Phantom Lady | Ty Templeton's ART LAND!!

Bondage? That’s where we are now?

I do six monthly posts about the rise of postmodernism as a result of new educational opportunities created by the second Industrial Revolution, and no one reads them. I do an eleven day series about our collective struggle for a cultural soul in light of recent media consolidations and the blog gets thirty-five hits over those eleven days… But hogtie Lois Lane to a speeding truck with her thighs held open and 37,804 internet pervs find a way to my homepage.

But I’m no fool. I understand the needs of the blog consumer, and I will accommodate with the content you heaving philistines so clearly demand. Here is part two of…TY TEMPLETON’S IRONICALLY SELF-AWARE COMIC BOOK BONDAGE PARADE.

I can't believe Marvel let me do this cover!

Both in the comments section, and in my email box, I was flooded with an estimated eight requests for Wonder Woman as my next subject. Unfortunately, it proved nearly impossible to find images of the Amazon Princess in bondage, in either my comic collection or on the internet– even with the safe search off. This screengrab from the Seventies WONDER WOMAN TV show was all I could find.

Those chains look uncomfortable. No wonder Nazis were considered rude.

morning

You’ll have to excuse me while I catch my breath after that much concentrated sarcasm. Who here DIDN’T know that the ORIGINAL Princess Diana (Ms. Magazine’s Mascot) was THE poster girl for restraint fetishism for her entire career? Her creator, Charles Moulton (aka Dr. William Moulton Marston, Phd in psychology from Harvard, and distinguished co-inventor of the lie-detector) was an outspoken bondage enthusiast who insisted in books and interviews that the world would be

noon

a more peaceful place if we all learned to sheepshank our loved ones. This was before we knew that sort of thing was “weird” and he was still allowed to be photographed for glossy magazines and shop at local stores all through the forties and fifties. And if peace through mutual rope burns wasn’t enough for

night

Mr. and Mrs. America, the good doctor had two openly poly-amorous wives, each of whom bore him a couple of kids, and the whole sordid commune of anti-establishment love lived happily ever after.

Compared to Dr. Moulton,

she may look upset, but she still hasn't shouted her safe word.

Hugh Hefner was a pussy.

So finding images of Wonder Woman in bondage is about as hard as finding a closeted republican at a gay bar. If you need to see shots of the chained up Amazon, grab your google and work your search engine, kids. You’ll end up with enough drawings of Diana cattle-roped to a torpedo to wallpaper your sanctum sanctorum.

But in light of the double-mint twins marital arrangements that Dr. Willie had with the wives, this image (below) of two hot ladies RIDING THE MONSTER KANGAROO does command attention, , but then, who hasn’t drawn two women riding the Monster Kangaroo?

Penis? What four legged penis?

Heck, riding the monster kangaroo is my regular phone-doodle, only I don’t draw the rollicking beast with quite so phallic a body shape.

So it’s way too easy to go after the Amazon Princess, or the Phantom Lady, or even Robin and Bucky, the boy hostages. No matter how much fun it is to draw a nicely restrained pale young boy wearing a domino mask, it’s just not “ART LAND” style to blog about the commonplace and mundane.

BATMAN is another story altogether.

I keep a sketch book. All artists do. It’s a place to warm up the hands as we start our work day, like doing scales on a piano. Sometimes the drawings are of two headed nuns playing ice hockey, or equally silly images never meant to be shown to the public. Sometimes I sketch ideas. The following was never meant to be anything more than an image of how tough Batman was. He can scare you pissless while still tied to a chair.

You want to see a tough guy? Find him some nails to eat.

This was just a doodle in a sketch book. But I had an idea. Could I do an entire issue where Batman is tied in a chair? Where he doesn’t get out of the trap at all, and just SCARES the bad guys into giving up…? That struck me as a fun challenge and I asked the editor if I could try it. I was told “yes” but I had to include Robin and Batgirl in the story, since they were co-stars of the book at the time. Well, that diluted the idea somewhat, but I was still happy to give it a chance, and I ended up writing one of my favorite little Batman stories for BATMAN ADVENTURES (vol 2) #6, during my more than ten years working on that title. It’s only five pages, so I reproduce it below…THIS is bondage in comics done RIGHT.

page 1

pg 2

pg 3

pg 4

pg 5

Don’t ask about the Black Mask/Red Hood storyline. The less said about that, the better.

There, I hope we’ve exhausted bondage for a while, you sicko pervs. Tomorrow, the return of all new Ty Templeton Funnies for the weekend. That post will be about coprophilia.