Fetish in Comics

UpDated 8/21/2013 

  “These aren’t your granddaddy’s comic’s son!”Comics and graphic novels have become an industry that is no longer geared towards kids…at least not exclusively. There are still some all ages titles out there – but if you plan to just grab any random book off the shelf and hand it to a child I recommend you leaf through it first to make sure it’sappropriate. Whether it’s the over the top violence in a book like The Boys or adult language in books like Powers Bureau you may not want to hand just any book over to a child. Another subject matter that splashes across the pages of comics that some may feel is more geared to a mature audience is fetish. This can’t be a big surprise though can it? Look at the outfits worn at your average fetish ball and the ones worn at your average comicon cosplay event and you could easily mix them up.

Now let me make myself clear…I am not suggesting that every comic book is full of bdsm fetish scenes, they aren’t porn or even erotica, but what they are – or rather what they do, is take some cues from the bdsm world and incorporate it into their character creations – sometimes in an overt way and sometimes in a more subtle way.

In the more overt way you have characters such as Night Bitch from Kick-Ass 2, Nikki Stripez from Green Hornet Legacy and The Twilight Lady from Before Watchmen: Nite Owl. These character’s costumes are designed to look like bdsm fetish wear – the characters talk and act like Dommes – it’s the source of their power and confidence. In cases like The Twilight Lady, they are in fact dominatrix madams. There is no way such overtly sexual/fringe characters would have passed the comic code back when it was in effect, but then again – as mentioned, these aren’t your granddaddy’s comics.

Or are they? It was mentioned that some characters were overt in their connection to bdsm but that some were subtle –now of course subtle is a relative term but let’s take a look at two characters who are not as blatant with their fetish connection but who have it none the less. Let’s look at Catwoman first. Now this is a character who has gone through many changes in costume over the year but one consistent thing is that she was always meant to be sexy. More modest in the early years, going from a dress to her current skin tight black outfit, but always sexy and always with the mask and always using her sex appeal to attempt to confound the Cape Crusader. Heck her weapon of choice is a whip for goodness sakes. Finally we have the most iconic female character there is – Wonder Woman. If you look at the early pages of Wonder Woman there is hardly an issue that went by where she wasn’t captured and bound up…or where she didn’t have someone bound in her Lasso of Truth. It happened so often that there is little question that the creator of the character had a thing for bondage – now wait just a minute…Catwoman and Wonder Woman are right out of the Golden and Silver age of comics – so maybe these ARE your Grandpas comics after all.

There are far more details that could be explored…we could look at more characters, more costumes, more scenarios and more themes if we wanted to explore how fetish can be found in comics. This was just a sort of intro into the idea. It’s not surprising. Not to make light of the BDSM lifestyle in anyway as I have a lot of respect and admiration for it, but it is a type of escapism for many who have to live outwardly vanilla lives –so it’s not at all surprising that it would find its way into one of the greatest mediums for escapism there is – the comic book.

Written for Miss Cindy by Simon11