Where is she now?

I felt very fortunate to find this video on the Internet a couple of years ago. I bought it as an 8mm reel in the late seventies or early eighties, and eventually lost it.

It came from Curtis DuPont (was that a real person?), which advertised in the back of the 'off-brand' pro wrestling magazines alongside Triumph Studios, California Supreme, Milco and others.

If you've never known anything but downloading videos straight off a website (or a torrent, if that's how you roll), you have no idea what it was like in those early, primitive days.

You'd order these reels by mail, and they would come wrapped in the iconic 'plain brown wrapper' - like your mailman didn't know what plain brown wrappers were for.

You'd open it, drag the projector out of the closet, close all the blinds and drapes, set up the screen if you had one, then meticulously thread the head of the film through the projector. If the producer was meticulous, you got a fairly long head on the reel so you could break it a couple of times while threading and not lose any of the actual footage.

Then, you'd turn out the lights, turn on the projector, and watch maybe three minutes of dim, grainy catfight footage.

And then it was over.

My memory is that I bought some stuff from DuPont because the ads made it seem a little more explicit than the tame-but-sexy Triumph Studios material and the slightly more risque California Supreme/Bellstone products.

This match, as it turned out, was not all that explicit, nor very rough as far as the fighting went. Bikinis stayed on for the entire match. They rolled around on seventies-style green shag carpeting for the whole film, basically trying to pull each other down and get a pin. No punching, no biting, no groping or fingering, and, of course, no sound. But it also proved, at least for me, that sexy and explicit are not always the same thing. Because this match was way sexy.

The girl in the jungle girl bikini (there's that motif again) was called Jenny, and I wanted to be the father of Jenny's children. She looked like some hippie chick that had answered an ad in the Freep and ended up wrestling the other girl in some real estate agent's tacky office for a dime bag. She was slender, willowy, with beautiful long brown hair, and small but perfect natural breasts that occasionally popped out of her chamois top. It's hard to imagine nowadays that a mere glimpse of a nipple over the top of a halter or bra could be erotic and sexy. But it was, and as I looked at this video again, it still is.

But part of the mystique with 8 mm stuff was that you couldn't really know what anyone looked like. The images were so dim and grainy that you got only a vague notion of appearance, so you filled in the details with your imagination.

Damn, that was an ugly sofa.

How things have changed

I was looking for something else on the web today, and I stumbled across this panel from a 1964 Justice League of America.

It was originally posted on the blog Crisis on Earth Prime, which looks like it would be a rather entertaining blog if you still follow DC Comics these days.

I glommed the pic because I'm pretty sure it's the first 'catfight' I saw in a mainstream comic. It was drawn by Mike Sekowsky. I put 'catfight' in semi-quotes because although it is, technically, two women fighting, or sort of fighting, I'm not sure it rises to the minimum standard of being a catfight.

The combatants are Wonder Woman, obviously, and her evil Earth-3 counterpart, Superwoman. (She was from Earth-3 in 1964, anyway. I think she's from somewhere else now. DC has rebooted its continuity so many times, I have no idea what the hell is going on. It's part of the reason I quit reading mainstream comics.)

This was about as hot as comic book catfights got in those days. Even in their skimpy superheroine outfits, most of the women in 60s DC comics looked like your math teacher, especially if Sekowsky drew them. But, we had to take what we could get.

It's interesting to ponder that while Sekowsky was drawing his "Up you go, dearie!" Wonder Woman with the 52-inch-hips, in another part of New York City, the man who should have drawn this fight, Eric Stanton, was cranking out – well, who knows what? Some cheesy paperback cover, or a four-pager for Klaw.

In the same web search, I came across this double truck from a 2008 book called Batman Confidential:

Imagine me saying "uh..." in Butt-head's voice. This is, apparently, really Batgirl really wrestling Catwoman in the nude in some Gotham City swinger club. Obviously, the standards at DC have changed since '64.

Some sort of flowers are strategically scattered across the scene. I have seen Batgirl and Catwoman fight at least semi-nude before, but they were always 'unsanctioned' matches, and there were always tiny white squares floating in all the best places. (If you've been as dedicated to collecting catfight art as I have, you know what I'm talking about.)

But yeah.... this is OK. Really, really OK.

Um... are all comic books like this now?

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.)

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!

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?

I've never told anyone, pt. 2

Rummaging around in a back room closet this morning, I found a couple of boxes of catfight stuff from the late seventies/early eighties – stuff I thought was long gone.

It looks like my housekeeper may have found them first. But, she hasn't called the cops or ratted me out to her friends, apparently. Her mother, who is about my age, is a notorious neighborhood gossip, and if she knows, the whole town knows.

But our mutual friends are still speaking to me, and no police or Southern Baptists have been to the house, so I guess I'm OK.

Talking 'bout my generation

Sherri Whitlow

You can tell by the cultural references scattered through these first posts that I am not exactly new to this.

I adore the fetish models and actresses that are out there feeding my obsession in 2011, but I come from a different time. I lusted mightily in my twenties after Sherri Whitlow, and for good reason: she was smokin' hot.

I don't remember how I even became aware of her existence. Sports Review Wrestling was obviously the gateway drug. But it was a competing magazine, whose name escapes me, that carried all the little ads in the back pages for California Supreme, Milco and Curtis Dupont.

I remember when I first ordered flyers from some of those companies. I think I handled the paper and envelopes with gloves, so as to not leave fingerprints. I wanted some measure of deniability in case the FBI swooped down on me. I was probably eighteen or nineteen.

After California Supreme and Milco came Triumph Studios and Golden Girls. I wanted Rosemary Lorenz so bad it hurt. And then Sue Bowser, of course, but everyone loved Sue.

Personally I was enamored of Golden Girls Mindy, Leslie and Jill. Especially Jill because she was really cute and willing to fight naked, which you didn't see a lot of in those days.

There was someone else, whose name I think was Lenore, who I liked because she did some serious bumps – serious by Golden Girls standards, anyway.

With Golden Girls, you saw a lot of damn near perfect-looking women who rolled around a lot. It wasn't terrific action, but the women were so stunning you didn't care.

Lenore was hot, but she didn't have the super-svelte figure you normally expected a Golden Girl to have. She looked like she meant business. I ordered the tape based on the other girl in the fight, and assumed it would look like a regular Golden Girls product. But Lenore worked a little stiff, as they would say in pro wrestling. I don't remember who she was fighting, but I remember she swung her opponent around and just tossed her about halfway across the ring, where she landed with a loud thud.

The other girl got up with a 'what the fuck was that?' expression on her face, and maybe I just wanted to believe it, but it seemed like that whole match was a little rougher than the typical GG event.

And when I say she landed with a loud thud, I mean loud by Golden Girls standards. In Golden Girls videos, for some reason, even an earring falling off would be accompanied by a reverberating, speaker-rattling WHUMPF! It wasn't dubbed in; it was just a loud echo-y venue. I guess they shot those in a zeppelin hangar somewhere.

I'll write more about this another time.

I've never told anyone

I have never told anyone who knows me personally about my catfight kink. You, gentle reader, know more about my fetish than my best friends, my parents or my ex-wife.

Do you know what happens in the next panel?
Oh, yeah. But I don't think I'm ready to post that.

I am sure that from time to time in my life, there have been a few who suspected. Maybe I left a copy of Sports Review Wrestling on the floor of the car. Or someone saw me paying rapt attention to a mud wrestling feature on PM Magazine. 

I bought a Super 8 reel from California Supreme once, and good god, I stayed on his mailing list for maybe ten years. Finally the unsolicited catalogs quit coming. Then, a few years later, after I had gotten married and moved three times, they started coming again.

"Sweetheart, I have no idea where this came from. Um... his mailing list probably got crosslinked at the post office with the one for the L.L. Bean Catalog. Just a database thing."

Do you think she bought that? Nah, probably not. You can't sit at the computer in the back room and draw scantily-clad and naked babes punching, biting and going down on each other and expect the person with whom you share the house to not at least suspect. But she never said anything.

The panel that accompanies this post was drawn on the down-low at the computer in the back bedroom. Internet Explorer was on hot standby, ready to be dragged on top of Fractal Design Painter if my wife walked into the room.

I remember a coworker who was obviously a 'fan.' The place where I was at the time had a fairly large bullpen area for creative staff, and there were three TV sets going all the time, one for each of what were then the only three commercial networks. I say this guy was 'obviously' a fan, because every time a catfight appeared on Dynasty or B.J. and the Bear or whatever, he would stop what he was doing and stand there staring at the TV, absolutely fucking transfixed. He didn't move. He didn't even freaking blink. Hell, he may have stopped breathing. It was like he was witnessing the Miracle of Fatima or a UFO landing.

'Jeebus,' I thought, 'Is that what I look like?'

But even though we were on the same page, I never revealed my secret to him. Frankly, in almost every other respect, he was a dork. I wouldn't have told him if his ass was on fire.

So no one ever knew. Sometimes, I thought about confiding in someone, but then I'd see catfight fans held up for public shaming by Geraldo or Sally Jessy Raphael, and I would be persuaded to keep my mouth shut a little longer.

I thought maybe that Seinfeld episode would open the door for this country to have its long-overdue national dialog on catfighting, but all we seemed to get from it was the inspiration for that Miller Lite commercial.

Which wasn't a bad outcome at all, really.

Now, a question: have you ever told anyone? If so, who was it? Leave a comment – I'd like to hear your story.

Cavegirls & Jungle Girls

I seem to turn out a lot of drawings of girls dressed in cavegirl/jungle girl costumes. The drawing at right is from 1994, and is one of my earliest efforts at digital art. Somewhere around here are some pen and ink drawings even older than these that illustrate the 'fighting cavegirl' theme.

I probably did my first fur bikini fight art in college, which would have been – well, some time back.

I remember seeing some movie with fighting cavegirls back in my adolescence that caught my attention, and probably influenced my later art. It wasn't the legendary Racquel/Martine battle, now the gold standard for the subgenre; it was some movie preceding even that.

Possibly it was "Prehistoric Women" from 1950. This dates back to a time when public standards wouldn't allow cavegirls to fight in bikinis; they were required to go at it in more modest attire. But even with the Wilma Flintstone dresses and the Toni perms, there was a certain aura of untamed wildness about this prehistoric fight. It was pretty hot for its time. In fact, it was about the only thing there was.

In terms of cavegirl catfight art, I guess the benchmark is still the battle between Nima and Embra for the right to marry Anthro, a young caveman who would later go on to develop a popular line of ergonomic workstations and office seating.

Anthro was another of those mainstream publications that, like Sports Review Wrestling, sort of jumped off the convenience store rack and into my sweaty adolescent hands. Later in life, I would rummage through back issue boxes at the comic stores trying to find additional copies. ('Hmmm... Angel Love... Animal Man... Animaniacs... Aquaman. Fuck!')

I also like a four-page booklet by Cire called Azza vs. Laka, produced in 1979. Azza and Laka are two jungle girls who decide Africa isn't big enough for both of them.

I notice a recurring theme in these jungle girl/cavegirl fights: somebody's always biting, but usually biting in not very interesting places. I may have to draw something to address this shortcoming in the genre.

Let me also add a plug here for a valuable paleontological resource: the Cavegirls in Fur Bikinis blog.

And thanks to every model to ever posed in a fur bikini, whether you were fighting another cavegirl or not.

Hooked for life

Valerie vs. Gloria: I was hooked for life.

I wonder how many other young men were hooked on the catfight fetish by this one early-1970s picture. It was on the cover of Sports Review Wrestling magazine, and it took my interest in fighting women to a new level.

I had been interested in catfights since my early adolescence, but mostly I had to settle for the occasional burly females that turned up on local TV wrestling, or some grainy black-and-white caveman flick on the Saturday matinee.

Then, suddenly, there was this – right there in plain sight on the 7-Eleven magazine rack. The dispassionate Valerie had sweet-faced Gloria in a not-very-effective headlock, her left fist cocked and ready to slam into her victim's smooth, perfect midsection.

Holy shit! Would girls really do this to each other? In bikinis, no less?

I'm pretty sure my face was red as a beet as a laid down my 50 cents, or whatever it was, and practically galloped home with my find. I'm not going to post any of the black and white interior pics, but I think you can probably find them on Dr. Chin's Apartment House Wrestling Gallery site.

I don't remember much of the copy that accompanied the photos (duh). My imagination wrote a story of its own. Valerie was wiry and athletic, and she knew the softer, curvier Gloria would be little competition for her. She seemed only vaguely interested in the whole affair, punishing the more earnest Gloria with relative ease and indifference. Although there was no photographic documentation to support it, I was pretty sure that after she had pounded Gloria's belly, Valerie would throw a few punches into those perfect breasts as well.

Once I had seen those photos, with two sexy, bikini-clad babes pretending to wrestle and struggle for victory, I knew there was no turning back for me. I was hooked, and still am.

More on this to come.