Craig Yoe has announced the imminent publication of a special limited edition of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster. This limited release will include a substantial amount of material not included in the standard release, such as a bookplate signed by Yoe and Stan Lee, a facsimile of a letter to Yoe from Shuster’s sister, and sixteen pages of additional Shuster artwork deemed too hot for bookstores.

This new material only reinforces Secret Identity’s importance as one of the most revelatory works of comics scholarship in recent memory. As Yoe observes, the comic book witch hunts of the 1950s might have had a far more severe outcome if Dr. Frederic Wertham had made the connection between Superman comics and Nights of Horror, the Shuster-illustrated fetish magazine that had become notorious thanks to its alleged role in inspiring the Brooklyn Thrill Killers in 1954.

Ironically, the very unwillingness of comic book critics to take the medium seriously as an art form kept them from seeing the evidence that was literally right before their eyes. Were they not so willfully ignorant about the distinquishing qualities of comic book artists, Shuster’s work would likely have become the missing link between superhero comics and teenage depravity.

In the interests of full disclosure I should note that I did play a small role in locating some legal material for the book, but my contribution was at best minuscule. The book’s real value comes from the stunning art and Yoe’s compelling historical introduction, which reads like a Beat-poet jazz riff inspired by the era it describes.

Below the jump are a few of my own reflections on Secret Identity and its significance for obscenity law and contemporary culture. Some of the references may seem unfamiliar if you haven’t read the book, so I strongly recommend that you get a copy for yourself!

Secret Identity has sparked a fascinating range of reactions in the comics community and beyond. Particularly noteworthy has been the extent to which fans and critics alike refer to Shuster’s fetish art as shameful filth, a characterization that resonates with condemnations of the work back in the 1950s.

Such loaded language tends to obscure the work’s moral complexity. Sexually suggestive depictions of bondage have a rich history, reflecting humanity’s epic struggle to reconcile sexuality and civilization.

The decades immediately leading up to Shuster’s art in Nights of Horror gave rise to some especially intriguing examples. In the nineteenth century U.S. the bestselling genre of (alleged) ex-Catholic memoirs reveled in accounts of priests abusing nuns with whips, brands and worse. As new media spawned more secular depictions of sexual behavior, Anthony Comstock launched the modern decency crusade and popular fashion fetishized the corset, through which binding women became a social norm.

When the publisher of Shuster’s work described it as designed for “adult-minded people who not conformists and have their own ideas on the relationship of the sexes, fashion and the like” (Secret Identity, 152), he was not merely excusing mindless porn. The postwar era had seen a return to more constrictive normalcy after a period of liberation in the 1920s, but as Shuster’s work highlights, deeper tensions were emerging that would soon lead to lasting social change.

On one level, Shuster’s art is a transitional form to what are now more mainstream explorations of bondage, sex and society. Rather than hiding Shuster’s fetish art as an embarrassment born of despair, we can see it as a forebear of cutting-edge contemporary artistic works, such as fetish fashion, the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and films such as Secretary and The Passion of the Christ.

Moreover, Shuster’s art expresses a trenchant social critique. In this regard Secret Identity is especially valuable as a historical resource, inasmuch as Yoe does not merely reproduce Shuster’s pictures but also describes the stories they illustrate. This is not merely torture for torture’s sake; the recurring theme of perverted authority could come straight out of a David Lynch movie, as time and again the sympathetic lead characters struggle with the sexual torment fomenting beneath society’s facade. There’s even a story that foreshadows the Nazi fetish porn that would become popular in Israel as well as in contemporary film.

In this context Shuster’s visual references to the Superman mythos, well documented in Yoe’s analysis, call back to the essence of the earliest Siegel and Shuster Superman stories. Before he became a vanilla big boy scout, Superman was a lawless force–”THE DEVIL HIMSELF!”–rescuing the oppressed from corrupt social institutions. By giving his fetish art characters the form of Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Luthor, Shuster creates an array of Black Lodge doppelgangers exposing the tortured moral ambiguity beneath the corporate super-mask.

This points to the ultimate historical irony of treating Shuster’s fetish work as irredeemable obscenity. As Yoe astutely discerns, the Supreme Court unquestioningly accepted the legitimacy of censoring Nights of Horror as obscene; to underscore the point, the Court’s majority opinion deliberately includes a reference to the material as “filth.” By the 1970s, however, the social revolution that material such as Nights of Horror helped create would make such blithe categorical condemnations constitutionally untenable.

As the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1972 Miller case, obscenity law “must be carefully limited,” applying only to works which appeal to the “prurient interest,” “which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” The Shuster material–lacking scenes of sexual intercourse and illustrating stories with an underlying moral message–is precisely the sort of work that would enjoy constitutional protection today.

Marshall McLuhan famously observed that the artist creates a counter-environment that makes the invisible visible, and from this perspective Secret Identity is art in its truest form. Shuster’s images expose us for what we are–abusive, tormented and yet nobly struggling to rise above our all too human contradictions.

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