Within are naked women with whips, brutish men brandishing red-hot pokers, exotic torture and politically incorrect spankings. What makes the illustrations more than simply a curiosity of the times is the disturbing fact that many of the characters look exactly like Shuster's Superman and Lois Lane.
"Yes, they look like Lois and Clark," Yoe says. "Joe obviously had some very dark fantasies. There's a panel in an early Superman comic book where he has Lois over his knee and is spanking her. But certainly nothing of this depth or extremeness."
Artist Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel created Superman in 1938 but didn't benefit when the character exploded in popularity in the 1940s. By the 1950s, Shuster was barely working. He died in 1992.
It is not unusual for comic-book artists to handle sexier fare; MAD magazine's Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder produced Little Annie Fanny in Playboy for 26 years.
But Stan Lee of Marvel Comics writes in an introduction that the Shuster work is "startling" in that it caters to "the basest of man's character. … It clearly indicates how desperate Joe must have been."
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