hid [Peter Parker’s] obviously boyish face. It would also add mystery to the character and allow the reader/viewer the opportunity to visualize, to ‘draw,’ his own preferred expression Peter Parker’s face and, perhaps, become the personality behind the mask.” Pointing to the Kirby sketch, Ditko might have disparaged the web gun Kirby’s character was brandishing: “That idea is old.” They married in Norway in 1971—and again in 1980 in Manhattan. This marriage was a happy one and resulted in two children, a boy, Tom, and a girl, Amber. Amber said her father always spoke highly of Ditko’s art, particularly his inking ability. “When they collaborated,” she said, “my father did the pencil work, and Steve would ink over it.”THE SAME YEAR that he and Grace separated, Stanton joined Ditko in a studio at 276 W. 43rd Street and revived the camaraderie of their C&IS days. GENE BILBREW REVEALED: The Unsung Legacy of a Fetish Art Pioneer by Richard Pérez Seves. New York, Fethistory, 2019. ISBN 978-1072487548 M y interest in these stories began as early as I can remember. One early example was a story I read in Loony Tunes comic #113 in which Bugs Bunny was forced to dress as a girl (bunny). The studio was bare bones. “It was a room about ten feet by twenty,” said Stanton. “One side was all windows. Steve’s desk and mine faced each other next to the window.”

Ditko’s material showed a total unawareness of sex while Stanton’s material conveyed a kooky preoccupation with it. Yet both shared the same ambition of make it as artists; and both, one might say, were earnest and obsessed.” It's all your fault Jim that we're like this!" Pete grumbled glancing down at his prettily flared skirts. "Aw shut up!" Jim retorted, "Do you think I like it any better than you, being dolled up like this?" Eric Stanton & the History of the Bizarre Underground by Richard Pérez Seves. Atglen, Schiffer Publishing, 2018. ISBN 978-0764355424 Their friendship,” she added, “was centered around creating art. Each of them contributed to the other's art as part of the friendship between two artists. While each was the driving force behind his own work, there was significant overlap. Steve contributed to the erotic stories my father worked on and my father contributed to Spider-Man and probably other stories. Neither one of them ever expected any recognition or money from the other.” Some instances that Seves cites are not quite so convincing: if Ditko did them, he did them by dutifully imitating his studio-mate’s mannerisms to the extent that his own disappear. Or so it seems to me, but I’m scarcely a Ditko expert.

Of course, Gisele. You would hardly expect to see a smart maid mincing about in trousers, would you?" Stanton seldom saw his erstwhile studio-mate in the years after they broke up the studio. He continued doing work until his death March 17, 1999, as “the most famous fetish artist in the world,” as Seves puts it. a b c Hyperallergic Daily magazine article, "A Long-Lost Artist of the 1950s Sexual Underground" by Jim Linderman, 5 January 2015 at hyperallergic.com Jan 6, 2015