Eric Stanton obituary

Fetish and fantasy

Hailed as 'the father of fetish', artist and strip cartoonist Eric Stanton, who has died aged 72, was America's most provocative and influential post-war illustrator of bondage and domination. For more than 50 years, he developed his imagery of sexually dominant, high-heeled, steely-eyed women for comics, magazines, book covers and to accompany the private fantasy stories commissioned by mail-order customers.

The only gallery exhibition of his artwork, in 1984, at the Danceteria club in Manhattan, attracted more than 4,000 fans. The British painter Allen Jones admires Stanton and his peers for their 'expressionist intensity' and 'sheer pictorial invention, draughtsmanship and humour'. Madonna modelled one of her early images on the Stanton female.

From a Russian family, Stanton was born in Brooklyn. Drawing became his passion from the age of 12, when he started copying the scantily-clad heroines in early comic books. 'Since I was only young and not very successful at the art of love, I invented my own little world... of which I am king,' he said. His tastes gravitated towards such strong female leads as the star-spangled Amazon Wonder Woman and Sheena, Queen Of The Jungle. Damsels in combat and distress were staple ingredients of adventure comics and the pulp fiction magazines from which they evolved.

On leaving high school in 1944, Stanton enlisted in the US Navy and produced an information strip about aircraft recognition for a service newspaper. He would also entertain his fellow sailors by drawing glamorous girls on their handkerchieves.

After the second world war, his first break into paid illustration was assisting newspaper strip cartoonist Gordon 'Boody' Rogers in his Long Island studio. Stanton pitched in on backgrounds, lettering, and colouring and invented some of the characters for Rogers's idiosyncratic plainclothes superhero Sparky Watts and his hillbilly blonde bombshell Babe, Darlin' Of The Hills. During this period, Stanton came across an advertisement by Irving Klaw, New York's self-styled pin-up king, offering 'fighting girl illustrated serials' by mail. Confident he could do better, the 22-year old Stanton offered his services; his 1948 Battling Women debut began a 10-year association with Klaw.

In his earliest works, such as Diary Of A Lady Wrestler, Stanton concentrated strictly on 'fighting femmes', but by the early 1950s, on Klaw's instructions, he started specialising in the bizarre conventions and contraptions of bondage. Entirely self-taught, he studied comic art from 1954 to 1956 at the Cartoonist and Illustrators' School under former Batman artist Jerry Robinson. He later shared a studio with classmate Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange for Marvel Comics in the 1960s.

Stanton invented many memorable titles for Klaw, including Girls' Figure Training Academy and Madame Discipline, and scripted the occasional serial, but he mainly illustrated Klaw's and other people's stories. He also worked on Klaw's photographic shoots with their most popular model, Betty Page.

By the more permissive 1960s, Stanton was able to show men in action with his women and tackle homosexual and transvestite subjects. He painted some 300 paperback covers and numerous interior illustrations.

After usually being poorly rewarded and losing much of his artwork, he set himself up as his own publisher in the 1970s as an artist-for-hire to visualise the fantasies of his specialist clientele. In 1997 the German publishers Taschen issued a 350-page art book covering his career, edited by photographer Eric Kroll.

Stanton is survived by his second wife and their two children.

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