Look! Down in the gutter!

If there's one thing I love more than a comic book, it's a dark peek into pop culture of the past. And there's plenty of both in Craig Yoe's fascinating new book, SECRET IDENTITY: THE FETISH ART OF SUPERMAN'S CO-CREATOR JOE SHUSTER.

Admittedly, that's an odd subtitle, but it fits the book's odd story. In the introduction, Yoe tells the familiar tale of how, after Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster lost the rights to their groundbreaking creation, they fell on hard times, with Joe (whose eyesight was fading) forced to work as a delivery boy (well, man) to make ends meet. What Yoe adds to the story is what happened after that -- and believe me, this is where the things get interesting.

Like many an artist past his peak years, Joe wound up in the shadowy world of drawing dirty pictures to make a buck. But these weren't any run-of-the-mill nudie shots. In an oddly fitting twist for someone who helped launch the comic book industry, Joe found himself drawing strange little pictures for a strange little magazine called NIGHTS OF HORROR. It wasn't a comic book -- the pictures and typewritten text were separate, for one thing -- but with its over-the-top plots, boo-worthy villains and damsels in dramatic distress, it sure resembled someone's twisted version of one. It's like those EC magazines Gaines tried after the comics line folded, but with a much lower budget -- and a much higher level of kink.

NIGHTS OF HORROR was clearly aimed at the same demographic buying all those photos of a tied-up Bettie Page. Sold in various seedy bookstores in the Times Square area (and wouldn't I kill to spend a vintage hour or two in one of those), it was cheaply printed, poorly written and, let's be honest, desperately drawn. Joe Shuster had a bold, clean style that screams "Golden Age," but his art hadn't changed much in the decade or so since he worked on Superman. (Maybe that's due to his eye troubles.) His art in NIGHTS OF HORROR looks almost exactly like his Superman art -- and that's why this book is so fascinating.

As Yoe points out, the characters in these twisted drawings, tied up, spanked and worse, look almost exactly like Lois, Superman, Jimmy Olsen and Luthor. They're not, of course (something else Yoe points out -- probably for legal reasons), but NIGHTS OF HORROR gives an unnerving (and fascinating) glimpse at what comic books might look like if the Code insisted on out-of-bounds behavior instead of forbidding it.

The drawings are pretty tame stuff by today's standards (especially considering you're reading this on the Internet, where a couple of choice clicks will take you to some real nights of horror), but titilation isn't the point -- at least not anymore. It's the thrill of peeling back the four-color wallpaper of comic book history and spying something that you never even suspected existed. Major credit goes to Yoe for not only finding these old magazines (by accident, according to his intro), but putting them in historical context and presenting them in a beautifully designed book. It's a sure bet the original copies of NIGHTS OF HORROR never treated Shuster's artwork with this much loving care.

Last year, the comic history scholarship award was easily won by THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE, David Hadju's comprehensive look at comic book censorship in the 1940s and 1950s. It was a long, detailed look at a big part of the comic book past. This year is still young, but it'll take a pretty impressive book to top SECRET IDENTITY. It's scope isn't nearly as wide as THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE, but what it does so well is take a tiny slice of related comic book history and explore it in amazing detail, then (and this is most of the book) reprint those crazy Shuster illos. It's not just fun, it's educational!

And hell, I haven't even mentioned the kill-crazy Jewish kids with Hitler moustaches and their connection to NIGHTS OF HORROR. You'll have to read the book to find out their story.

You can get a sneak peek at SECRET IDENTITY at the blog Yoe has dedicated to the book here. Those wacky drawings can say more than my stunned scrawlings here ever could.