New York's museum exhibit traces history of erotic comic books and artists

An exhibition that opened this week at New York City's Museum of Sex is tracing the titillating history of erotica in comic books.

'Comics Stripped' will feature 150 artifacts from the Great Depression to the present, including original drawings, illustrated books, comic books, magazines and videos.

Craig Yoe, co-curator of the exhibition and a child of the '60s, said he learned it all from comic books.

"Sex comics were entertaining and erotically stimulating, but also educational for younger people in the past. The Internet serves the same function now as a way to find out what the birds and bees and flowers and trees and Mom and Dad did," ABC News quoted him as saying.

One of the featured artists is hippie-era illustrator Robert Crumb, who drew such comics as 'Fritz the Cat' and 'Keep on Truckin,' where Yoe said he "learned the mechanics of copulation and the joy of free love."

Comics entered the mainstream in 1938 with the advent of Joe Shuster's 'Superman.' But during the Depression, many other artists began 'dirty drawings' of busty women, fetishes and even homosexuality.

Over the course of the 20th century and beyond, these comics have not only depicted sexual fantasy but have loosened taboos and lampooned popular culture.

And for boys like Yoe, who grew up in the uptight 1950s and early 1960s, naughty comics even had an 'educational factor.'

"I can personally attest to that. You found your Dad's Playboy under the socks in the dresser drawer. You talked about sex, but you didn't quite yet know how you did it.

"When you came across the sex-oriented comics, they were diagrammed well beyond Playboy and the health classes. You got to see how the physical act was performed and it was quite revelatory," said the 59-year-old.

The New York City exhibit opens with an erotic self-portrait by Crumb, Philadelphia born, but who now lives in France, and other original pieces.

Other historic displays include 18 original pulp instruction books from Wesley Morse's 'Tijuana Bibles' and MAD magazine cartoonist Wally Wood's sexually satirical drawing of Disney's characters.

Joe Shuster's 'Nights of Horror' depicts doppelgangers of Superman and Lois Lane in fetish scenarios. Eric Stanton's 'Blunder Broad' mimicked Wonder Woman.