Starman to the rescue... again. (2)

Yesterday, we left poor old Jediah Rikane in a mess. Well, it turns out he stays in a mess for some time. How come? Are the authors that sadistic?

Not exactly! It's just so Jediah has time to reminisce how he got into that mess. So is Starman going to find out about the plot on his own? Is he going to come and save poor cute bear in bondage Jediah? What do you think?

Starman to the rescue... again.

Or, as we are supposed to say in French : Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (Which means the more things change, the more they stay the same but really, I'm French and I've never heard any Frenchman say that except Maurice Chevalier in very old movies.) So it's another superhero with the name of Starman, this time the third character to have that name. This extract is from Starman's first appearance in Adventure Comics 467 published in late 1979 and yes, I did buy that issue when it came out and no, I'm not going to tell you how old that makes me. The story is written by Paul Levitz (who has since become VP of publisher DC Comics), inked by Romeo Tanghal and pencilled by the inimitable Steve Ditko, whom I've always thought drew very hot mature men (hey, he created J.Jonah Jameson, Spider-Man's arch enemy who's the star of this blog post). So you can imagine my delight when I bought this issue and found out there was a new Ditko-drawn series and it featured this hot bondage scene. So what is going on? Somewhere in space, mysterious masked figure Starman has just rescued a star cruiser that was hurtling towards a sun and certain doom and now, he's being given the grand tour by the starship's owner, Lord Oswin. He's unaware that in the ship's hold, hot mature man Jediah Rikane is being held in bondage and questioned. Shall our hero rescue him? Tune in later for the answer.

Yes, it's another hogtie! I guess this really must be my favourite bondage position. The not-so-older man in this drawing was inspired by a famous comics character. Can you guess which?

Isn't there something wonderfully hot about an older man in bondage, struggling to get free, but to no avail? Well, at least I think so. This drawing is titled "Businessman Bound". I just finished putting it in colour and showing how I do that to my friend Marc, whose place I'm staying at for a few days. It's in Britanny, about twenty miles from Rennes and the weather's great so I didn't spend much time in front of the computer today. It's much nicer in the garden.

This drawing is an experiment - I tried scanning a pencil sketch that I kinda liked the way it was and colouring it. I'm quite happy with the result. The name of this one is "Pris au saut du lit" which means something like "taken right when you step out of bed" in French, although it's obvious this guy didn't even have time to get out of bed. It's the first panel in a comic that never went any further than pencilling the first page of. I guess it was all in the first picture and, yes, the man sleeps in his undies. Isn't that cute?

I'm extremely happy today because I just had a story published on the Nifty site of porn fiction. Actually, that's not that great a feat, since all contributions to the site are welcome, so all you have to do is write a short story or novel and submit it and it'll be published online. Still, it means that you actually have to write a story and finish it to be able to submit it and have it published. Over the years, I've started a number of prose stories that never went anywhere. This time, I'm trying to be realistic, write one chapter at a time and have it published when it's completed, as a sort of incentive to writing a longer story little bit by little bit (or rather, chapter by chapter).

The Nifty Erotic Stories Archives are organised in a number of categories and sub-categories. My favourite is, obviously, the Gay Male/Authoritarian listing. However, most of the stories deal with younger men as subs, which is kind of frustrating. So I decided that once again, if I didn't find what I liked, I had to make my own. Actually, I've been writing porn fiction since I was in my teens but never had anything out in the open. You can't imagine what a thrill it is to see my writing out there for people to read. In case you are interested - and I bet you are - you can read chapter one of "Old Enough To Know Better" here.

Another colour version of a drawing published in Bound & Gagged. This one has a bearish kind of mature man. It's for Forrest, from PlanetBears, who liked my work and has great taste in men. Note the little zip-a-tone dots: this was long before my computer could make that kind of effect. So, yes - the zip-a-tone was actually cut, stuck on the drawing, then scraped to get the desired effect, just like the Japanese manga artists, only they do it every day while I only did it once.

The other day, I was musing on the imaginative possibilities a bondage artist could get out of setting himself the task of depicting an amputee in bondage. Like, how do you tie up a guy's legs if he only has one? French comic artist Crisse seems to have taken up the opposite challenge: how do you tie up someone who has more limbs than the average human? Say, a centaur? This extract from the first volume of his series Atalante shows how Crisse handled the problem. And since the centaur in bondage is none other than Chiron, oldest and wisest of all, it only makes the answer more exciting to look at!

Unlike lots of people interested or involved in gay SM art, I'm no great fan of The Hun.

However, I have to admit there's one thing in his art that works really well - the mixture of art and text. You can consider his art extremely static comics or very wordy cartoons. I personally think it defies such categorization.

I have found that putting text in certain drawings, as if they were extracts from a bigger story, really works. One can imagine what went on before and what's going to take place afterwards. Really stimulates the… imagination.

Punishment for Father

As you can see from the date next to my signature, "Punishment for Father" is a rather old drawing. I still find it very hot. It was actually conceived as an illustration for a novel I only ever wrote the first paragraphs of.

It was also one of my few drawings to be published. And no, I don't mean online publishing, I mean real honest-to-goodness paper publishing. That was in Projet X 39 (April 1999), which had a portfolio of four of my drawings.

That was kind of a strange experience. On the plus side, at last I was being published in a French gay mag (my attempts at having my more vanilla drawings published in the weekly Gai Pied Hebdo in the late 1980s having being a dismal failure - they only wanted young muscular guys, you see). On the minus side, the editor of Projet X felt the need to ask for his readers' "open mindedness" for my "fully mature forces of nature" in the issue's editorial. And that just after he was asking them to be open minded about scatology. It felt kind of weird to learn that to some people, being interested in mature and older men was akin to eating shit. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Starman to the rescue!

Yes, it's another of those superheroes from the so-called "Golden Age" of comics coming to the rescue - not of a damsel in distress but of a mature man in bondage. This time, it's Starman, who's just escaped from a bo-o-ring dinner date with perk brunette "miss Lee" in "the fashionable and exclusive Flamingo Club". It's so much more fun to go out and fight crooks with your "gravity rod", especially when you can score with cute elderly scientists abducted by dorks with names like "Dr. Doog" who are only interested in their ultra-dynamos. I mean come on, Doog, get a life! Or at least a fashion sense!

(These panels are from the debut story of Starman in Adventure Comics 61, from April 1941. They are drawn by Jack Burnley.)