The son of British ex-pats, John Alexander Scott Coutts was born in Singapore on December 9, 1902, educated in England, and then moved to Australia where he met his second wife, Holly. Their relationship didn’t last, and, although they remained married and on good terms, Coutts moved to New York alone in 1946.
Coutts started creating comics under the pseudonym John Willie, producing the Sweet Gwendoline stories, The Escape Artist and The Missing Princess, which he licensed the mail order rights to Irving Klaw. Unfortunately, Willie’s artwork was deemed too extreme for Klaw, who ordered fellow in-house artist Eric Stanton to paint clothes over the whip marks on the original art for The Missing Princess. Stanton reluctantly did so, and Willie was mindful of Klaw afterward.
Willie’s Sweet Gwendoline comic strip also ran in Robert Harrison’s Wink magazine from June 1947 through February 1950, but ended abruptly and unfinished. However, he continued the series in Bizarre magazine, which Willie also wrote, illustrated, took photographs for, and edited. Willie added to the familiar “damsel in distress” story, of a neophyte victim, continually kidnapped and bound in various ways by the nefarious Sir Dystic d’Arcy. Along with his fellow scoundrel, The Countess, d’Arcy was the archetypal villain—a lookalike of the popular British actor Terry-Thomas, who often played cads and bounders, but more likely a self-parody of the artist himself.
The adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, were in the same archetypal vein as the silent movie serial Pauline’s Peril, and the newspaper strip Hairbreadth Harry, and John Willie quickly became the undisputed master of sequential bondage stories at the time.
Willie’s creation Sweet Gwendoline at the mercy of The Countess and Sir Dystic d’Arcy.
Partially inked pencils by John Willie. The text can be seen in the third panel: “Oh good old Polly—I’ll never be mad at you again for undoing knots, but I wish you’d start on my wrists.”
Less than 50 of Willie’s watercolors remain, and most are in the hands of private collectors. Here, a cruel mistress demands her glove be picked up.
Occasionally Willie would hold photo shoots for Bizarre magazine, or work in friends’ homes across New York. Tragically, one of Willie’s many models, Judy Ann Dull, was the first victim of serial killer Harvey Glatman, on August 1, 1957. Glatman killed another two women before being caught in 1958 and executed the following year. He had pretended to be a fetish photographer and tied models up before strangling them with a rope. The case sent ripples through the nascent BDSM community as they feared a public backlash and misunderstanding about the scene. Fortunately it never came.
Willie constantly had money and cashflow problems, and was barely able to keep a roof over his own head—a familiar problem for all small publishers. Consequently, he often accepted personal commissions from discerning fans and friends, and created numerous works, some of which remain unpublished and in private collections. But it wasn’t enough to keep the magazine afloat and Willie sold it to a close friend known only as “R.E.B.” R.E.B continued to publish the magazine until 1959, replacing Willie with Mahlon Blaine as the cover artist, with the noble intent of getting the magazine onto solid financial ground and selling it back to Willie for the purchase price. However, shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1958, Willie developed a brain tumor. He retired to Guernsey, where he died a few years later, in 1962.
This page from The Wasp Women originally appeared in Bizarre #6–8, but remains unfinished.
The cover for the collected edition of The Race For The Gold Cup, Willie’s best-known work.
Secret agent U69 and Gwendoline find themselves in a familiar predicament in a page from …Gold Cup, Willie’s favorite strip.
This illustration mocks Gwen’s constant predicament, “Help!! John Willie! Help!!! I’ve been caught again.”
