The Adentures of Sweet Gwendoline by John Willie, edited by J. B. Rund
This is the second edition, 1999, in hard cover.

The order in which I purchased books by or about John Willie (a pseudonym used by John Alexander Scott Coutts, 1902-1962) followed a natural progression of sorts. I bought the two volume Taschen reprint of Willie’s Bizarre magazine. Then I found a copy of Possibilities, published in France (1985), of Willie’s bondage photographs. The next purchase was this volume, The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, devoted to Willie’s artwork, principally his comics, but also including artwork for late 1940s Harrison publications and stand alone works.

That’s not a bad way to dive in John Willie’s work and output since his publications, photography, and comics interweave throughout the second half of his life.

John Willie while in Australia, he was born in England, in the mid-1930s began producing artwork and photographs influenced by the English magazine London Life. Bizarre magazine is Willie’s continuation of some of London Life’s themes: fetish costumes, personal letters, fetish photography. Willie was self-taught but had obvious native talent and a good eye.

After the war Willie moved to North America, finally settling in New York, and began publishing Bizarre on an irregular schedule in 1946. He worked for a short period in the late 1940s for Harrison producing artwork for magazines like Beauty Parade. He also sold photographs taken in Australia to Irving Klaw and shot a series of bondage photographs.

Sweet Gwendoline offers a glimpse into rare survivals from this early pre-Bizarre period in Australia and work for the Harrison magazines. What stands out is Willie’s humor and his ability to draw the female figure. This humor and skill would present itself in the narratives as comics that Willie produced, first in Bizarre, later for Klaw, and finally as a self-published “The Race for the Gold Cup.”

Willie’s comic style appears to have been inspired by Alex Raymond’s artwork for a newspaper comic titled Secret Agent X-9 originally authored by Dashiell Hammett starting in 1936. Hammett’s secret agent becomes Willie’s secret agent U89 in his comics, such as “The Escape Artiste.”

Willie’s comic narrative is driven by story, a sly humor, and good artwork. There is a fluidity to this narrative which takes place in a wholly created world, that is not usually found in fetish, or other, comics during the era that Willie worked. This is one reason I enjoy returning to the stories, the artwork, and the artist.

I have personal favorites and there are others where, while the artwork is delightful, the narrative is less present. In that case the comic is essentially a series of loosely tied together images. I’m thinking primarily of “The Missing Princess” filled with pinup delights in unusually harsh physical situations.

The masterwork is Willie’s “Sweet Gwendoline: The Race for the Gold Cup” published in 1958 while Willie was living in Los Angeles (he moved there in 1957 from New York). “The Race for the Gold Cup” was advertised in men’s magazines such as Gala and was used to help promote his other venture, bondage photography. A sheet of 4 photographs and flyer was included with each copy sold by mail.

Rund’s Sweet Gwendoline presents the comics in actual or larger than originally published size. There is also an unfinished work, “The Golden Idol.”

Sweet Gwendoline also has two letters by Willie, a biography, introductions to each work or group of works, but is mainly art in its various forms produced by Willie. A possible lack is the absence of a table of contents, though this forces one to hunt through the book and rediscover on the way. I’ll attempt a list of contents here:

Introduction, biography — v through xii
Correspondence — xiii through xix (bondage ties and gags)
“The London Life Girl” — 20 through 21 (Willie’s first published artwork)
“Sweet Gwendoline” — 22 through 70 (first parts appeared in Bizarre, later parts in Harrison’s Wink magazine, and finally published by Klaw)
“The Diary of a French Maid” — 71 through 91 (humorous two page spread artworks for Harrison)
Illustrations for the Harrison Magazines — 92 through 113 (spot and other illustrations along with as a model in photo stories)
“The Escape Artiste” — 114 through 132 (Sweet Gwendoline characters in a short comic published by Bizarre Publishing Co. and later by Klaw)
“The Missing Princess” — 133 through 180 (comic published by Bizarre Publishing Co and later reprinted by Klaw in a censored form)
“The Wasp Women” — 181 through 198 (begun in Bizarre but never completed, includes unfinished artwork)
The Race for the Gold Cup – 199 through 256 (published in 1958, Willie’s last completed work)
“The Golden Idol” — 257 through 298 (unfinished, included penciled pages not inked)
Drawings and Paintings — 299 through 368 (pages 337 through 368 are in color).

This book is available from the publisher, Belier Press.