Femdom Artists

The Spanking Stepmother, Raymond Rogers

Do you have dreams of a dominatrix-cum-stepmother?

I’ve never had kinky fantasies about any family member. Not that I’m criticising the kink. The feelings are opaque to me.

Bill Ward with Some of His Muses

I recall the very first time I saw a drawing by Bill Ward. It was in an early issue of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. Ward used to run a full-page ad offering to do original drawings for a fee. Naturally given the context the center of an ad was Torchy the narrow-hipped, huge-breasted young woman whose misadventures he drew for Quality Comics.

The art was awful. But you could tell that the cause was in his hands. Either Ward had arthritis or his fingers were shaking. An awful thing for an artist. In his last years Jack Kirby would leave the room to sign an autograph so no one could see his hands shake. (And Wally Wood killed himself when his vision began to fail.)

After I opened my used bookshop in which I also sell comic books I became more familiar with Bill Ward’s oeuvre.

His Torchy art when he was a young man was fine. The Torchy stories were mildly funny in a sexist way. Ditzy Torchy was as anatomically improbable as Ward women always were. Her body literally caused traffic accidents and left men drooling.

The decline of the American comic book industry in the 1950s saw Ward move on to pretty girl gag cartoons. Stylistically this would remain Bill Ward’s most mature work. The illustrations had an appealingly limpid quality. The emphasis was on glamour of a cheap and obvious sort. Despite the mink stoles and gowns the women had faces that somehow always look vulgar however lovely they ostensibly are.

That market also went into decline. Ward became an active contributor to From Sex to Sexty. We had a stack of those in the shop a few years ago. (I’d seen the magazine on the newsstands as a boy but never the interior.) The magazine was as lowbrow as it gets. The gags were always obvious.

I think I recall reading that the publishers Ward worked for after his glamour gag period paid much less. This forced him to draw faster. Quantity was necessary for Ward to sustain his income. Ward’s work became sloppy, his line much less fluid.

At some time Bill Ward started doing covers and interior illustrations for pornographic books. And as you must know if you are visiting Femdom Artists he became one of the most popular illustrators of sadistic women ever. I have no idea how much his porn work paid. But those publishers were notoriously cheap.

Often I’ve wondered which of the qualities of that work came from Ward and which were at the editor’s behest. Breasts as big was the women’s heads may have been the latter. Not that Ward ever drew a flat-chested woman.

The appeal of Bill Ward’s Femdom art lies in the outré and extreme situations he depicted. Women shooting arrows at men, knocking them down the stairs, sticking electric prods up their sphincter. The women were the most relentless sadists. Even Steffi could match their violence and cruelty.

I loved it. For a time.

Then a lover pointed out how awful the women’s faces looked. Suddenly the drawing of the woman wearing stilettos as she jumped up and down on a man’s buttocks no longer seemed as exciting. Eventually all I could notice were the awful eyelashes (as if the women applied eyeliner with a trowel), anatomical exaggerations, aesthetic failures.

Bill Ward no longer stoked my masochistic fantasies.

But I’m sure that you gentle reader still love Bill Ward’s fierce female sadists.

I wish someone with a more attractive style would recreate some of those drawings or least create new ones with the same disturbing intensity.

I think that I read Bill Ward never felt shame in his kinky work. He certainly deserves our respect.

(Please feel free to leave a comment telling me about your favorite Bill Ward drawings.)

Cartoon Fun and Comedy

This magazine cover is from Bill Ward’s glamour gag cartoon period. Very possibly it is the first drawing by him of a female spanking a male. Perhaps is first ‘Femdom’ illustration.

Can’t imagine a more diabolical nurse and I certainly wouldn’t want to check into that hospital.

Do you have sadomasochistic medical fantasies?

I know this man isn’t on his knees in the tradition way of a submissive male. But the drawing is by Bill Ward so I thought I’d stretch the point. I like Ward’s glamour work much more than the dementedly sadistic.

Shoe salesman: the retifist’s dream job.

Her breasts are so huge it is hard to believe she can stand up straight. Not that the idea of kneeling before a woman, arms and legs bound isn’t exciting. The top of a presumably New York skyscraper is an odd choice of venue.

What do you think of how the dominatrix is drawn?

From the better part of Bill Ward’s glamour cartoon period.

I confess myself not greatly in sympathy with the absurd sordidness of Bill Ward nowadays. But there’s no denying his popularity among male masochists in general.

Diabolical Nurse: Illustrated Collector’s Issue

While in a coma a few years ago I kept dreaming that my nurses were dominatrices under the control of an alien female that wanted to … – … I never was sure what or why I was the subject of her attentions. Coma dreams are intense and vivid.

Cum One, Cum All is a terribly uninspired title isn’t it?

This Bill Ward cover drawing of a man licking a woman’s thigh-high boots seems better to me than much of his work of this period.

• The dominant woman’s breasts aren’t insanely huge.
• Her face has some softness, she doesn’t look like one of Ward’s wacked-out harridians.

So, gentle viewer, what do you think of this Bill Ward drawing. Wish it was one of his more heavily sadistic cover illustrations?