GENE BILBREW REVEALED: The Unsung Legacy of a Fetish Art Pioneer: 1 (African American Artists)

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Says Seves: “One could only imagine how gratifying Ditko’s presence must have been to Stanton after his time with Grace; from being around someone who was repulsed by art to being around someone whose very waking moment was consumed by it. ‘There were times Steve would spend twenty hours straight doing a comic,’ Stanton remembered.

After her father’s death, she found Ditko’s phone number and called him. She wanted to know if he had any memories he could share. He couldn’t remember anything, she reported, and he denied that her father had anything to do with creating Spider-Man. While Stanton began his career as a bondage fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, the majority of his later work depicted gender role reversal and proto-feminist female dominance scenarios. Commissioned by Klaw starting in the late 1940s, his bondage fantasy chapter serials earned him underground fame. Stanton also worked with pioneering underground fetish art publishers, Leonard Burtman, the notorious Times Square publisher. THE SAME YEAR that he and Grace separated, Stanton joined Ditko in a studio at 276 W. 43rd Street and revived the camaraderie of their C&IS days.

Her mother was angry that Stanton never claimed recognition or royalties because of his role in creating the character. When Amber asked her father about it, “his response,” she said, “made it clear that it was something he would never even consider because the ideas were freely given. Several of the stories were originally sold by Gargoyle Sales Corporation of New York City between 1954 and 1957 as 8x10 photographs of the art and story. I have several of these photo collections but would always like to find more. Mine include item 211, 'Memories From a Pink Mirror', item 212, 'The Panty Raiders', and item #252, 'Transformed'. Together he and Ditko would have ‘skull sessions’ and choreograph many of the great action sequences throughout the books.” GENE BILBREW REVEALED: The Unsung Legacy of a Fetish Art Pioneer by Richard Pérez Seves. New York, Fethistory, 2019. ISBN 978-1072487548

Of course, Gisele. You would hardly expect to see a smart maid mincing about in trousers, would you?" While Stanton wanted to honor Ditko’s work by not claiming any part of it for himself, he had another reason for avoiding the subject: he wanted to protect his family by keeping a low profile:

The boys look so good at the dance that they got more attention than the girls. They become upset about them stealing their boyfriends. The book’s only scholarly flaw is Seves’ failure to caption the illustrations; they are usually explained in the adjacent text, but you have to look hard for it. A photograph of an attractive middle-aged woman we determine is Stanton’s mother only because the text nearby is about her.

In fact, while Stanton usually denied having influenced Ditko’s conception of Spider-Man—“Steve doesn’t like me to talk about him,” he told Theakston, “my contribution to Spider-Man was almost nil”— he sometimes admitted that the web-shooter idea was his.

Stanton seldom saw his erstwhile studio-mate in the years after they broke up the studio. He continued doing work until his death March 17, 1999, as “the most famous fetish artist in the world,” as Seves puts it.