Emasculated at the Gym (Female Muscle Domination)

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During his last months with Rogers, Stanton was also producing work for Irving Klaw. Klaw, self-named the "Pin-up King," was a merchant of sexploitation, fetish, Hollywood glamour pin-up photographs, and underground films. His business, which eventually became Movie Star News, began in 1938 when he and his sister Paula opened a basement level struggling used bookstore on 14th St. in Manhattan. We had a great working relationship,” Stanton recalled in a 1988 interview. “We were the only guys who could have gotten along with each other.”

Sandi Stone beats up Alex and dominates Brad Sandi Stone's first ring fight, she destroys her male opponent men she fights, then when she has them helpless, she carries on inflicting permanent and debilitiating injuries, STANTON’S DAUGHTER Amber wrote about her father’s contribution to Ditko’s creation of Spider-Man in an article, “A Tangled Web,” originally published in The Creativity of Steve Ditko (2012). She remembered watching with the family the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on tv when she was nine years old. As a giant balloon of Spider-Man appeared on the screen, her father exclaimed: "Would you believe that— I never would have thought," she quotes her father saying with amusement. Was it a goal for you to compete in figure competitions right from the beginning or was it something that grew in your mind as time went on and you saw the progress in your body? Almost at once Stanton recognized that art provided a unique satisfaction he did not experience in real life: not only access to a special fantasy world, but a sense of personal power: ‘I had control ... I could have the people I drew do anything I wanted’ he reflected in later years. ‘I was king of my world.’ Control and powerlessness—as mirrored in the secret subculture of the sexual fantasist–would become a major theme in his art. [...]Wrote Amber: “My father contributed to the costume, the idea of the web shooting out of Spider-Man's wrist, and the movement which he made with his hands to release the web. ... I still remember my father's beautiful, strong, broad hands as he showed me the movement that makes Spider-Man's web release from his wrist. It was just like my dad to come up with something like that. If you knew my father it would make sense that he had a hand in Spider-Man.”

They married in Norway in 1971—and again in 1980 in Manhattan. This marriage was a happy one and resulted in two children, a boy, Tom, and a girl, Amber. He explained that since Spider-Man was so famous, it might draw attention to him as an artist if people knew he contributed to the creation of the character,” Amber wrote. “My brother and I were children and in school, and he feared that it could negatively effect our lives if people knew he was an erotic fetish artist.” Something in Stanton’s psychological makeup dictated channeling and creating art as a means of attaining a proper balance and some measure of control in his life. The actual art he made—the artifact itself—was always less important than the process. [...] It was the process of making art that Stanton lived for; it was that process of exploration and discovery. My goal is to take top 3 at a Pro Qualifier to get to compete at the Olympia this year. I will be starting with the Toronto Pro on June 17th, 2011 and the Tampa Pro on June 24th, 2011. Off-season I like to eat more and lift heavy! I always weigh out my protein even during the off-season, but I will have a few cheat meals per week. I like to maintain a reasonable off-season look.Ditko, asked years later how he and Stanton met, said, “I liked the way he drew women.” More about their relationship anon.

While Stanton wanted to honor Ditko’s work by not claiming any part of it for himself, he had another reason for avoiding the subject: he wanted to protect his family by keeping a low profile: Her mother was angry that Stanton never claimed recognition or royalties because of his role in creating the character. When Amber asked her father about it, “his response,” she said, “made it clear that it was something he would never even consider because the ideas were freely given.

Some instances that Seves cites are not quite so convincing: if Ditko did them, he did them by dutifully imitating his studio-mate’s mannerisms to the extent that his own disappear. Or so it seems to me, but I’m scarcely a Ditko expert. After her father’s death, she found Ditko’s phone number and called him. She wanted to know if he had any memories he could share. He couldn’t remember anything, she reported, and he denied that her father had anything to do with creating Spider-Man.

We are an organization dedicated to female led relationships, female led communities and female led projects of all kinds. Their friendship,” she added, “was centered around creating art. Each of them contributed to the other's art as part of the friendship between two artists. While each was the driving force behind his own work, there was significant overlap. Steve contributed to the erotic stories my father worked on and my father contributed to Spider-Man and probably other stories. Neither one of them ever expected any recognition or money from the other.” While Stanton began his career as a bondage fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, the majority of his later work depicted gender role reversal and proto-feminist female dominance scenarios. Commissioned by Klaw starting in the late 1940s, his bondage fantasy chapter serials earned him underground fame. Stanton also worked with pioneering underground fetish art publishers, Leonard Burtman, the notorious Times Square publisher. Voltairine founded the production company Artvamp in 2000, and has since produced several award-winning feature films. These include the experimental narrative film Profane, which won Best Feature at the Boston Underground Film Festival and Best Film of the Year in the Underground Film Journal, as well as the Creative Capital award-winning documentary Nice Bombs, shot in Baghdad a few months after the beginning of U.S. occupation. Her work has appeared on the Sundance Channel, and many of the films she has worked on have been distributed internationally and shown in festivals and on television worldwide. For her short films, she has received grants from the Princess Grace Foundation and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. She was also given a full merit scholarship to the School of the Art Institute Chicago where she received her Master's in Film and Video.

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Says Seves: “One could only imagine how gratifying Ditko’s presence must have been to Stanton after his time with Grace; from being around someone who was repulsed by art to being around someone whose very waking moment was consumed by it. ‘There were times Steve would spend twenty hours straight doing a comic,’ Stanton remembered.