'Duchess of the Bastille'.
Eric Stanton was an American artist of fetish cartoons and comics, that often featured bondage and fighting girls. He was born Ernest Stanzoni into a family of Russian origins in New York City. He studied at the School of Visual Arts and made his debut as an illustrator and comic artist in 1947 with Irving Klaw, a publisher of sadomasochistic paraphernalia. He afterwards attended the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, where he learned the finer points of the profession from teachers like Jerry Robinson.
Although Stanton's official debut was after the war, it is very likely that Stanton already drew the daily panel 'Tin Hats' from July 1942 until November 1944 for the Bell Syndicate, as was discovered by Dutch scholar Ger Apeldoorn in December 2013.
Comic strip by Eric Stanton.
Sharing a studio with classmate Steve Ditko, he continued to work for Klaw's Movie Star News company until the publisher's death in 1966. From then on he self-published and distributed his work to a quasi-underground network of subscribers, and also made work for rich clients who ordered his work for private use. Proving himself a master of the bondage genre, Stanton created an impressive number of stories, such as 'The Nightmares of Diana', 'Marie's Extraordinary Adventure' and 'Phyllis in Danger'. At the same time he worked for magazine La Revue Érotique, using pseudonyms like Savage and John Bee.
Erotic art by Eric Stanton.
Stanton's work has been published in numerous European magazines, like Bédé X, Blue and Kiss Comix, and by publishers like Taschen in Germany. Stanton self-published his 'Stantoons' books until his death in 1999. Famous creations include the 'Wonder Woman' parody 'Blunder Broad' in the 1970s with writer Turk Winter, and the 'Princkazons' series. Fantagraphics published Stanton collections under their imprint Eros Comix in the 1990s, called 'Tops and Bottoms'.
Comic strip by Eric Stanton.