Joe Shuster
~ 1914 - 1992
Joe Shuster was born in Toronto, Canada on July 10, 1914. At the age of nine, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he would later meet Jerome Siegel, with whom he would become a creative partner. Siegel and Shuster created a hero character which later became famous as Superman.
The story on Joe Shuster is a sad and shameful tale. He drew that big read S, made comic history and never received anything amounting to even a tiny percentage of the financial rewards his character should have given him. It led him towards drawing fetish artworks for the magazine Titled Nights of Horror.
Nights of Horror is an American series of fetish comic books, created in 1954 by publisher Malcla. Broke and slowly going blind, Shuster took a project from his neighbor, a writer for a publishing company called Malcla. His neighbor "Clancy" was the "Cla" in the name, and the "Mal" was Eugene Maletta, who ran a print shop out of a basement in Queens. These magazines were sold under the counter at drugstores until they got banned in the U.S.
The booklet lasted for 16 issues, with Clancy penning them all under pseudonyms. Shuster never signed any of his illustrations, but the work is universally attributed to him, especially when compared to his work on Superman. Some of the characters in Nights of Horror even look like Shuster's Superman character drawings, such as Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, even Clark Kent.
(read more about Nights of Horror via Wikipedia)
Some say the knowledge of Joe publishing in these ' crude, stapled pamphlets of erotic horror' magazines should have never been brought to anyones attention. From an erotic artistic point of view this part of his artworks is as much legacy as his non erotic artworks are, and therefor are worthwile to share in order to pay respects to an artist who maybe was just miles ahead of his time with his fetish artworks.
Joe Shuster, nearly blind & very bitter about his treatment from DC died July 30, 1992 just short of his seventy-eighth birthday. Though forgotten by the publisher that should have presented him as their savior, he will never be forgotten by the millions of fans worldwide who have read his legendary creation.
Some published books were confiscated and lead to Edward Mishkin being brought to trail. One of these books was titled Education in Submission (ca 1950/1957).
It is incredibly challenging to find high-quality scans or originals of this underground art, let alone reliably connect individual illustrations to the exact publications they appeared in. Many pieces of Joe Shuster's fetish artwork from the 1950s circulated anonymously, were reprinted, cropped, or even edited and reused across different booklets and digests. Because of this uncertainty, I have organized much of the material into thematic galleries rather than strict per-issue breakdowns.
Featured in gallery below:
- Adventures of Princess Elegante (reprint, original from 1950)
- Nights of Horror Vol. 1 - The Strange Loves of Alice & Book of Torture (1953)
- Anette Secret Agent X (1955)
- Nights of Horror Vol. 7 - The Bride wore leather (1954, reprinted in 1971)
- Nights of Horror Vol. 9 - Eternal Bondage (1954)
- Nights of Horror Vol. 15 - Dreams for Sale (1954, reprinted in 1971)
- Education in Submission (ca 1950/55)
- Paula's Agony
- House of Tears
16 albums/168 artworks
Latest Update: June 21, 2026 -> Adventures of Princess Elegante was added (34 artworks)
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