Number 1179: Kinkdom Come

Like Wednesday's post about artist Adolphe Barreaux, Gene Bilbrew, who often signed his name "Eneg," published his art in a shadowy realm of disrespectability. His work appeared on covers and interiors of publications catering to a fetish audience. This story, called "The Passion Pit," has no nudity or hardcore sex, just some sexy costuming and a lot of innuendo. It appears Eneg swiped some of his war panels from war comics of the era (1950s), and lavished most of his effort on what the reader paid for, sexy women.

I showed this story in the early days of this blog, but linked the pages to the online storage site, Photobucket. Some of the links have broken, and rather than go back in and fix them I've enlarged the scans and am re-presenting them. As I said in that earlier blog, in the early '60s I was with a friend who bought "The Passion Pit" from a bookseller in a classic under-the-counter scenario."The Passion Pit" was hot in that era, the stuff of Times Square sleaze and the bondage-discipline crowd. Looking at it now makes me wonder how there could have been a time when anyone thought it was pornographic or dangerous. In today's porn-saturated world it seems almost innocent.

Bilbrew was African-American. He died young, about 50. I've seen a couple of sources use different years for his death, 1971 or 1974. What draws us to his artwork isn't technical excellence but an idea of a sexual underground where women dress up in latex and leather, spiky-heeled boots (with spurs, yet!) and dominate men. The "vitalizer" the sisters Fettisha and Sexsina give to the hero, Dick Strong (ho-ho), is a kind of liquid Viagra. The ability to perform sexually with chemical enhancement was a fantasy when this was written and drawn.

In the '70s I found a pirate edition of "The Passion Pit" re-titled "Chinese Torture," which removed Eneg's name. I sold my copy of "Chinese Torture" on eBay years ago, but before I did I photocopied it. The scans are from those copies.