Eric Stanton: The Dominant Wives & Other Stories

by Eric Stanton

You can trace a thematic line between the work of comic-book artist Eric Stanton and his fellow American image-maker Russ Meyer. Both began producing their art in the aftermath of World War Two, both were obsessed with a similar parodic vision of the female. Tall, absurdly buxom, with long legs, a slim waist, long hair, and an expression of insane desire imprinted on her beautiful face, as with Meyer, Stanton's depiction of woman was beyond reality. They were amazon descendants, femme fatales, mistresses of the whip or the handcuffs; simultaneously a parody and a sincere celebration of empowered sexuality. The men in his fast-moving narratives are often striving to escape but they are always immobilised, restrained literally by ropes, or simply frozen in their awe at the sight of Stanton's superheroines. So prolific was the artist that his collected oeuvre, all the covers, illustrations (for magazines such as Exotique) and comic books, could now fill several libraries, but one should really stumble upon Stanton by chance. At midnight in a cheap hotel room, you might come across this edition lurking under the mattress with a girl's name and a phone number scrawled inside. You probably won't even need to phone that number.

Genres: Comics, Erotica, Art, Smut, Graphic Novels

704 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

Reviews

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

i did not like cuzz my mom mad me read it

[Mistress Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masturbatory material currently next to my bed.

[Dominick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. Stanton's reputation as one of the preeminent fetish artists is not well served by this shoddy collection. Nice as it is to see a big, fat collection of Stanton's work, this book leaves a lot to be desired. The size (about 6 x 8 inches) is itself a problem, as the text is frequently difficult to read, in part because of poor typography no doubt but in part also because it is so small. However, there are more basic production errors. Most trivially, the Taschen page numbering is occasionally placed over the edges of caption boxes, therefore obscuring a word or two of text (not that the prose here is terribly good--in fact, most of it is pedestrian at best, and it is riddled with errors--but it should still all be visible). Far more seriously, there are clear problems with missing caption boxes (evident because since the book is shot from the original art, one can see the remnants of the glue that held the captions on), and there is a story that pretty clearly has been accidentally combined with another one; mid-narrative, we are suddenly looking at different characters in a different scenario. Another story seems to have missing pages, assuming the Stanton page numbering on the actual art is correct. Other stories seem to stop rather than ending; missing pages or just bad stories? Who knows? There certainly are narrative/art level problems, as well. For all that Stanton does some interesting things with the art (e.g. one story using photo backgrounds, or some of the ways colour and black and white mix), he also often seems inattentive to detail. Costuming will change colour from page to page; text and image will not match; etc. Some of the art is quite strong; some of it looks almost dashed off. As for the stories themselves, well, I suppose if corporal punishment (of men--the few stories with female objects focus on bondage rather than flagellation) is your turn-on these might be effective enough, but for the most part, they left me cold--despite all the posteriors heated up by extensive spanking. It's actually oddly chaste stuff, given its fetish context; many stories don't even have any, or much, nudity in them, and there's not really any hard-core sexual content. Most of the stories don't even reference orgasm at all. Anyway, given the shoddy production values, I can't even recommend this to fetish or Stanton fans. Not worth the investment--certainly not at cover price.

[Gianni Del Cesta]

Great! Drawn by Stanto and colored by Stan Lee