Number 1179: Kinkdom Come

Like Wednesday's post about artist Adolphe Barreaux, Gene Bilbrew, who often signed his name "Eneg," published his art in a shadowy realm of disrespectability. His work appeared on covers and interiors of publications catering to a fetish audience. This story, called "The Passion Pit," has no nudity or hardcore sex, just some sexy costuming and a lot of innuendo. It appears Eneg swiped some of his war panels from war comics of the era (1950s), and lavished most of his effort on what the reader paid for, sexy women.

I showed this story in the early days of this blog, but linked the pages to the online storage site, Photobucket. Some of the links have broken, and rather than go back in and fix them I've enlarged the scans and am re-presenting them. As I said in that earlier blog, in the early '60s I was with a friend who bought "The Passion Pit" from a bookseller in a classic under-the-counter scenario."The Passion Pit" was hot in that era, the stuff of Times Square sleaze and the bondage-discipline crowd. Looking at it now makes me wonder how there could have been a time when anyone thought it was pornographic or dangerous. In today's porn-saturated world it seems almost innocent.

Bilbrew was African-American. He died young, about 50. I've seen a couple of sources use different years for his death, 1971 or 1974. What draws us to his artwork isn't technical excellence but an idea of a sexual underground where women dress up in latex and leather, spiky-heeled boots (with spurs, yet!) and dominate men. The "vitalizer" the sisters Fettisha and Sexsina give to the hero, Dick Strong (ho-ho), is a kind of liquid Viagra. The ability to perform sexually with chemical enhancement was a fantasy when this was written and drawn.

In the '70s I found a pirate edition of "The Passion Pit" re-titled "Chinese Torture," which removed Eneg's name. I sold my copy of "Chinese Torture" on eBay years ago, but before I did I photocopied it. The scans are from those copies.

Number 163


Kink From Under The Counter


It's hard for me to believe, grizzled and jaded as I am today, that I was ever young and naïve. But I was. It was 1965, I was 18. A friend and I went into a bookstore. In some pre-arranged buy, my friend gave the clerk $3.00, which got him a digest-sized booklet, very slim. It was a black-and-white comic book called The Passion Pit.

The booklet was by Eneg, an artist I'd never heard of. Eneg was the pseudonym for Gene Bilbrew, an African-American comic book artist who turned to fetish illustrating and became well-known in that subterranean community. Bilbrew was born in 1923 and died in 1974 at the young age of 51. You can google his name and come up with several sites, some of them selling his printed work.

If this were published today it would be considered tame. There just isn't that forbidden thrill to spike-heeled boots, masks, whips and chains, or rubber clothes, not anymore. The mainstream co-opted those images some years ago. I saw a lot of them when I watched MTV with my son in the early 1990s and the heavy metal bands were thrashing around with models right out of Irving Klaw's shop in New York City.

A note on the copy I used for the scans: I found a pirate copy of The Passion Pit back in the late 1970s. It was called Chinese Torture, and Eneg's name was removed. The printing was not that good, photographed as it was from an original printed copy. Mine is a second generation from that generation. So if there are details that are muddy I apologize. Some of it isn't my fault. Some of the original printing flaws due to Bilbrew's sloppy original art are still present: There are lettering guide lines visible in some panels, even some pencil marks under his drawings. He also didn't rule his panel borders very straight. Personally, I like that sort of thing. It reminds me that a real live human being sat down at a drawing board and made these pictures, and was a sloppy workman with some of it. Just like the rest of us are at times in our everyday work.

I also get a kick out of his spelling: "Bhudda" and "strenght" show no editor was involved in this comic.