Dirty Little Secret

Superman isn't the only one with a secret identity—it turns out that
Joe Shuster, the artist who co-created the Man of Steel along with
writer Jerry Siegel when they were teenagers in the 1930s, had one
of his own.

During the 1950s, when the partners were on the outs with DC Comics
due to their attempts to regain the copyrights to their character,
Shuster was unable get any comic-book assignments, and had to look
elsewhere for work. So instead of illustrating the adventures of
Lois and Clark, Shuster took to drawing the racy doings of decidedly
different sorts of couples in images for Nights of Horror, a fetish
magazine sold surreptiously in Times Square sex shops.

It doesn't take a great leap of the imagination to look at the cover
of Craig Yoe's upcoming Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's
Co-creator Joe Shuster (Abrams, $24.95) and picture the young artist
getting out his frustrations over what he'd lost, because the faces
seem awfully close to those of the most famous famous couple in comics.

Shuster never signed any these images, but as Yoe discovered, many
had been signed JOSH—a combination of the JO from Joseph and the SH
from Shuster. To those in the know, however, no signature was necessary,
as they were clearly Shuster's work.

Luckily for the artist, the general public did not share that
familiarity, because though the publication was eventually banned
by the U.S. Senate, and both the printer and the publisher were jailed,
no one made the connection at the time between those erotic images and
the creator of Superman.

Yoe, whose other books include The Art of Mickey Mouse and Clean
Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings, connected the dots to uncover the
full story behind Shuster's secret, and promises to reveal all in
the pages of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman.

Stan Lee, co-creator of quite a few superhero characters himself,
will be writing the introduction. We'll just have to wait until the
book's April release to see whether he plans on sharing any secrets
of his own.

(story from scifiwire.com)