1. Sweet Gwendoline John Willie
2. John Willie Sweet Gwendolyn And The Countess
3. Sweet Gwendoline John Willie

Find great deals on eBay for sweet gwendoline john willie. Shop with confidence.

My college roommate was Mistress Domino. She was also Carrie, a freshman from upstate New York who didn't drink or do drugs or sociology assignments. Every day after class Carrie strolled down Fifth Avenue to a club near Wall Street, where she traded her sneakers for stilettos.

Sweet Gwendoline John Willie

She lounged on a satin sofa until a stockbroker tickled her Chanel vamp toes. Then she led him downstairs to a dungeon, called him a pig and swatted his behind with a horsewhip. That was all.

Or that was all she would say after my jaw dropped when Carrie first told me about her extracurricular activities. Typically, slapstick comedy underscored Willie's serial cartoons - with the villain Sir Dystic D'Arcy drawing Gwendoline into 'spine chilling melodramas placing her in pungent peril.' In Willie's 'Diary of a French Maid' series and depictions of D'Arcy's upper-crusty companion, a vixenish 'Countess,' it's clear the illustrator defected from his bourgeois homeland. The facade of breeding and etiquette is bared; underneath their couture, the 'Ma'mselle' and the Countess are sadistic nymphos. The French maid and the farm-raised Gwendoline may be wild, but they stand by their man and you can bring them home to meet Mom. Willie was known for his use of conventional crosshatching and other rustic pen marks to characterize the villains and a smoother, more idealized form for the heroines.

Instead of explicit depictions of sex, Willie would bob and weave with an innuendo punch, unlike certain contemporaries who depicted 'some despicable acts,' as Rund puts it. Willie's two-step may have been a bow to censors (some of his private drawings were far more prurient), yet Rund believes that Willie was indeed bound by morals.

John Willie Sweet Gwendolyn And The Countess

'Willie grew up watching silent films,' Rund notes. 'When he saw a woman tied up, he wanted to rescue the damsel, not rape her. In the context of Victorian melodrama, you can't defile the heroine.' In the early '90s, Rund's friends encouraged him to do a second edition of 'The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline' after they observed how fetishism had infiltrated the mainstream, with Madonna's book 'Sex,' Manolo Blahnik stilettos and dominatrix shades in the clothing designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Yesteryear erotica is fashionable in the swinger/cocktail lounge set, and places like the Viper Room in Los Angeles feature a weekly burlesque routine. 'Time does lend enchantment,' says James Maclean of the Erotic Print Review. 'The pornography of yesterday probably is the erotica of tomorrow.'

Sweet Gwendoline John Willie

Rund contends Willie was the first fetish artist who illustrated only from models or from photographs he took himself. American fetish artist Eric Stanton, who specialized in illustrations of 'fighting femmes' in the late 1940s and early '50s, was a contemporary illustrator also noted for his realism, but 'Stanton would create a fantasy and pretend it's real,' Rund says. 'Willie took reality and made it fantasy. But his realism made it unique; you could imagine these things happening because the poses were real.' But Rund distinguishes between proclivity and pathology. 'For Willie, tying a woman up was a preference, not a necessity,' he writes in the book's introduction.

It's not about hate and misogyny, either. Rund is quick to add that Willie genuinely liked women and portrayed his female characters as the brains and his males as empty brawn.

'You look at bondage and domination Web sites and they're nailing tits to a table,' the 57-year-old growls. 'Today you tie 'em up and fuck 'em, but with John Willie you only imagined that part. If Sweet Gwendoline is alone with the villain Sir Dystic D'Arcy, another character enters the picture before anything can happen.'