Eric Stanton (born Ernest Stanzoni Jr.; September 30, 1926 – March 17, 1999) was an American underground cartoonist and fetish-art pioneer. He began as a bondage-fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, then spent most of his later career on gender-role reversal and proto-feminist female-dominance scenarios—women in charge, men humiliated, Amazons and “princks,” not only classic damsel-in-distress rope. Commissioned by Klaw from the late 1940s, his chapter serials made him underground famous. He also worked with Leonard Burtman (Exotique and Selbee magazines), Times Square publisher Edward Mishkin, paperback publisher Stanley Malkin, and later magazine publisher George W. Mavety. For a decade he shared a Manhattan studio with Marvel legend Steve Ditko. After the soft-core 1960s his art grew more transgressive. In the 1970s he ran the mail-order “Stanton Archives,” selling directly to fans; from 1982 he issued staple-bound offset fan books as “Stantoons,” more than a hundred by his death. He contributed to underground titles and later adult magazines such as Leg Show and Leg World. His only lifetime art exhibit was at New York’s Danceteria in 1984. Banksy, Allen Jones, and Madonna are among those said to have drawn inspiration from his work. For BDSM and femdom art history, Stanton is foundational American bizarre underground.
Early life, Navy injury, and Irving Klaw
Stanton was born and raised in Brooklyn to an Italian father and a Russian mother. During World War II service in the U.S. Navy, a head injury left him partially color-blind. Afterward he assisted Boody Rogers on Sparky Watts or Babe, supplying backgrounds and plot ideas. His personal preference was lady wrestling and fighting-women comics, but Klaw—who also sold pin-ups and movie stills from 212 E. 14th Street—commissioned bondage fantasy chapter serials, launching Stanton’s fetish career. In the early 1950s he attended the Cartoonists and Illustrators School under Jerry Robinson and others. Classmates included future Spider-Man and Dr. Strange co-creator Steve Ditko, and Gene Bilbrew, whom Stanton introduced to Klaw.
Studio years with Steve Ditko
From 1958 to 1968 Stanton shared a studio at 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue with Ditko. For years they collaborated on fetish comics. Biographer Blake Bell (without citing sources) wrote that Ditko at one time denied ever touching Stanton’s work, even though Stanton said they dabbled in each other’s art, mainly spot-inking. An introduction to one Stanton collection claims Stanton drew in India ink and Ditko hand-colored the pages. In a 1988 interview with Greg Theakston, Stanton said his contribution to Spider-Man was “almost nil,” but that they worked on storyboards together and he “added a few ideas,” including, he thought, webs coming from the hands. Fetish-art historian and Stanton biographer Richard Pérez Seves has suggested Stanton may have underplayed any Spider-Man role to protect the friendship with Ditko. Evidence has also been argued for uncredited Stanton input on Dr. Strange. Whatever the exact split, the shared studio is a legendary crossroads of mainstream superhero craft and Times Square fetish comics.
Self-publishing, Stantoons, Blunder Broad, Princkazons
From the late 1960s Stanton supported himself by self-publishing into a quasi-underground network of subscribers and patrons. The Stantoons series (from 1982 to 1999) carried many of his best-known transgressive concepts. Blunder Broad, created in the 1970s with writer Andrew J. Offutt (a.k.a. Turk Winter), is a Wonder Woman parody: an inept superheroine who fails missions and is tortured by enemies including lesbian supervillainess Leopard Lady / Pussycat Galore / Cheetah and male sidekick Count Dastardly. Her super strength can be stripped by cunnilingus—pure Stanton absurdity and SM humiliation comedy. Princkazons, developed with “Lady Princker,” Shaltis, Alan Throne, and Winter, imagines women worldwide growing oversized female penises (“princks”), becoming taller and stronger than men, and dominating them in public with facesitting, urophagia, coprophagia, and oral and anal rape. The series is extreme even by underground standards and shows how far Stanton pushed femdom fantasy past 1950s bondage serials.
Reprints, translations, and legacy
From the mid-1970s, Bélier Press in New York reprinted many Stanton serials in its 24-volume Bizarre Comix series. 1950s-era titles include Dianna’s Ordeal, Perils of Dianna, Priscilla: Queen of Escapes, Poor Pamela, Bound in Leather, Duchess of the Bastille, Bizarre Museum, Pleasure Bound, Rita’s School of Discipline, Mrs. Tyrant’s Finishing School, Fifi Chastises Her Maids, A Hazardous Journey, Helga’s Search for Slaves, Madame Discipline, and Girls’ Figure Training Academy. Book-length collections have been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch. In the 1990s Fantagraphics’ Eros Comix reprinted Stanton work as The Kinky Hook (1991), Sweeter Gwen (1992), Confidential TV (1994), and Tops and Bottoms #1–4 (1997)—subtitled “Bound Beauty,” “Lady in Charge,” “Broken Engagement,” and “Broken Engagement 2.” Essential secondary reading includes Richard Pérez Seves’s Eric Stanton & the History of the Bizarre Underground (Schiffer, 2018) and related FetHistory work on Charles Guyette. Stanton’s daughter Amber Stanton has written about the tangled web of his possible Spider-Man contributions. For kink readers, Eric Stanton is the line from Klaw bondage serials through shared Ditko ink to mail-order Stantoons of Amazon cruelty—American femdom cartooning before the internet, still raided by fashion, fine art, and pop stars who may never name the source.
