I have a few magazines from the 1970s, which I have copied over the years. They contain various reference information and articles about publishers’ titles and movies at that time. I would like to share some of this information here for your reference and enjoyment.
Some of the fetish and bondage magazines published in the 1970s are truly outstanding, and there’s nothing quite like them nowadays. What’s available online simply doesn’t compare to the effort and craftsmanship of a magazine that took weeks to produce. I’m fortunate enough to handle these magazines most days, and I know there are many collectors with a wealth of knowledge.
I’m hoping to jog a few memories, reignite your interest, and perhaps inform younger collectors about some fantastic publications. To get started, I’ve included a two-page article about Belier and Sweet Gwendoline extracted from Volume 1 No 2 of The Bondage Buyers Guide & Almanac (1978).
Belier
No flaws here—this is a superbly intelligent company whose faith in the late John Willie has helped it escalate into a position of preeminence within the bondage publishing field.
For if there is a bondage classic which exceeds all others, it is Willie’s venerated “Sweet Gwendoline,” a deliciously witty and exquisitely done melodrama which Willie drew during the postwar 1940s.
And, even though the original “Gwendoline” has been rephotographed and reissued through the years on the order of a best-selling cookbook, its popularity only seems to increase. What Belier has done, with painstaking care and an apparent measure of affection, is launch “Gwendoline” to her ultimate apogee as a large hardcover book, lovingly fleshed out to 144 pages with various other Willie drawings, including some watercolours, plus compelling text material both by and about Willie. Thus far, according to a Belier spokesman, 11,500 copies of the hard-bound “Gwen” have sold since it first went on sale on 9 December 1974.
If Belier has thus become Willie’s amanuensis, it plans on being not less so for other noted bondage cartoonists, including Stanton, Eneg, Maria, and Jim, for whom Belier has produced some revivals:
Bizarre Comix Volume 1 contains two complete Stanton serials (“Diana’s Ordeal” and “Perils of Diana”), Bizarre Comix Number 2 covers the same ground on behalf of artist Eneg, the serials in this case being (“Princess Elaine’s Terrible Fate” and “Dangerous Plight of Princess Elaine“). The four serials date back to the early 1950s.
Belier plans to continue issuing Bizarre Comix in order to reprise long-dormant and out-of-print bondage drawings. Meanwhile, if you do not yet have “Sweet Gwendoline” in your collection, you are depriving yourself of the probable masterpiece of the genre.
This article was written in 1978 and has been extracted from The Bondage and Buyers Guide & Almanac – 1978.
Belier Press and JB Rund eventually published 24 volumes of Bizarre Comix. See some of those books here.
