Hardware porn chapter 4

A few reboots seem to have solved the 'reluctant mouse' problem I was having. Everything's sailing along splendidly now.

Today's random art

Today's random art is an actual pen and ink drawing. I'm guessing it was done in the early eighties. As you can see, it's yet another iteration of my regular theme.

This was originally done at 17 x 22 inches on Bristol board, and was probably a combination of brush, pen and ink.

I was never very good with the cartoonist's favorite brush, the Winsor & Newton Series 7 #2.

I preferred the Robert Simmons Lancer brush. The bristles weren't quite as flexible as those of the Series 7, but it had a large grip on the ferrule which made it easier to hold. And it cost about 40 per cent less.

Hardware porn chapter 3

Well, the new monitor is installed, and issues have arisen. The left click on my mouse, a Logitech Revolution MX, isn't working with some applications. Or actually, it does work, but sometimes I have to click two or three times before the computer responds.

Also, adding the third monitor has completely thrown off eye-hand coordination with my tablet. Moving to the left or right makes the cursor travel almost twice as far as it used to. There's a way to change the tablet to recognize only one monitor at a time, but that adds extra steps every time I want to grab or click something on the second or third screen.

But I shall persevere.

Also: I owe the blog a piece of art today. I promise to do that.

Hardware porn redux

A question was posted here, and then apparently deleted by the poster, asking whether my hardware upgrade will increase the likelihood I will finish a story. I think it's a good question, so I'm going to answer it, anyway.

As I look back on it, it seems like the most productive period of my catfight art career was in the early to mid-nineties. At that point, I was working on a 486/33 PC clone with a dim, crappy 14-inch CRT monitor. I mean this thing got so dim I had to turn out the lights to see anything. But I got stuff done.

I have two friends who are fine artists. They are both well-known in my community, and are shown in high-end galleries. They both work on large canvases – 36 inches or wider. And they both just prop their paintings on the floor or on a tabletop to work on them. No huge oak easels, no fine hardwood palettes. One mixes his paint on tinfoil.

I remember seeing a clip from a documentary on the legendary MAD Magazine cartoonist, Mort Drucker. Drucker sits at his kitchen table to draw, working with Bristol board taped to an old drawing board.

I like having kickass hardware. It certainly makes the more mundane aspects of artwork easier, and I'm in favor of anything that reduces the overhead of small, repetitive tasks, such as trying to find a particular child window in a maze of palettes in Painter or Photoshop.

But big iron doesn't automatically equate to better work, or more work. If I want to be more productive, the main thing I need to improve is not my system, but myself.

Remixing

I made a commitment to myself, as I previously mentioned, to try to post at least one piece of art every day. This has compelled me to spend a lot of time going through my archive looking for items that can stand alone in a post, even if they were intended to be part of a larger narrative structure.

I have found things that are obviously mine, yet I have no recollection of having ever drawn them. (The piece at right is not one of those drawings, by the way – it's just something I picked out for today's post.)

I've even found entire stories that I don't remember doing, and some of the stuff is pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. It's so good, in fact, that I find myself loath to post it here when I could easily recycle it for another story.

The guy who did the PCToons catfight comics on the old Foxfax web site used to call this 'remixing', and that's a good description of it. Digital art is almost endlessly adjustable, tweak-able and repurpose-able. I could take this drawing, for example, and turn it into superheroines, cheerleaders or some other sexual icons in about 90 minutes.

So as I look at these thousands of drawings I've got (many of them iterative saves of the same piece, by the way), I find myself thinking, "Hmm... I think I'll save that for another story."

Hardware porn

I've ordered a second Apple LED Cinema Display for my Mac. This will give me a three-monitor setup, with two of the 2560 by 1440 px LED Cinema Displays and one of the older 1680 by 1050 px Cinema Displays, which is growing dim and yellow with age.

It's amazing how quickly you can run out of screen real estate when you're working with graphics programs.

I'm thinking about ordering a bigger desk, too.

Catfight customer relations

I have subscribed to the Twitter feeds of several fetish models and video producers whose work I like.

I don't personally know any fetish models or catfight video producers, but I did spend a lot of my working life in more 'mainstream' media, and I think what I learned there is probably applicable to fetish media as well.

Twitter is a great tool for creating and maintaining a relationship with your customers. They read your tweets, and feel like they're getting to know the 'real you', and that may make them more prone to being repeat customers.

The down sides, though, are these: if you're the talent doing the tweeting, you may be attracting stalkers who otherwise would be leaving you alone; and if you're the customer reading the tweets, you may be fooled into thinking you have some kind of personal relationship with that talent when actually – read this carefully, please – she is a complete and utter stranger to you and you don't know a damn thing about her.

My media career mostly predates social media, but I saw people create all kinds of infatuations and delusions regarding TV newscasters, radio station personalities, Playboy playmates, pageant contestants and commercial talent based on promotional material that was specifically created to lull people into that false sense of familiarity they were experiencing – the same thing Twitter feeds often do.

I once worked in a radio station where an entire family broke into the building after hours in the hope of meeting one of our personalities, who, thankfully, wasn't there. The family had driven all the way from a neighboring state to meet this guy, based only on hearing him on the radio. They broke out a window on the front door, reached through and undid the lock, and invited themselves in.

They had convinced themselves this DJ was their personal friend and good buddy, and would just be thrilled to death to have them drop in on him. Creating that kind of bond is great for ratings, but it's bad for attracting weirdos.

I was quite surprised to learn of this practice of fetish and porn talent posting their Amazon wish lists so that their fans can buy them stuff. I think it's kind of unprofessional.

I can see, from a purely business standpoint, a situation where this might be appropriate. If you had a custom video made, and you thought the performers put in exceptionally good effort on it, then it might be appropriate to offer some kind of gift to show your appreciation. We did that for vendors and talent who went above and beyond for us.

But if you think having a Crockpot drop-shipped to some porn/fetish star is going to make her masturbate in bed while gazing adoringly at your Twitter avatar on her iPad, you need to come home from the parallel universe. She is not your girlfriend or your soul mate; she is a professional performer doing her job. You are basically buying stuff for a total stranger, and that's it.

deviantART redux: stuff I like

After ragging on deviantART the other day for providing server space to so much creepy shit (IMHO), it's only fair to point out that I've also found a lot of stuff on there that I think is pretty hot.

It's not all catfight stuff, either, and only a small part of it will remind you of anything I've done.

But if you'd like to see a sort of cross-section of art that I find interesting, here's a link to my deviantART favorites: cameroonw's favourites

(Why do they spell 'favourites' with a 'u'? Are they English?)

Julie Winchester

Female Fight Theater has online this morning a clip of Julie Winchester and Jasae wrestling – and pretty much really wrestling – for California Supreme some time back in the Reagan administration. Or maybe earlier.

I will tell you that I am quite partial to Julie Winchester. Or, to be more accurate, I am quite partial to the imaginary person I have attached to Julie Winchester's face and body.

She was also the porn actress Gina Carrera, and according to her IMDb listing, she was born in 1963 in Fort Worth, Texas, which makes her sort of close to my age (but still younger) and from my general region of the US.

Even though she's been doing catfight videos since the 1980s or before, I only really noticed her about three or four years ago. Then, rummaging around through old photos, I found much earlier pictures of her when she was young and gorgeous. But the Julie Winchester who first caught my attention was the one I saw in pics from the late nineties and early 2000s – older, but still sexy and captivating to my eye.

The most recent video I can find for her was made in September 2010 for Double Trouble, where she slugged it out with a model who is probably half her age. There are few pictures from it available. But here's a 2008 STJ photo (in case its provenance wasn't clear to you) of her working over Tori Sinclair.

The imaginary person to whom I have attached this face and this body is not as svelte and fresh-faced as she once was.  But neither am I. We are both older, and tired and world-weary.

She's still too young to remember Nov. 22, as I clearly do, but she remembers when the Beatles were together, and seeing the Huntley-Brinkley Report and The Big Valley, and maybe King and RFK being shot, and the protests against Vietnam.

And I imagine her out somewhere on the west coast, trading fake body punches and wrestling holds with some young woman as lithe and lovely as she once was, but who thinks history began with Bill Clinton, can't remember us not being in Afghanistan, and for whom Snooki is our greatest cultural icon, and I imagine her wondering, 'Jesus... how did it all turn out like this?'

Because I wonder that, too. A lot.

And so, Julie Winchester, wherever you are – whoever you are – I hope your life has been at least a little bit like you hoped it would be.

Pro wrestling catfight

Here's another piece from the period between 1999 and 2005. And it's one of my favorites from those years.

I was inspired by seeing a video online of a pro wrestling female battle royale – or whatever they call those everyone-against-everyone matches.

But my take on it was a lone brunette who stepped into the ring against three blondes, who, rather than fight amongst themselves, chose instead to focus their attention on her.

But I got about three-fourths of the way through it when I had a fresh idea: have two of the blondes attacking the brunette's boobs, and two more fighting over which of them would be first to work over their victim's pussy.

So I added pixels all the way around and started redrawing. The final art is shown above. At left is the drawing I discarded.

One of the joys of digital art is how forgiving it is of mistakes and changes. I have never erased a hole in my monitor. If this had been 'natural media', I would have been obliged to restart pretty much from scratch, perhaps with tracing paper or graphite transfer paper. It would have been a mess, and time-consuming as well. Working with layers in Painter and Photoshop, making the changes was a fairly simple process.

Looking at it today, I can see that it could have used a little more finishing out, especially the two blondes in the background. I was probably getting bored with it and decided to just stop where I was.

When I first posted this years ago, someone asked if these were specific people. They aren't. I'm a little uncomfortable (although not completely so) with using real people or copyright fictional characters.

I know how I would feel if I found someone else's picture of me wrestling naked with, say, Eric Stanton.

And believe me, you would have to be the most absolutely deranged pervert in the universe to want to see that.

Hot off the griddle

SPOILER ALERT: Do not click on the picture unless you're willing to see dialog that gives away part of the story's plot.

Instead of posting work from ten or fifteen years ago, I'm sharing with you today a bit of the thing I'm working on right now.

And which, of course, I will probably not finish. But here, at least, is part of it.

MORE SPOILERS FOLLOW:












The premise is another cavegirl catfight between two women from different clans. It is a 'friendly' fight between two women both known as fierce, and occasionally dirty, fighters.

Just before the battle begins, one of them suggests a stake: the loser must accompany the winner back to her clan's dwelling place and be her sexual 'trophy' until the next full moon.

As it turns out, the woman who suggested the stake loses the fight, and her friends abruptly turn on her for bringing dishonor on them and the clan. In the panel I've posted, the winner of the fight comes to the loser's defense, and castigates her friends for not supporting her in her entirely honorable defeat.

WTF, deviantART?!

I opened a deviantART account about three years ago. I read the rules, though, and decided that a lot of my art, with the biting, fingering, oral sex and such was too explicit for their standards.

Then I start going through the galleries, and holy shit. Women being shot. Women being decapitated. Women being run through with swords, chopped up with axes, and impaled on huge spikes. I try to keep an open mind about other people's kinks, just as I would like for them to keep an open mind about mine. But... holy shit.

And to say that I can't depict a woman performing cunnilingus on another woman, but I can show her cutting off the other woman's head — well, WTF?!

Who among us does not love fighting cheerleaders?

Now that football season is under way, here's a collegiate sports 'tribute' I did sometime between 1999 and 2005.

I personally am not all that jazzed about this particular piece. I would probably approach the same topic differently today.

Personally, I'm more turned on by the 'traditional' outfits cheerleaders wore in my college days than by the pro-inspired costumes that seem more prevalent today.

As a young man, I was part of that vast gray sea of average-looking dudes who were invisible to the cheerleaders of my schools. If anything, they might acknowledge me in that superficially cheerful 'Oh, hi!' way that said 'friendly' on the surface and 'aloof and condescending' right beneath the surface.

Even today, I can spot an ex-cheerleader after about five minutes of conversation.

Back in the day, I fantasized about them being put in a situation in which they would willingly abandon their perky cheerful facades and pound the hell out of each other, pom-pons flying though the air amidst the shrieks, moans and obscenities.

Was there really such a person as Tina Diane?

Just wondering.

Hit the beach!

These are a few of my favorite things

I'm not sure why I think milking is so hot in a catfight. I didn't 'discover' the concept until about 2000 or thereabouts, but I was immediately turned on by it.

But this is the only 'milking' catfight I've drawn.

Do I do more? Yea or nay?

This is, by the way, another in my collection of drawings done sometime prior to 2005, but whose original file dates are lost.

Today's random art

This was an experiment: two figures set against a flat background with a drop shadow. I never did anything else like it.

I'm going to guesstimate that this was done in 2001 or 2002.

A creative burst

My interest in catfight art, and catfighting in general, has been an off-and-on thing. From pre-puberty to my early twenties, I was obsessed with it.

But in the eighties and nineties, and then into the new millennium, my interest came and went. When I drew catfights, I was often more interested in the interaction of color and the interplay of light and shade than I was the fight itself.

But starting maybe 90 days ago, I suddenly had a renewed interest in it, and it's as strong now as it was when I was 16. This blog is a reflection of that. And I've been at the computer all day, every day, creating art. I hope that I will actually finish a few things this time around.

Back-alley heroines

Two superheroines decide to have it out in a back alley battle. One suddenly realizes the other has a bit more in mind than a fight.

This was drawn in 2003 and circulated on Yahoo! groups shortly after.

At this point, I was trying to get more acclimated to a 'painterly' approach to my art. I had already lost the pen and ink technique (and by 'lost', I mean found myself suddenly unable to recreate it), and I was doing a bunch of one-panel illustrations to try to work out some issues in my then-new artistic direction.

I was still working at 800 by 600 at this point; eventually I realized the direction I was going would require much larger canvas sizes.

This one is very rough and sketchy, and I think it's actually the narration that 'sells' it.

The work I was doing at this point is not, in my opinion, as good as what I had been doing ten years earlier.

The look on LG's face is priceless

Here's the panel to which I think Carpal Diem was referring two posts back. It's not a very convincing-looking shoe, in retrospect. I didn't use much photographic reference back then.

But he's right about the look on lingerie girl's face: it is priceless.

Judging from the original file name, this would have been part of page 80 of this story. That's part of the reason my stories never got finished – I was always trying to do the War and Peace of catfight comics.

KatFiteManiaK

KatFiteManiaK has a collection of catfight art in a post this morning.

It includes a few things I've never seen before.

Tomorrow's random art

Let's just call this tomorrow's random art, and maybe that will get me off the hook for posting tomorrow, OK?

Here are 'pencils', 'inks', and color for another panel in the 'jungle girl vs lingerie girl' story. There aren't many pieces of art left on my hard drive with all three steps in my early 90s art process shown this clearly.

Here's the setup: 'jungle girl' has gone into the match barefoot, while 'lingerie girl' has stepped into the ring wearing some awkward-looking white 'fuck me' stilettos. But her intent in wearing the shoes becomes clear several pages in when she pulls one shoe off her foot and begins working over jungle girl's chest with the sharp heel.

A woman in the audience, angered by lingerie girl's dirty tactic, pulls off her own high heeled shoe and throws it to jungle girl in the ring. This panel picks up the action where jungle girl, now armed with the spectator's shoe, starts paying lingerie girl back for her assault.

And damn, I think this particular drawing turned out well. If I have any criticism at all, it's that the shoe lingerie girl is holding is sort of obscured by the swish lines from jungle girl's shoe. But in context, it's already been established that lingerie girl is holding the shoe, so the reader would know it's there.

I was again working at a mere 800 x 600 pixels. The year was 1996, about three years after the panel I posted previously.

Aas I mentioned a few days ago, I am now literally unable to duplicate this look. I don't remember how I did it. I've tried, but I can't get it right. It is a combination of the somewhat cartoony look of the women, the small canvas size, and an awkward method of creating the 'inked' look that I've since forgotten.

The dialog font is the one I built myself in Fontographer. The files are long lost, and I now use commercial comic book fonts purchased online.

Also, as a general rule, I don't think you can ever go wrong having a character moan, "Oh, my boobs!" somewhere in a catfight story.

Friend Connect

My "Friend Connect" widget seems to have imploded. I'll ignore it for now and see if it comes back on its own. Still feel free to follow this blog.

Today's random art

I'm trying to commit to posting some kind of art, either by me or by someone else, every day.

I'm well ahead of quota for September, but I'm not sure how long I can keep up the pace.

In any event, this is from the 'jungle girl vs lingerie girl' fight I worked on incrementally from 1993 through about 1996 or '97.

I never finished it, of course, but I later reworked the concept into a tag team match. That was never finished. either, but pieces of that second story are around on the web.

I drew this at 800 x 600 pixels; in other words, at the actual size you'll see if you click on the picture. By comparison, I work now at 3360 x 2100 pixels. The computer I used in 1994, when this was drawn, wouldn't have been able to load a 3360 x 2100 graphic into memory. As I look at it, though, I can't see that this art has significantly less detail than the huge pieces I'm drawing right now.

I was sketching in Painter back then with a blue 'pencil' because I was accustomed to non-repro blue pencils from my Higgins Black Magic and Zip-a-tone days. I later discovered that as I put in color, I picked up litlle traces of the blue while blending. At the time, I liked the effect I got from that.

(I just threw out the last of my Zip-a-tone about four months ago, incidentally. The stuff was thirty-five years old, and the film was peeling off the backing sheets. I had hung onto it out of sentimentality.)

Here's how bad I've got it

Sometimes, when I'm in a restaurant or bar, some very hot woman will walk in, and instead of thinking, "Wow, I'd really like to do her," I find myself thinking, "Wow, I'd really like to see her in a catfight."

And then I start looking around the room for an appropriate opponent.

No fear of foreshortening

The earliest career choice I can remember being interested in was that of cartoonist or comic book artist. This was in the era of Swan, Schaffenberger, Sekowsky and a yet-to-be-famous Kirby. Although I was fortunate enough to spend several years as a professional artist (along with several other careers), I never got the chance to do comics. I think the reason I want to draw catfights as sequential narratives is to fulfill that old lust for comics.

Like almost every art student with an interest in sequential narrative, I happened across the series of Dynamic Anatomy books by Burne Hogarth. Hogarth was 26 years old when he took over the immensely popular Tarzan newspaper strip from Hal Foster, who was leaving to create Prince Valiant.

Hogarth realized he needed to draw Tarzan in a variety of poses for which live models would not be available – running, jumping, swinging from vines, leaping from waterfalls and so on. So he began developing a systematic method of understanding and drawing human anatomy. His goal was to understand every aspect of the human body so thoroughly that he could draw it from memory, at any angle, without the need for live models or photographic reference.

He shared what he'd learned in his Dynamic Anatomy books, which included Dynamic Anatomy, Dynamic Figure Drawing, Drawing Dynamic Hands,  and others.

Together with Silas Rhodes, Hogarth founded the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where his students included both Eric Stanton and Gene Bilbrew, along with Stanton's later studio partner Steve Ditko.

And here's how that education paid off. These pages from a French translation of Divorce, at right, represent Stanton at what I consider the height of his abilities. (And the story appears to have been inked by Ditko.)

This is the work of a man whose understanding of the human body is so complete he can draw it in a variety of positions, from a variety of viewpoints, without having to bring actual women into the studio to fight in front of him. (Although if you could get that to happen, I don't know why you wouldn't, for cryin' out loud.)

If you want to draw action/adventure art, whether it's catfights or anything else, Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy books are, in my opinion, essential to your artistic education.

I realize as I write this that I haven't cracked my copies in decades, and I ought to go revisit them.

Otis Sweat

I wrote a post the other day about things that crossed my personal line – stuff that I've seen on the net, but that I personally would not draw. As a follow-up, I wanted to write something about things I would be willing to do, but that no one else seemed to be doing.

Art courtesy cavmag.com

I was going to accompany it with a classic catfight illustration by Otis Sweat, which appeared in either Cavalier or Nugget back in the pre-Internet era. But I have apparently lost that file, and I can't find it on the web, either. (Meanwhile, here's another one, not quite as kinky.)

But in searching for that art, I discovered some interesting things. I had not seen any new Otis Sweat art in years, but he's still out there creating. And maybe everyone already knew this, but Otis Sweat is apparently his real name, not a pseudonym. Seriously, you couldn't make up a better name than that. It has a lot more cachet than, for example, 'Cameroon Wildebeest, Jr.'

I also discovered that in addition to his vast ouevre of sex art, he's done editorial illustration for the Miami Herald and the Washington Post. This is interesting to me because, as I've mentioned previously, I adopted the 'Wildebeest' pseudonym primarily to protect my 'mainstream' art/marketing/media career. But Sweat has apparently juggled sex art and 'mainstream' art successfully.

He's another of those guys who make me wonder why I even bother to do this stuff. He's Clapton, and I'm a teenager strumming 'Kumbaya'. I love what he does with skin tones, and it's influenced the way I draw them. At one point, years ago, I was consciously mimicking Sweat's handling of skin tones and highlights.

Sweat's work has an almost hyperrealistic quality at first glance. After you look at it for a few minutes, though, you notice that what he was doing in his Dugent Publishing days, at least, actually bordered on caricature, and it was this careful exaggeration that created the sense of hyperrealism. This is a technique he shares with Neal Adams, and, to some extent, Norman Rockwell. (Yes, I'm seriously comparing Norman Rockwell and Otis Sweat. It's about time somebody did.)

Another sign of progress

One interesting effect of this blog is that if you do a Google image search for 'wildebeest catfight art' (with SafeSearch off), you'll now actually get catfight art instead of, you know, 30 drawings of wildebeests followed by five pictures of actual cats fighting.

The Crying Game

I thought this drawing was pretty hot... until I saw the uncropped version a few months later.

Strangely enough, I didn't save that one. But I'm sure you can turn it up if you look hard enough.

SPOILER ALERT:


















They're dudes.

AmericaGirl vs some random evildoer

This is another item that was originally circulated via Yahoo! Groups, probably about ten years ago. You may have seen it before.

Sometimes I end up being much more caught up in the small details of these pieces rather than the central erotic/fighting aspects.

This one has a bunch of moments I really like.

First off, AmericaGirl's face is more cartoony than I would normally draw, but I think it turned out almost perfect. The expression says stunned... but the tiny hint of a smile suggests she actually gets off on feeling that flagpole between her legs.

I was also happy with the way her hands hang limply down. And I like the folds in her cape hanging behind her, visible between her legs. The fingertip bruises on her boobs suggest her nemesis had already engaged in some dirty fighting before using the flagpole on her.

I knew I wanted to show the flagpole somehow bent or buckled from the force of the attack, but I had to experiment with several different approaches before drawing it this way. Had the flagpole actually buckled like this, the halyard would be much more slack, and the flag flying loose and away from the pole. I drew it that way originally, but even though it was right, it looked wrong. So I redrew it the way you see it here. Click on the picture to enlarge it and you'll even see the pulley for the halyard meticulously rendered.

The overturned car and the bent, broken light pole help establish that there had already been a hell of a fight going on. The word balloons obscure the overturned newspaper box, but you can see pages from a paper blowing down the sidewalk. Also, near the top, there's a big hole punched through what I think is supposed to be a fallen billboard. I've forgotten what I trying to do there.

And there are the spectators hiding around the corner and behind the car. I worked with a pretty small original size on this, and it shows in the lack of detail in the spectators' faces.

I also originally drew this with AmericaGirl stripped of her pants as well as her top. But her pantslessness, combined with the viewing angle, suggested more than I intended to suggest, and I thought it might go beyond the limits of what Yahoo! would allow. I actually debated whether to post it here now, but decided to stay on the safe side.

(At first, I couldn't remember which one I had actually let out. I had to look at the Wildebeest collection at udtqc's site to see which one is the definitive one.)

Superheroine fights are one area where you can still draw things that can't be recreated with video – at least not easily.

Welcome ardoniart

The first step to being a successful artist is to actually create art. The same thing is true of music or writing.

I'm pleased to have artists like Ardoni and Slid following this blog because these are the guys who are actually creating the art – I mean finished art, something by which I have historically been challenged.

You can see Ardoni's work at Girlfight Comix. (18 and older, please)

And now for something completely different

If you're like me, you've probably spent a lot of time scouring the net for some knowledgeable professional information about why guys are turned on by catfights. I mean something more in-depth than "they might accidentally kiss", as per Seinfeld and Kramer.

You've probably read E. F. Cherrytree's landmark essay, "Hello, Out There." (And if you haven't, it's posted here.) And Johnny Ringo's essay on his Catfight Report blog. (It's right here.)

Those are both great essays, but I was looking for professional, expert opinions. People who had done surveys, or had stuck electrodes on catfight fans while they watched tapes of Goldie Blair and Tylene Buck working each other over.

I Googled everything I could think of.
I Googled "catfight fetish".
I Googled "catfight" and "psychology".
I Googled "catfight" and "dissertation".
I even Googled "catfight" and "DSM-IV".

And I don't know any more now than I did before.

But there was interesting item on Friday's io9 science fiction blog entitled "Do you really have a sexual fetish?" There's nothing about catfighting specifically in this article, but it provides an interesting overview of where current professional thought is on the subject of sexual fetishes.

Still, the early work of Hirschfeld and Kinsey has accomplished one thing, especially in the age of the internet. Sexual fetishes are, as Stekel said almost a century ago, "normal." Instead of medical tomes with pathologizing titles, today we have self-help books devoted to finding your kink, and enjoying your (safe, consensual) fetishes. You can shop for sex toys at boutiques, and learn about erotic role playing from famous bloggers.

I hope to provide links (when I find them) to other articles that might help us understand why we're turned on by catfights.

Today's random art

A few days ago I posted a drawing I did for a Yahoo! catfight groups admin who used the alias 'Dropkick'.

Here's a preliminary sketch for that drawing. I discarded this composition in favor of the overhead view in the final piece.

Celebrity in the audience

I want to welcome Slid, who has joined the blog via FriendConnect. Slid is an artist whose blog is on my list of stuff I read regularly, and his work appears on the MediaNine web sites, including Catfight Central.

And thanks to the rest of you who've joined and are following my work.

Random art

A random sketch out of the archive. Created sometime prior to 2005.

I like dog collars and chokers on the fighters I draw, but I have trouble getting them right.

Eneg and 'Big Milly'

I'll just come right out and say I never got the attraction of Eneg's work. I think a big part of his claim to fame derives from simply being one of the few artists of his day producing any kind of catfight art at all. If he were doing this kind of material today, he'd be just another deviantART backbencher.

Eneg's work was always full of stocky, boozy-looking, crosseyed broads like you might find hunkered over the bar at some dive next door to the bus station.

'Big Milly' was sort of the archetype Eneg woman. If Stan Lee had decided to make Ben Grimm a woman, this is what she would have been like. It's easy to imagine Milly yelling 'it's clobberin' time!' before decking someone.

But as I got to looking today at this particular 'Big Milly' story, something else jumped out at me: not all the work here is Gene Bilbrew's. Parts of it – mostly faces – were done by someone else.

The wimpy Jm J Bullock-looking character appears to be entirely another artist's work.

And look at how Milly's face changes from page to page. Eneg was never able to draw faces from anything other than eye-level angles. It's extremely tough to do correctly, especially with line art where you don't have the advantage of shading to model the planes of the jaw and brow.

But Bilbrew's faces always looked like he drew a face on a bucket and turned it at different angles for reference. Milly's face on page 2 is a perfect example of that.

But then on page 3, Milly and her cousin take on a decidedly more palatable Stantonesque attractiveness in the top panel, before devolving back to Eneg-type roughness in the remaining two panels.

Maybe Eneg would have benefited from having another artist touch up his work all the time.

Enough is enough!

Here's my favorite page of Eric Stanton's Blunder Broad.

After years of having Blunder Broad punched, kicked, bitten, tied up and otherwise abused by her archnemesis, the Cheetah, Stanton finally gave his heroine a page to settle the score.

The Cheetah's belly and boobs are no match for the power in Blunder Broad's angry fists. The bad girl finally goes down under a barrage of blows.

Speaking of Rumble Roses...

Whatever happened to that? They did two different editions for two different platforms, and no more.

Were there not enough of us to keep it going?

I got rid of my gaming stuff a few years ago because I wasn't using it. Then I looked through some Rumble Roses XX videos on YouTube for my info about the brass knuckles, and realized I kind of miss this game.

But enough about philosophy

...'cause y'all are here for the catfight art – right? This is another of those pre-2005 drawings whose actual date is lost. What I like about the ones from this series, looking back on them, is the depth and richness of the color – something I often have trouble with. And there's a lot of energy and life in the figures.

This whole sequence also includes a lot of wrestling, as opposed to fist fighting, which is unusual for me.

I also drew these on a white background. Normally, I work on a 15-20% gray ground.

What I wouldn't do

I've never done commissions, so I've never had to think much about what I would decline to draw. But I read another erotic artist's guidelines yesterday, and it got me to thinking about what mine would be.

Children, obviously. I say 'obviously' – maybe it's not obvious. Stanton, after all, drew adolescent girls fighting. But I'm even uncomfortable with websites and stories with the word 'teen' in the title. Yes, there may be some 2257 fine print about the characters portrayed being over 18, but if the title says 'teen' or 'teens', both producer and consumer know what the attraction is. I'm probably going to be a little squicky about it. I won't knowingly go to a web site that promotes itself that way. I've seen a few 'teen boxing' or 'teen wrestling' items out there that left me feeling uncomfortable.

Snuff or fatalities. This is sort of odd, really. People die in literature and movies all the time. John Wayne dies in Sands of Iwo Jima, but no one calls that a 'snuff' film. Even so, I don't think I would draw a fight scenario that involved the death of a character.

Maiming. I don't want to single anyone out, but I've seen stuff in this regard that just turned my stomach. Anything that's a lasting injury is off limits.

Miss Spencer gets nailed with brass knuckles
in Rumble Roses XX.

Weapons. I think it depends on the weapon. My life experiences have put me in contact with people who have been the actual victims of violence with real weapons, ranging from guns to planks of wood to pliers, and that definitely colors my attitude.

In the Rumble Roses video games, you can score major damage points by picking up a pair of brass knuckles and punching your opponent between her legs. Frankly, it was sexy to have Reiko pick up those knucks, shake them a couple of times to weigh their heft, then smack Miss Spencer right where it would do the most good. But folks, I've seen people who were actually hit with brass knuckles, and it's not like Rumble Roses at all. They're illegal in most states, and with good reason. So, Rumble Roses notwithstanding, I think brass knuckles would be out for me.

Knives and swords and such would be even less acceptable. I know there's a lot of 'gladiatrix' art out there with broadswords and battle axes and whatnot, but it's too violent for me, especially when people have been sliced up with them. I was even grossed out by the slashing murder of Katma Tui in Green Lantern – in my opinion, it was totally inappropriate.

I've drawn one catfight with weapons, and I think the sexual overtone of the heroine's 'guns', plus the fact that they're lying spent on the ground, makes it clear they're not exactly weapons at all. My notion here was that the guns, used correctly, induced a shuddering, debilitating orgasm in the target. In this case, though, the green-skinned alien girl seems to have been immune to them. (But feel free to make up your own story. You don't have to follow mine.)

I've never drawn anything involving strap-ons or other sexual devices as weapons, but I probably wouldn't be averse to that.

Scat. Nope. Just nope.

Blood. A trickle of blood from a bite or a split lip is okay. Blood spattered on the walls and ceiling, or any amount of blood that would suggest a crippling or fatal injury, is not.

Animals. Well, how do you have a catfight with an animal, anyway? But no, no bestiality.

Rape/victimization. Rape is obvious, I think. But a personal taboo that may be less apparent, because it's part of mainstream entertainment, is anything where a woman is taken somewhere against her will and forced to fight, or do anything else. I know there have been a couple of movies lately with that theme (and it was even in an episode of The Fall Guy), but I won't indulge in it.

The rest of this post will probably sound bizarre. The women I draw are not real, and yet I feel like I am connected to them. They are my creations. They're soft, sexy, curvy, feminine, adorable women whose lust for each other manifests itself in a special, sexualized combat. Even though they live only in my imagination, I would not wish on them any of the brutality I have seen in real life.

This one was mine, too.

I think this is the very first piece of digital catfight art I ever did. It circulated uncredited for years after I posted it to alt.sex.fetish.wrestling on Usenet. In fact. I think this is a copy I downloaded from somewhere; the original is long gone, saved to a floppy disk that got tossed with all my other floppy disks.

It was created with WinRIX, a buggy, barely usable raster drawing program that came bundled with my brand-new Zeos 486/33 PC, and my huge SummaGraphics tablet. Compared to my setup in 2011, that rig was like drawing on clay with a sharp stick.

This was fairly blatantly copied, by the way, from a photo of Danni Ashe and Santana going at it. You've probably seen the original more often than you've seen this.

I always wished Danni had done more catfight stuff.

Canoga Park! Then slowly I turned...

To my 19-year-old (or maybe slightly older) imagination, Canoga Park, California was the world capital of hot catfighting babes.

Because Canoga Park was the home of the legendary Triumph Studios, which occupied (I assumed) a sprawling catfighting, wrestling and foxy boxing complex at its landmark address of 7106 Alabama Avenue.

I had never been to Los Angeles at that point in my life. I had grown up in the flyover, and I'd never been west of the Rockies. My impression of southern California had been formed by movies and TV shows.

I assumed Triumph's operation wasn't as big as Paramount or Warner, probably, but still pretty impressive. There would be gates you'd have to drive through, of course, with the Triumph Studios logo in polished copper overhead.

The Hollywood sign would be visible from the entrance, certainly, and if you parked in the right place, the creeping shadow of the Capitol Records building would shield your car from the afternoon sun.

And wasn't Helen O'Connell discovered in a drugstore right down the street?

A golf cart might cruise by as you stood there, taking it all in.  Was that Gretchen Gayle and Candy Costello in the back? They looked like they were laughing – I thought they were feuding prior to their next big showdown match.

As it turned out, of course, Triumph Studios was nothing like that. It was in a shabby building now occupied, according to Google Earth, by a pest control company.

So they weren't part of the big, corrupt, old guard studio system. They were indie filmmakers!

Sound Effects

Drawn in the mid-nineties. New sound effects
added for this blog post.

This post is actually a rant about video sound effects, not comic sound effects.

Years ago, a famous film critic (who would probably not want this blog to turn up on a Google search of his name) remarked that the fighting sound effects in a certain Hong Kong martial arts movie sounded like 'someone swatting a sofa with a ping pong paddle'.

I was reminded of that as I was watching a catfight promo clip from some producer the other day, and one fighter landed a right hook on the other. It was accompanied by a thunderous "THWAK!" from some SFX library. It completely destroyed the illusion.

Those TV/movie sound effects work in a context where there's music under the action, and where all the other sound effects, from squealing tires to guns going off, are exaggerated as well. But when you've got two women ostensibly fighting in a quiet motel room somewhere, those action movie sound effects are 'way over the top.

I saw another video where SFX were repeatedly inserted a good 50 frames ahead of where they should have been. The editor would have been better off to have left them out altogether.

X Club Wrestling is still kind of my gold standard right now for female fight videos. Their fighting SFX sound as if they recorded them themselves – they're more like sharp but soft smacks than huge whacks. They're utterly convincing and, if you like that kind of catfighting, immensely sexy.

Superheroine fight

Here's another old piece that I might go back to and finish. I look at a lot of this old stuff and think, 'Well, this isn't all that great'.

But sometimes I'll find something that almost demands to be completed, and I think this might be one of those.

Or, maybe rather than finish this one, I should rework the concept.

I think the original concept of this superheroine duel was that the amazon heroine's uppercuts were so powerful that they lifted the star-spangled heroine completely off her feet. Which, if you think about it, is actually a fairly common meme in comic book fights.

They just aren't executed quite like this.

This is another piece from pre-2005, exact date unknown.

A lazy-ass mf

One of the reasons I decided to start this blog was because I became aware of the extent to which people were trying to find more of my catfight art out on the net.

A few years ago, I Googled my pseudonym, along with the keywords 'catfight' and 'art' or 'artist', and got dozens of hits. Only a couple had any of my work posted. Most appeared to be malware or porn sites that had embedded 'Wildebeest catfight' into their pages, I assume because they had a better understanding than did I of how frequently the terms were being searched by fans.

Five years ago, I found a blog called 'Wildebeest's Lair' or 'Wildebeest's Den' or something similar. Its author wrote about the term 'Wildebeest catfight artist' turning up in the keywords that had led people to his site. He didn't know what that was about – but I did.

Then the requests started popping up on web fora: Does anyone know Wildebeest? Does he have a web site? Where is he?

I was not deliberately trying to be mysterious. I was, and still am, trying to maintain at least a veneer of anonymity. But mostly, I'm just a lazy-ass mf, and that's why my stuff has been so hard to find.

The scenic southwest

A sketch loosely inspired by Lake Powell, on the border between Utah and Arizona. Parts of Planet of the Apes were filmed there.

Put a smoldering volcano in the background, and it would be a perfect location for a cavegirl showdown, which is why I drew it.

But this may be as far as it goes.

More early influences

Martine Beswick and Aliza Gur
in a publicity still for
From Russia, With Love

It occurred to me as I was reminiscing and researching for the previous post that I was eleven years old when I saw From Russia, With Love. I saw it at a drive-in with my parents, sitting in the back seat eating one of the crap 10-cent hamburgers we'd smuggled in.

(Even in 1963, 10 cents was a ridiculously low price for a burger. I think we actually got a bag of ten for a dollar. The patty was slightly thicker than cardboard and just about as tasty.)

I guess I was old enough to sort of understand what was going on. I was certainly fascinated by the daggers in the toes of Rosa Klebb's shoes and the submarine periscope surreptitiously installed in the Russian embassy.

But when they got to the catfight between Aliza Gur and Martine Beswick, there was something else happening in the back seat of the old Ford. I wasn't old enough to be sexually aroused by it, but I was – intrigued, let's say. I didn't even know why.

But at age eleven, the die had already been cast.

Raquel Welch (or a stunt double) getting it on
with Beswick for the cavegirl championship

I was fourteen when One Million Years, BC arrived. Enough hormones had kicked in during the intervening three years that when Beswick went cavegirl-on-cavegirl with Raquel Welch, I knew exactly why I was interested. The periscope was going up, all right, but it wasn't in the Russian embassy.

And since I couldn't choose between the blonde and the brunette, I would have to take both of them back to the cave with me.

I still wonder what set me on this path and when it happened. Was I an infant? Five or six? Why am I hot for catfights, and not bondage? Or foot worship? Or just plain ol' porn movies, which have always bored the shit out of me?

These are a few of my favorite things

In the novel version of Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love, the Romany camp catfight is not going well for Vida (played in the movie by Aliza Gur). Outmatched by her stronger and larger opponent, Zora (Martine Beswick in the film), Vida is trapped in a crushing bearhug and about to be slammed helplessly against a rock, leaving Zora free to do as she will with her.

But Vida escapes her foe's grasp by sinking her teeth into Zora's breasts. Zora screams, releases Vida and backs away. Fleming describes the trickle of blood running down Zora's chest.

The movie had a certain impact on my nascent fetish when it came out in 1963. The more graphic catfight in the novel, which I read in 1964 or '65, probably had a significant influence on my interest in biting as a catfight tactic.

Every unfinished catfight narrative I've drawn, and more than a few of the standalone pieces, have included at least one moment where one rival sinks her teeth into the other's breast. Sometimes, blood trickles down the skin as it did with Zora.

Breast biting seems to be a fairly common element in catfight material. I have several hundred photos accumulated over the decades of women attacking each other's breasts with their teeth, and a couple of videos as well. I find the videos to be almost breathtakingly sexy.

But biting to the point of drawing blood is rare. In fact, I have found only one other piece of art that portrays it. It was drawn by J. M. Rolen, whose catfight art is usually so bloody and brutal that it makes even me queasy. (That's an observation, not a criticism, by the way. I suppose that some of the thousand or so catfight fans who have visited this blog since it began find my art so extreme as to be unsettling.)

So perhaps I am out on the fringe of the fringe with this, and violating one of the few taboos left in this genre.

In any event, here is an assortment of biting attacks I've drawn over the years, ranging from 1996 or thereabouts to within the past couple of years.

I have others, and I'll include some of them in future posts.

Dropkick

Another piece from back in the day.

I did this as a gift to Ian, aka Dropkick, who admin'd more than a hundred Yahoo! catfight groups before suddenly passing away in 2008.

This is the only 'dropkick' I've ever drawn, and I thought it turned out quite well.

I have a dream

Last night I dreamt that someone asked permission to repost parts of this blog on a Christian lifestyles web site. I woke up before I had to give him an answer.

Why things don't get done around here

Another piece from pre-2005. It was part of another unfinished story.

Let me tell you a little more about why these stories never get finished.

I typically start out with a straightforward premise: two women meet and they decide to fight. They don't fight over anything, most of the time. They just fight.

(You know those fight videos where one woman is sitting on the sofa in a teddy and thigh-highs reading Us magazine, and another woman in teddy and thigh-highs walks in and is all, 'Bitch, you broke my hair dryer?'

I don't find that very plausible, frankly. If that's all you've got for a plot, just go straight to the fight.)

So, I've got them fighting, and there's some punching, some low blows, clothes torn off, biting, groping, some making out, some orgasms, and I've got all these pages numbered: 0001.psd, 0002.psd, 0003.psd, and so on, up to 0020.psd or thereabouts. So far, so good.

And then I think, 'Hey, you know what would be cool? Back here on page 3, where Amber tears off Lisa's top, instead she should pull it over Lisa's head to blind her. Then, while Lisa can't see, Amber goes to work on her boobs with some sexy punches. Then she bites her.'

"Owww! Hey, what page are we on?"

So I back up to page 3, and add 0003b.psd. Bap, bap, bap: Amber is popping Lisa in the chest. And then, 0003c.psd, where she bites Lisa.

And then I'm not entirely happy with the way 0003c.psd turned out, so I make some changes, and that's 0003c2.psd.

And then I'm thinking, 'This starts too abruptly. We need to see Amber walking up the stairs to Lisa's condo, and knocking on the door.'

So I go back and draw that, and it's pre0001.psd. And if I decide to change it, there'll be a pre0001b.psd.

And so on, until the story is maybe fifty pages long, and numbered thusly:

pre0001b.psd
0001.psd
0002.psd
0002b-1.psd
0003.psd
0003-dont-use.psd
0003b.psd
0003c.psd
0003c2.psd
0004.psd
0004b-1b.psd
000something-maybe-pre5.psd
0005.psd
pre0006.psd
000lisasucksambersnipplepre.psd
pre0007.psd
0007bfirebreaksoutinkitchen.psd

and so on, and so on, until it's to the point that I have no fucking idea what I've done, what order the pages go in, it's just a total fucking mess now, and I quit and go watch Dr. Who.

Which now stars a guy about half my age.

Vancefalon

I think this is the work of artist Vancefalon, another person about whom I know almost nothing, except that he (or she) is author of the Paladin stories released in this country by Superheroine Central. This particular panel seems to be from something other than Paladin, although I can't say what. Maybe one of you can enlighten me.

Vancefalon's theme usually seems to be a heroine menaced and abused by a much larger, hulking opponent. I would say it's more heroine peril fetish than catfight fetish.

In this case, they seem to be more evenly matched. The woman with the eyepatch is still more heavily muscled than I prefer, but I like her fighting tactics.

If I could steal something from Vancefalon, it would be panel composition and inking skill. I don't know if these inks are digital or not (although the colors certainly are), but they are very clean and just the right weight for the drawing style.

Bone

When I post another artist's work here, it's because I think they're as good or better than I am, or because there's some aspect of their work I wish I could incorporate into mine.

So it is with the artist known as Bone, whose entire contribution to the genre seems to be a single 16-panel fight sequence.

Whoever Bone is, he/she did not learn art from "How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way".  I think this is a classically-trained artist, and I wonder how Bone came to create this one sequence of drawings, and apparently nothing else that was similar.

These fighters have a weight and a solidity that I don't think I've ever seen before in catfight art. In fact, I'm not sure I would even include these drawings in the genre.

They have an almost documentary feel to them, like something an anthropologist would have sketched because the tribe was frightened by his camera. I personally get no sexy or erotic vibe from these drawings at all.

But Bone has a solid understanding of human anatomy, composition and light and shade. Better than mine, that's for sure, and I wish I could incorporate his/her knowledge into my own stuff.

This work would be more at home in an art gallery than in an online collection of battling babes comics.

Where else do you go?

Where else do you go on the web for catfight art? I'm curious if anyone knows of places I'm not aware of.

Convenience store

Well, here's a piece of the convenience store thing. I'm posting it mainly because the guy in the background (drawn entirely from imagination) looks like 90 per cent of the customers at my neighborhood convenience store.

And it helps prove I can draw something besides women fighting.

Not that I especially want to.

Lost to the ages

Man, I wish I'd had a better backup system in place. I hoped to find and share today a setup I drew many years ago in which a customer in a convenience store challenges a clerk to a fight. I liked it because I spent a lot of time developing the background in the store. But it seems to be gone.

On the other hand, I just stumbled across about 200 more sketches that I had no recollection of having done. So there's good news and bad news.

Faces

I mentioned in a previous post my preference for showing both faces when I draw a catfight. But here's a sketch from an unknown (to me) source with neither face showing, and I think it works pretty well.

I wouldn't want to begin a sequence or story this way, but if we're already acquainted with the characters, then this angle is fine.