This imperative to make enough from his art to look after his family, combined perhaps with a sense that he was lucky to get paid to do the stuff he liked to do, seems to have led Stanton to accept all manner of poor pay rates from various publishers over the years. 

He was incredibly prolific, which might actually have worked against him in terms of the unit prices he commanded per illustration or per page. 

He also seems to have been terribly naïve about providing publishers with originals (rather than copies) which, on a number of occasions, were seized and destroyed in various raids and prosecutions by the authorities.

A lot of his work was also pirated by various publishers (this continued into the 1970s and ’80s) and although he did later wise-up about protecting his intellectual property, considerable damage had been done by then.

The Eric Stanton story, as told by Pérez Seves, is an endlessly fascinating series of often surprising revelations which any review can only scratch the surface of. 

This book, replete with wonderful illustrations, is also stuffed solid with text, which anyone with an interest in the subject matter will surely find themselves devouring as avidly as I did. 

Of great assistance here is the author’s writing style, which is engaging and affectionate, thorough and careful but never dry, and enthusiastic without losing sight of the importance of objectivity. 

Obviously the main appeal of this Eric Stanton biography will be to people with fetish interests who are already familiar with — or, through this book, might chance upon — the world of vintage fetish art, and are curious about its history.

Particularly valuable for enthusiasts will be the last 60 pages of the book, devoted to various appendices. More than 40 pages are devoted to the author’s Eric Stanton Collector’s Guide covering the underground years 1949-1970, followed by a page devoted to a list of the different names used by Stanton (14 in all!). Finally come 15 pages of notes relating to the book’s 36 chapters, and a very useful six-page index.

But Eric Stanton & the History of the Bizarre Underground also offers some perhaps unexpected food for thought for students of another American comic/cartoon genre: the superhero.

I’m not sure how widely known it is that Stanton was partnered in many of his fetish art projects by Steve Ditko, creator of Spider-Man. 

In fact the two were great friends, and for some considerable time shared a studio near Manhattan’s Times Square. 

So it is not reasonable to guess that even when Ditko wasn’t adding ink to Stanton’s pencil creations under one of his pseudonyms, and was busy instead on his own work for Marvel, the two men sometimes acted as sounding boards for each other’s ideas.

Thus it is that, in a rare departure from the strictly factual content of his book, Pérez Seves allows himself to indulge in a bit of fanciful speculation about just how much Stanton might have influenced Ditko in his creation of Spider-Man’s look. 

The skintight catsuit, the hood with its overlaid mask… these were all elements more familiar from Stanton’s work than anything Ditko had previously created.

However, the author insists that despite considerable speculation, Stanton — always the loyal friend to Ditko — never claimed any credit for the character’s look and always maintained in interviews that visually, Spider-Man was solely Ditko’s creation.

By coincidence, as this review was being prepared for publication, the death of Marvel’s Stan Lee was announced. 

According to Pérez Seves, it was Ditko’s falling out with “editor and compulsive self-promoter” Lee that led in 1966 to his (anonymously) partnering Stanton in a new venture, Stantoons, which marked Eric’s first decisive move towards finally becoming an autonomous producer and entrepreneur.

It certainly appears that obituarists have largely gone along with Lee’s claims to the creation of Spider-Man, with Ditko somewhat relegated to junior partner status. 

One can only imagine what those writers might say if it were to be established that this very mainstream Marvel character actually owed more than a little to the world of underground fetish art and its most celebrated exponent. 

Richard Pérez Seves/fethistory.blogspot.com
Schifferbooks.com/EricStanton

Want to know more about Eric Stanton? Read this review’s companion piece — a reproduction of Tony Mitchell’s interview with the artist when he visited London in 1984 — first published in Issue 3 of Skin Two magazine. Find it HERE!