Tag: Artwork

Black Widow

The new Avengers movie is out in a few weeks. While I enjoyed the last one, I thought it was a great comic book movie, rather than a great movie in its own right. As a big Joss Whedon fan I’m hoping this new one takes it up a notch.  I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Scarlett Johansson continue in her role as Black Widow. Joss has always done a great job with strong female characters, so this should really play to his strength.

The image below is from the cover of Black Widow #14. I’ve not read this particular comic, but it’s a fun image, despite the incredibly ineffectual gags on display. Somebody with BDSM experience should tell the artist that a professional like Black Widow would never use the cliched handkerchief gag. They’re hopeless at silencing people.

BlackWidow

Pick a number

It’s not femdom related, but I found this article on estimating the percentages of LGB people an interesting one. In most important ways the actual number is irrelevant. It’s clearly millions of people, so I’m not sure why different groups get so riled up over the exact count. It’s the historical and scientific perspective that I find interesting. One thing that comes through clearly from the article is the difficulty in giving a binary answer to what’s not a binary situation. There’s also clearly shifts in the numbers that reflect both changes in public identification and changes in actual behavior.

The precision of the wording in these kind of surveys always makes me smile. In this case I particularly liked the phrase – “someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm”. That’s a smooth line to use in a bar – “Fancy coming back to my place? I’ve got a box of Franzia in the fridge and a smooth jazz CD in the stereo. Maybe we could have some genital contact with the intention of achieving orgasm?”

I wonder if there was a line in the survey that would fit these two ladies? I’m not sure about genital contact or the intention to achieve orgasm, but there’s definitely something pretty kinky going on.

TwoOnHorseI believe the artist is Chéri Hérouard aka herric.

Why wasn’t I told?

I’ve just discovered that Sardax has both a twitter account and a blog. As you’d expect, both contain many interesting images and thoughts. I’m stunned I’ve only just discovered them. Clearly I’ve been failing in my duty as a resource for all fine things femdom.

A refresh of my links and resources pages is obviously in order. I’ve been debating putting together a set of twitter links, and this suggests such a list is overdue. While I ponder the right way to handle that, I’ll leave you with an image from Sardax’s blog of Mistress Lucy Khan. I played with Mistress Lucy only a few weeks ago, so this seems a fitting piece of artwork to feature here.

Mistress Lucy Khan by Sardax

Getting a good buzz going

Masochists come in all shapes and sizes. For example, I give you Dr Schmidt, inventor of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index which rates certain insects (hymenoptera) by the degree of pain their sting produces. Admittedly he’s an entomologist who studies these insects in the field, so getting stung is part of the job description. I also wouldn’t say that inventing a pain scale automatically makes you a masochist. If you’re a thoughtful scientist who gets stung that seems like a logical thing to do. I think the giveaway is the descriptions he gives the stings.

A Yellowjacket sting is apparently – “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” In contrast the Sweet Bee is – “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. As if a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” Nobody can wrote those kind of descriptions without some appreciation for the pleasures of pain.

'Eaten Alive' by XRendererThe above image is by the artist XRenderer. From the pot she’s holding I’m guessing these are supposed to be honey bees. According to Dr Schmidt they feel “like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.” I can’t imagine that can be too pleasant on a scrotum. Unless you like that kind of thing of course.

Sad day

I was very sad to read today about the death of author Terry Pratchett. He’d been suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s for some years, so it wasn’t particularly surprising, but that didn’t make it any less upsetting.

I’ve probably never mentioned it here, but his books are a regular part of my self-aftercare when playing and traveling. My vacations to various cities have a regular pattern. I meet and play with an interesting domme on an afternoon. I go for a beautiful meal in the evening. And, while enjoying a glass of wine and spacey on post scene endorphins, I read Terry Pratchett over diner. His gentle blend of humor, parody and witty references can make the end of a great day close to perfect.

His books have a great number of strong female characters (Esme Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg, Angua, Tiffany Aching, Susan Sto Helit, etc), but not a lot of kinky references. The most obvious one I could remember comes from The Light Fantastic. He’s just introduced a female warrior into the storyline…

“Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one’s shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades.
Words like ‘full’, ‘round’ and even ‘pert’ creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.
Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn’t about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer.
Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling’s Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword.
All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.”

Terry Pratchett from the Light Fantastic

I’ll leave you an image of another of Sir Terry’s memorable female characters – Adora Belle Dearheart. She’s forceful, opinionated, sarcastic, dresses severely and has been known to put men in hospital with her spiked heels. Just the kind of woman I think my readers would appreciate.

Adora Belle Dearheart by rubendevelaThis image is by the artist Rubendevela. Her character is a support and aid to Golems, which explains the large hand holding the ashtray behind her.

Learning to boogie with Eric Stanton

I’ll finish the sequence of posts on comic book artists and 50’s fetish with one of my favorite artists of that or any time – Eric Stanton. The image below is from a sequence called ‘Bruised and Battered‘. It’s not often you see a chamber pot and sock suspenders in fetish artwork.  If the text is a little hard to read then let me reproduce his speech bubble – “Karin! Honestly! I don’t know how to boogie! I’m doing the very best that I can do!”

Stanton of course wasn’t a mainstream comic book artist, but in the late 50’s and early 60’s he shared a studio with Steve Ditko, the creator of Spiderman. It’ll never be known how much of a role Eric Stanton played in the creation of the famous wisecracking webslinger, but as this blogpost makes clear, he was definitely involved to some extent.

Eric Stanton - Image from Bruised and Battered series

Nights of Horror

While I’m on the subject of 50’s erotic art (as I was), I recently stumbled across this fascinating article on Joe Shuster. If that name’s not familiar to you then you’re probably not a comic books fan. Along with Jerry Siegel he was the co-creator of Superman. The story of how DC comics paid them $130 for the character and made millions of dollars while leaving the creators destitute is a well known one. What I hadn’t realized was the Joe Shuster went on to do fetish illustrations for a series called Nights of Horror.

The article is a lengthy one but well worth reading if you’re interested in modern American pop culture. It touches on comics, censorship, pornography, murder and the moral culture panics that seem to regularly spasm across the US. There’s also a book which covers the topic in more depth. The illustration below is both Shuster’s work and the cover from this book.

Shuster

Times Square Smut

I have an odd fondness for the old 1950’s fetish artists and illustrators. The quality of their work is often pretty variable, the sexual politics archaic and the subjects tame by today’s standards. Compared to modern artists like Sardax and Shiniez the work doesn’t do much for more erotically and yet, despite that, I enjoy looking at it. There’s a sense of fun and quirkiness that’s missing in the more explicit work of today. I suspect that’s down to the legal constraints that they had to operate under and the limited fetish material available at the time. There weren’t well defined niches and ready made markets for them. They had to make it up as they went along.

If you share my interest in this period then I’d direct you to this article by Jim Linderman. It describes how he stumbled across artists like Gene Bilbrew and the colorful cast of characters that hung out around 42nd Street in NYC. There’s also a gallery of artwork and a book that he’s put together on the topic.

My absolute favorite drawing of those in the gallery is probably this one. It’s got sci-fi, bondage, fetishism and vintage fashion all mixed into a very bizarre scene. However, it’s not really femdom, so to illustrate the post I’ve gone with a different drawing from the gallery. I’m not really sure what’s going on, but that’s part of the appeal of these one off book covers.

RawDamesI was amused to spot in the comments to the Guardian article somebody complaining that the paper never featured modern artists like Sardax. I’m not going to hold my breath for that to happen but I do agree. Not sure if robbo100 is a reader of this blog but it made me smile to see another femdom artist aficionado pop-up in an unexpected place.