Tom Sutton (aka Sean Todd) was born on April 15, 1937 and raised in North Adams, Massachusetts. Sutton was influenced by newspaper strips and E.C.’s line of 1950s horror comics, but his career was perhaps predetermined when he began drawing nudie schoolyard art for paying classmates.
Like so many of his cartooning contemporaries, Sutton joined the U.S. armed forces, enlisting in the Air Force. While stationed at the Itami base in northern Japan he created his first professional comics work—the Caniff-inspired adventure strip F.E.A.F. Dragon—for the base’s magazine. This led to Sutton getting his dream job on the military’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, working in Tokyo on the Johnny Craig comic strip inspired by the artist of the same name. But Sutton later dismissed the strip as being “all stupid. It was a kind of cheap version of [Frank Robbins’] Johnny Hazard…”
When Sutton came back to the U.S. he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on a scholarship, worked as a freelance commercial artist, and was one of the first artists to draw the perennially popular sexy vampire goth chick, Vampirella, for Jim Warren’s magazines. He also worked for Marvel Comics, but when he moved to San Francisco, he discovered Robert Crumb and the rest of the underground comix movement and was impressed by the creative freedom that he was unable to exert in the work he was doing.
But it wasn’t until he reached his fifties, in the early 1990s, that he finally felt that he could liberate himself in the way Crumb, S. Clay Wilson and the underground comix artists had done 30 years earlier. Under the pseudonym “Dementia,” Sutton created a whole slew of extreme bondage comics for Fantagraphics’ Eros Comix.
Sutton’s extreme hardcore comix included Bizarre Bondage, Bondage Slaves, Outrage!, Jailbait, and Extreme!! Much of the material is repetitive and shocking, featuring women bound, gagged, and suspended from various piercings (nose, nipple, or genital). Monsterotic features various fettered victims being abused by a series of monsters and creatures, harking back to 1950s comics and reflecting the Japanese subgenre of “tentacle sex” manga.
Unlike much of John Willie and Eric Stanton’s work, which has a certain naïve charm, Sutton’s work has an unpleasant, misogynistic tone, with most of the bound ladies genuinely looking distressed. This is, of course, tailored to a specific market and is almost certainly Sutton’s Dementia persona purging his soul—the artist even covered taboo fetishes such as coprophilia, in Savage Sewer Sluts.
But Sutton also wore his great sense of humor and knowledge of comics history on his sleeve when he harked back to his childhood and created a number of sexy E.C. Comics parodies: Bustline Combat (Frontline Combat); The Vault of Whores (Vault of Horror); The Crypt of Cum (Crypt of Terror); and the title that could easily sum up his entire erotic comic oeuvre—Weird Sex (Weird Science).
A rare image of a slave enjoying herself “bouncing cum” in Outrage! #2 (2001).
Sutton’s Savage Sewer Sluts uses all the trappings of superhero comics—from the excessive cartoon violence to the over-the-top sound effects—all intimating that no one is actually getting hurt.
The cover to Savage Sewer Sluts, a feast of wrestling, coprophilia, and super-heroic slugfest parodies.