AS CHILDREN, my siblings and I each had a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons. They were special crayons, a gift from our father, along with high-quality coloring books he ordered by mail. Dad had his own set. After supper the family often sat at the table and colored together. Dad carefully read the name of each crayon before using it, explaining that he was partially color-blind. Soon we stepped up to sophisticated coloring books with more intricate designs, using felt-tip pens that we stored in cigar boxes. As we got older, we colored less often, until at some point we stopped altogether. Those evenings remain my best memories of family life.
After Dad’s death, I found hundreds of dried and useless felt-tip pens from various drawers of his desk. Each pen held a slip of paper taped to the shaft that identified the color, similar to the label on a crayon. I filled a box with eighty folders of original art. In Mississippi I opened that box and made my final significant discovery. Behind my father’s public identity as a science fiction writer and his covert life as a pornographer was yet another private enterprise. For over fifty years, he secretly made comic books of a sexual nature and neatly filed them away.
The first item in each file was something innocuous—a Reds schedule or an old bill—as if concealing the true contents. No one entered his office except by invitation, and even then, none dared go behind his desk. His children had been out of the house more than twenty-five years. Concealment was part of his creative process, born of shame and guilt, which he maintained long after there was anyone to hide it from. He needed the fetish of secrecy in order to draw.
My father never took an art class. He didn’t visit museums or draw from a model. He’d taught himself from studying comic books, illustrations in pulp magazines, and bondage serials from the forties and fifties. Scenes lacked perspective, and the anatomy was crude. His earliest work is reminiscent of Henry Darger’s drawings, based on imagination rather than observation. When Dad began drawing as a child, he didn’t comprehend female anatomy, and for a long time he believed the vagina was in the middle of the stomach because babies came from there. He didn’t know women had pubic hair.
Frustrated by his lack of skill, he developed a complicated and time-consuming way of making comics. First he wrote a script that described the action. On separate pages he made loose pencil layouts of panels. He fed the layouts into his typewriter and carefully typed segments of narrative into the allotted areas. After removing the paper, he used the typed sections as guides for what to draw.
Dad called his method of drawing “the steal technique.” He traced images from other works, transferred the tracing to a second page via carbon paper, and modified them by enlarging sexual characteristics. Then he inked and colored the pages. Dad believed that he enhanced any picture he stole due to an innate ability to improve everyone else’s work. A dozen thick notebooks held thousands of pages of source material, images torn from magazines and catalogs, divided by category: standing, sitting, sex, breasts, legs, and so forth. He dismantled hundreds of porn magazines to accumulate a reservoir of pictures to steal. Mixed in were images from lingerie catalogs, Heavy Metal magazine, and Entertainment Weekly.
As a very young child, I had a Superman coloring book my father had given me. I colored every page that featured Superman, which left the scenes of Clark Kent interacting with other characters. These were very boring, since everyone wore office attire, and I began coloring the suits brightly with different hues for the lapels and pockets. While concentrating, I realized that my father stood behind me, watching with an intense frown. He asked why I colored that way. Instantly I understood it was wrong. “I got tired of blue,” I said, and wished I hadn’t, since he was wearing a blue suit. He didn’t answer, just looked away, thinking for a long time. Many years later Dad asked if I remembered the incident and I told him yes.
“Me, too,” he said. “You taught me something then. There are no rules for coloring.”
He’d inherited deuteranopia, a form of color-blindness that affected his perception of the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum. This genetic flaw bothered him throughout his life. To avoid clashing colors, he wore dark clothes. The lack of rules for coloring freed him from the pressure of making a mistake. Blending color for subtlety was impossible with felt-tip pens. Most of the figures in his comics were unclothed, their skin blue or green. The hues were bright and flat. His lack of facility with color produced lurid and shocking, unusual combinations matching the intensity of the scenes.
Along with the comics was a personal document dated 1963, with the caveat that it be read after his death. He was twenty-nine when he wrote it. I was five. It was his only sustained example of personal writing. He referred to the comics as his “Great Secret” and revealed a deep concern about his zeal for the material. He worried that he hated women. He wondered if there were other people like him and, if so, how they dealt with their urges.
At age fourteen, he’d begun drawing comics that portrayed women in torment, before he’d had any exposure to fetish material or knowledge of sadism. The impulse was simply inside him; he’d always been that way. He called his comics an atrocity. The locked box in which he kept them was “full of my shame and my wickedness and my weakness.”
The document has a sincere quality absent in everything else he wrote. Without his usual grandiosity, the intent probing of his own psyche makes him vulnerable enough for sympathy.
I have wasted hundreds of hours at this, always fearful of discovery, always secretive, always aware of the sickness and hating myself for it. I well know the utter dream-fiction stupidity of it, even while continuing through page after gory, naked page after blood-splashed page, after ordeal-filled page. I know it’s silly, tom-foolery. And I’m ashamed: I know it’s sick.
I’m sorry, sorry. Who is to blame? It can only be my childhood . . . because these things took place in it, after certain patterns were formed, after certain circuitry was already branded on my mental relays. Mother, Dad, Judeo-Christianity, and my childhood friends.
It is the repressions, not the manifestations of unrepressed thoughts, that give us trouble. Apparently I am giving them vent, egress, by drawing page after page.
But what if I stop?
In 1957, just before getting married, he packed a decade’s worth of his art in a sack with rocks and threw it into the Cumberland River. He wrote that no one knew what it had taken for him to do that. He swore never to make such material again. Eighteen months later, he began The Saga of Valkyria Barbosa and worked on it for the rest of his life. It ran one hundred and twenty separate books that totaled four thousand pages.
As a lonely teenager in a log cabin, he’d invented the premise: a barbarian culture crossed with the highly advanced science of Atlantis. Aging was medically quickened to bypass childhood. Breasts were enlarged with special serums and could lactate and grow upon command. Subcutaneous skin dye replaced clothing. The healing process was hastened, with no infection or scars. The dead could be resurrected. Hymens were restored. The only permanent disfigurement came from branding and amputation.
The protagonist, Valkyria, was a barbarian princess secretly raised as a boy, later trained as a warrior. She was kidnapped by desert raiders, sold to slavers, purchased by a wealthy merchant, and kidnapped again by pirates. At age nineteen, she became queen of Veltria. Nearly all the characters were female, with the exception of an occasional hermaphrodite. According to Dad’s notes, the pictorial domination of women by women was a practical decision—he preferred to draw them.
The concept of a universe was too limiting for his imagination, and he created a complex multiverse in which all the comics took place. The multiple worlds of Valkyria were staggeringly complicated, with Dad’s trademark maps, glossary, and religions. The entire series was a never-ending narrative set on many planets, spanning thousands of years. It blended fairy tales, ancient legends, science fiction, and space opera into one sprawling story.
The books had no audience, but the first and last pages were composed as if a preexisting readership eagerly awaited the next installment. Every comic ended with the phrase “to be continued.” The first page featured a single-panel illustration and a quick synopsis:
This is the fabulous myth-history of the pre-recorded history heroine, Valkyria. A girl with a face and figure envied by temptresses . . . The cunning, the speed, the agility of a jungle cat . . . The muscles, the stamina, the fighting prowess of a professional soldier.
Val’s wounds heal themselves, scarlessly, even monstrously serious ones. Unfortunately this form of indestructible immortality makes her the perfect victim!
In order to combine all the worlds and time frames into a single overlapping narrative, Dad gave Valkyria several daughters, each born of rape. The infants received serums from Atlantean science that sped their growth. Within three months they reached puberty and were again injected. Their final growth spurt enhanced their sexual characteristics and halted their aging at eighteen. By age twenty-two, Valkyria had become a grandmother. “Real time” was thus collapsed, enabling each of these women to travel across the multiverse until captured, tortured, and rescued.
The plot is similar from book to book: a highborn woman is brought down through systematic psychological humiliation and physical degradation. The motivation for torture is always vengeance—the victim deserves her fate. Melodramatic dialogue offsets the grim imagery. Each comic ends with a cliff-hanger of inescapable bondage in a secret dungeon. The next book prolongs the torture until the victim is rescued or escapes, whereupon she often turns the tables on the captor. Of necessity, the punishment must surpass the one endured by the previous victim. In this fashion the techniques of sexual suffering steadily increase in intensity and horror. The bondage becomes more complex—victims are fully immobilized, with every orifice plugged, while enduring elaborate sexual torture. At times Valkyria is compelled to watch her daughters undergo vicious assault.
The relentless narrative has a grotesque quality, a chilling insight into the mind of a man with an unsavory attitude toward women. They undergo brain transplants and watch their former bodies die in an acid bath. Hermaphrodites fight warrior women wearing strap-on dildos with metal claws. Zombies, androids, and clones enter the narrative. A snake crawls into a woman’s vagina, swelling her stomach with pregnancy. She gives birth to a demon who promptly rapes her.
In a book from the mid-1960s, Valkyria travels through time to the year 2931. Her clone becomes a media star when a TV network shows her torment on a live feed. Viewers respond to a contest with ideas. The lucky winner visits the studio and is allowed to personally torture Valkyria’s clone to death. In an off-camera dungeon, the true Valkyria experiences every sensation. The reader is thus able to observe the suffering of both clone and human.
One volume of Valkyria centers around an alien scientist who performs gruesome medical experiments on humans, often depicting surgeries in process. The result is a planet populated by failed procedures: women with a single large breast centered on their chests. A mustached man has a woman’s backside, large breasts, and an enormous permanent erection. Women have two or three sets of breasts linked by metal rings. A green-skinned transsexual has three breasts and a large clitoris shaped like a penis. The scientist is presented as: “The most brilliant man on this planet. He has a short attention span and more ideas than he can handle; is essentially amoral (he is nigh a god!) and does believe in giving in to his whims. He looks upon the world as his.”
Another comic, Prisma, is less a book and more of an illustrated manifesto. It is the only one narrated in the first person. The sadistic tinkerer Volk is the most brilliant scientist who ever existed. He explains his project with many detailed illustrations.
I made 10 androids, perfect women-plus, all attributes vary, but with the taut-muscled bodies of age 18. Small breasts are 46DD. Then I duplicated each, & modified those. Next I merely made 50 copies of all 20. They are the population of Prisma.
Nine hundred are Betas, sadomasochistic born servants. All of the other 100 are Alphas, all sadistic. Twenty of those are ravening beast-sadists. Ten of those are plus-Alphas, superbosses with medieval titles. As you will see, I have mingled technology & a medieval-barbaric culture.
Clothing is manufactured underground by my computer system—randomly from every fabric & every era. My own creation of subcutaneous dye is used in a number of ways. For one thing, the legs of few Prismans match their skin!
Because of my computer control—& my whimsical nature—reality changes on Prisma!—and IS reality.
The series Jera takes its title from the name of a blue-skinned alien with vacant pink eyes and an elongated bald head. She combs through Playboy, Playgirl, Penthouse, and Cosmopolitan, culling a list of women, then feeds their attributes into a “computrex.” The top twenty-seven are kidnapped and modified through serum and surgery. The 187 pages of Jera contain the most lavish and intricate use of color. The genius alien finds a planet whose inhabitants have reached the medieval level, and kills everyone with a plague. She then distributes her three thousand creations among the existing city-states, organizes a social hierarchy, and teaches them fetish bondage. Time continues to progress swiftly. The story leaps ahead fifty years, then a hundred, and lands in the three hundredth year. Every so often, all the male children are murdered. Matrilineal royal dynasties rule each city-state of warriors. A new term emerges, a “penoid,” or a penis on a female.
The most original comic is entitled Null-A, a philosophical term meaning an absence of Aristotelean logic. The two-hundred-page series opens with a lab assistant hopping into an experimental matter transmitter to escape a rapist. She arrives on a foreign planet. By page ten, she’s dead of multiple stab wounds. The text says:
Epitaph? Perhaps: she came a long, long way for no reason to die for no reason.
Another comic is subtitled The Most Awful Tortures Ever Told . . . A bound woman is nailed to a block of wood and pierced by hundreds of pins, including in her face and eyes. Her left leg is sawed off to reveal a protruding bone. The female killer washes away the blood in order to gloat over the corpse as she masturbates herself to orgasm. A victim is staked spread-eagle in the desert, her bosom doused with honey. A team of “super ants” chews off her breasts, depicted in a series of dramatic panels. Four hours later only her skeleton remains. Another story ends with a very large-breasted woman bound in a hog-tied position, ankles and wrists locked behind her back. She is suspended on a chain. Her captors slowly lower her until only her bosom enters a cauldron of boiling fat. After her breasts fry, they are eaten in front of her.
Throughout history, people have turned up their noses at pornography, dismissing it as disgusting and immoral. I tried very hard to resist such a response. These comics were Dad’s most personal work and therefore deserving of careful examination. Looking at them made my stomach hurt. I could peruse them for only short periods before turning away. Despite my revulsion, I felt a horrified sympathy for anyone who lived with such imagery on a daily basis. That it was my own father made it worse. He didn’t collect these books, he made them. Here was the world he carried inside himself at all times—filled with pain and suffering. I had no idea how miserable he had truly been.
My initial abhorrence gave way to the reckless anger of a teenager. I wanted to lash out at the world, drink and take pills, nullify all that I thought and felt. I became mad at myself for deliberately studying the evidence of what had soiled my childhood. While the family tiptoed around the house to prevent disturbing him, he sat in his office and entertained himself in an appalling manner. I was angry at being raised by a maniacal father and a passive mother with no means of extrication except walking dirt roads until they turned to blacktop. Perhaps my siblings had been right all along—I should’ve destroyed everything, not out of embarrassment but for the sake of my own mental equilibrium.
It’s extremely rare for anyone, let alone a son, to have access to another person’s private and unfiltered fantasies. I expected to gain insight through seeing maturity and growth, but the world of Valkyria didn’t change. My father never tired of the material and repeated it until he died. By the end—not of Valkyria’s saga but of my father’s life—plot vanished completely. The pages evolved to single-panel illustrations of garishly colored women enduring profound misery and pain. Text was scribbled haphazardly in available space, with occasional dialogue commenting on the agony of the victim.
Unfettered by market, my father was free to explore all facets of his imagination in Valkyria. There was no evolution of character or story, just a steady move toward the greater defilement of women. The books are grisly and grim. Time travel and advanced technology allowed him to include any content without the stricture of logic, physics, or medical consequences.
He made Valkyria solely for himself and never showed it to anyone—not even his wife. The secret will hadn’t specified it. The four-thousand-page chronicle of the multiverse represents the deepest core of my father’s identity, his life’s work. For over fifty years he worked on it, overlapping every other writing project. He tried to quit and he couldn’t.
Valkyria has a nihilistic bleakness blended with a child’s freedom of expression. Perpetrators feel no guilt and prisoners lack all hope. There is no morality. Life is composed of suffering. Existence has no point. It baffled him in 1963 and it baffles me today.
My father often said that if not for pornography, he’d have become a serial killer. On two occasions he told me the same story. One night in college he resolved to kill a woman, any woman. He carried a butcher knife beneath his coat and stalked the campus, seeking a target. It rained all night. No one else was out. He went home soaked and miserable and wrote a story about a man who invented an invisibility serum and killed women at a YWCA. Dad destroyed the manuscript and castigated himself for using invisibility in such an unimaginative way. For me, the crucial element of this story is a man’s impulse to tell it to his son.
Many years later he read a biography of a serial killer who owned bondage magazines at the time of his capture. According to Dad, the details of the killer’s childhood were “eerily similar” to his own, including three warning signs: bed-wetting, killing animals, and setting fires. When Dad was about twelve, a cat scratched his sister, and he put the cat on trial, dramatically acting out the roles of prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge. The cat was found guilty and condemned to death. Dad hanged it and watched it die.
The three warning signs are known as the “MacDonald Triad,” but subsequent research refuted the theory that these propensities are indicators of future violent behavior. The traits are not a recipe for a killer. They are regarded as attributes of a distressed child with poor coping skills who might develop a narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder.
If my father was correct that porn prevented him from killing women, then I should be grateful for its continuing presence in his life. Far better to be the son of a pornographer than a serial killer. But I don’t believe my father’s theory. The sight of blood, even his own, made him light-headed enough to faint. He was not athletic or strong and therefore was incapable of overpowering most people. He was also a physical coward, having never been in a fistfight. He never struck his children or his wife.
The idea that porn prevented him from killing women was a self-serving delusion that justified his impulse to depict women in torment. Thinking of himself as a serial killer if not for making porn was another fantasy on his part, one that allowed him to surrender completely to his obsessions. He needed to believe in a greater purpose in order to continue his work. Admitting that he liked it was too much to bear.