'Sweet Gwendoline'.
John Willie was a British pioneer in fetish and bondage art in the 1940s and 1950s. Born John Alexander Scott Coutts in Singapore as the son of British parents. He grew up and studied in England during the Edwardian era, then migrated to Australia. He got into the fetish scene after joining the High Heel Club in Brisbane in the 1920s. He started to draw and photograph, often using his second wife Holly Anna Faram as his muse and model. He started to sell his drawings and photographs through the club's mailing list.
'Sweet Gwendoline'.
By 1945 Willie headed to the United States, but eventually ended up in Montréal, Canada. From there, he sent his comics, cartoons and photographs to the US. Most of it was published in Bizarre, a soft-porn magazine that he edited under the pseudonym John Willie between 1946 and 1959. It was filled with themes like bondage, high heels, sadomasochism, transvestism and body modification, and his most famous stories were 'The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline', 'Pauline's Peril' and 'Hairbreadth Harry'. He additionally worked for the mail-order publications of Irving Klaw, and other magazines.
John Willie was a master of the bondage genre, and he created numerous works for private orders, which unfortunately have never been published. After developing a brain tumor, he was forced to stop his mail-order business. He destroyed his archives and retired to Guernsey, where he died in August 1962.
'Sweet Gwendoline'.