A History of Superhero Kink

“Bind me as tight as you can, girls, with the biggest ropes and chains you can find!”

In Wonder Woman #13 (1945), our superheroine finds herself in a tight spot, literally, as she’s bound to a wooden post with ropes and chains by her fellow Amazon warriors. “Even you can’t escape these bonds,” they taunt her. But despite their best efforts, Wonder Woman (aka, Princess Diana of Themyscira) frees herself easily in what turns out to be a Themysciran game.

This was just one of many scenes rife with imagery of bondage and fetish play that Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston littered throughout his comics. Marston, a psychologist and avowed feminist, believed that submission from a “loving authority” was the ideal form of human interaction. He also believed that women would eventually rule the world and that the best way to prepare the male population was to teach them to submit through the metaphor of comic books.

“He created Wonder Woman as a way to prepare young boys for a woman who was stronger and more powerful than them,” Tim Hanley, author of Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine, tells Inverse. “To illustrate submission, Marston and his handpicked artist, H.G. Peter, used bondage imagery as a metaphor.”

In Marston’s ideal world, Wonder Woman might’ve been the beginning of a kink takeover of superhero comics. Instead, history has reduced Wonder Woman’s bondage roots to a forgotten footnote. But did those kinky feminist origins leave more of an impact on the comics industry than we might have thought? In a genre that’s becoming increasingly de-sexualized, perhaps the kink is just waiting in the wings.

Wonder Woman: The Queen of Bondage

Early Wonder Woman comics were filled to the brim with images of bondage. The Amazons regularly bound each other in ritualistic games, Wonder Woman’s signature lasso of truth allowed her to control her enemies, and college girls regularly engaged in spanking parties (yes, seriously). But these images of bondage were not always positive.

“In the world of men, bondage was unpleasant,” Hanley says. “Having her bracelets welded together literally rendered her powerless.”

In Wonder Woman Unbound, Hanley tallies how often female characters are bound compared to male characters in the comics. Overwhelmingly, it was women who were chained up compared to men. (It was also extremely frequent, with more than a quarter of the comic’s panels depicting bondage of some kind.)

But despite his muddled execution, Marston’s intentions are clear: submission to a greater authority (in this case, women who like being tied up) is an essential part of human nature.

“There's a weird kind of purity to what Marston wants to do with Wonder Woman,” Susana Polo, senior entertainment writer at Polygon, tells Inverse. “The idea that to responsibly exercise power, you should first be able to understand what it is like to submit to responsible power, is neat and deserves examination. It frustrates me that it gets flattened to like, ‘Oh, well, this guy was really into being tied up.’”

Marston’s personal life — he was in a longtime polyamorous relationship with his wife and mistress, with whom he fathered two children each — and his passion for bondage have cast a strange shadow on Wonder Woman’s origins. After Marston passed, Wonder Woman was stripped of her powers and divorced from her feminism. Her lasso and pinup-ready outfit were switched out for a skirt suit. There was even a time when she shed the Wonder Woman persona altogether (an era known as the Diana Prince years). Though she’s still considered one of the foundational superheroes alongside Superman and Batman, many writers consider her a difficult assignment.

“Wonder Woman's legacy became very much tainted in people's minds. And by people, I mean the men creating comics,” Comics Beat Editor-in-Chief Heidi MacDonald tells Inverse. “It’s a very male-dominated industry. I think it was their discomfort with writing this female unencumbered by a man's world's hang-ups, character, and they just really couldn’t relate to it.”

Today, Wonder Woman feels far removed from her kinky origins. In trying to distance Wonder Woman from her roots, comic book writers downplayed the queerness of her character, which went hand-in-hand with her embrace of bondage. (Marston was also a noted defender of what to the 1940s society would be deemed “abnormal” sexuality, which included homosexuality, fetishism, and sadomasochism; and loaded the Wonder Woman comics with as many sapphic overtones as he did bondage imagery.)

“Downplaying Wonder Woman's queerness, downplaying Wonder Woman's kink, all of it seems like it's very intertwined,” comic book critic and podcaster Sara Century tells Inverse.

When she was first created, Wonder Woman was a symbol of Marston’s belief in the superior strength of women and in pacifism. She was a warrior only when necessary and argued for love (sometimes among women) over war. So it’s ironic that, in sanding down Wonder Woman’s queerness and kink, writers played up her militant nature. (In the Silver and Bronze Ages of comics, Wonder Woman frequently worked in military intelligence.)

“She's supposed to be about bringing peace to man's world,” Century says. “[Now, she’s] intertwined with the military as opposed to queerness and kink, because that's not for kids.”

But while Wonder Woman’s kink origins may have been pruned away, there are plenty of other examples of how sexual fetish has continued to inspire the superhero genre.

From the Pages of Pulp

In 2004, it was discovered that Joe Shuster, who co-created Superman with Jerry Siegel, had drawn a series of fetish comic books in 1954 featuring characters that looked eerily like Superman and Lois Lane. Titled Nights of Horror, these comics put the bondage play of Wonder Woman to shame and featured images of BDSM, bondage, torture, and sexual slavery, each more titillating than the last. There was none of Marston’s idyllic belief that bondage would lead to a better matriarchal society. Nights of Horror is pure sleaze: hooded men assault bound and weeping women, women spank each other with hair brushes, and a Lois Lane lookalike whips a shirtless man who looks suspiciously like Superman.

Writer Craig Yoe found a rare remaining copy (most of which had been seized and banned by New York for violating obscenity laws) and published the drawings in his book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster, in which Yoe speculates that Shuster was simply trying to make ends meet. Shuster and Siegel were famously duped into selling the rights to Superman for a mere $130, and subsequent attempts to sue DC Comics (then Action Comics) for the rights would leave the two of them broke and penniless. Stan Lee, who wrote the introduction to Yoe’s books, theorized that a “disillusioned and desperate” Joe Shuster was “forced to accept commissions to draw what amounted to S&M erotic horror books.”

“Stan Lee was slightly kink-shaming the creators of Superman,” Century says, which is ironic since Lee had just created Stripperella for Spike TV’s adult animation block. “But I don't think that's often true of people who do NSFW art. They were having a blast drawing this kink art, I'm pretty sure."

Shuster’s enjoyment notwithstanding, the existence of his secret erotica proves one thing: even outside of Wonder Woman’s unique origins, kink and superheroes are not all that removed from each other. While actual depictions of bondage and sadomasochism remained on the fringes of the comics industry for much of its early history, they are inevitably intertwined simply because artists either enjoyed drawing it — or just had to pay the bills.

Lust, Bondage, and Hysteria

Outside of Wonder Woman, kink and bondage elements have mostly remained on the periphery of superhero comics. You’ll find Catwoman wielding a whip and picking up dominatrix sensibilities (along with a sex-worker origin story) in Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, while X-Men icon Emma Frost is literally dressed like a dominatrix. Even the most wholesome of superheroes can have a kinky side if you know where to look for it.

“Superman, for example, is often breaking free of chains,” Hanley says. “It's one of his most iconic poses.” But with female characters, “bondage often only has a sexual connotation, and whatever power comes with it is used for evil and punished.”

Take Chris Claremont’s Dark Phoenix saga, in which the Hellfire Club corrupts Jean Grey and turns her into their Black Queen, complete with a black leather corset, boots, and a whip. Jean is ultimately killed “in a way that could be read as a punishment for the sexually transgressive fantasies that fueled her dark turn,” Hanley says.

“The lust, bondage, and hysteria, all combined to shift her into a villainous role, for which she was ultimately punished,” he adds. “Jean was supposed to be the good girl, the perfect girlfriend for the good guy, Scott Summers, but by giving into her desires she transgressed this role and was thus punished.”

Other female characters have been depicted in bondage-themed contexts over the years, but it’s usually as a result of a turn to darkness or evil — or as an excuse to hypersexualize women. BDSM-coded characters like Emma Frost or Catwoman walk the line between heroism and villainy, while their provocative outfits straddle the border between sexually liberated and exploitative.

Catwoman might be more associated with the “dom” aspects of sub-dom culture, but she’s not exempt from the punishment female characters get for being transgressive. In Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, “the Joker brutally beats her and ties her up in a Wonder Woman costume that calls back to Wonder Woman's roots in a brutal, violent, sexualized way,” Hanley says.

Kink in Superheroes Today

Sadly, it seems like we are no closer to William Moulton Marston’s dream of a masochistic matriarchy than we were when Wonder Woman and her Amazons were gleefully tying each other up on Paradise Island. In the years since Wonder Woman’s inception, only a handful of mainstream comic book characters have engaged in the kind of bondage play the Amazonian princess got up to, and even fewer in a positive way.

Hanley points out that in comics, sexual movements are “always a bit behind.”

“For kink and BDSM, it's slowly made its way into comics over recent years as they've become a larger part of mainstream media and culture,” he says. “For Wonder Woman, the kink of her origins has rarely come back in any significant way since the original Marston run. Feminism has moved beyond his theories, and in recent years, we've seen progress within the genre in terms of sexualizing female characters.”

Polygon writer Susana Polo theorizes that as audiences became more familiar with kink culture, artists could get away with less. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, superheroes were often clad in belts and leather, or wearing full bondage gear.

“You can't do that today because everybody looks at it and goes, ‘Oh, that's a gimp mask,’” Polo says. “It's this weird Catch-22 where, as representation gets better, it has to show up in a completely different and more codified way.”

Perhaps this is the reason kink exists mostly on the periphery in modern comics. For now, kink in superheroes might just remain on the fringes or in fandom.

“People are going to find that fantasy that fits their fantasy or their kink, and they're going to run with it,” Comics Beat editor MacDonald says. “The world of comics and superheroes provides ample fodder for it.”

But fans will probably be able to find something that suits their kink, even simply in the way that superheroes are designed — all taut muscles, skin-tight suits, whips, lassos of truth, and (not gimp) masks.

“Superheroes are kinky,” Sara Century says. “The idealized human form is pretty kinky just in and of itself.”

Inverse’s 2024 Superhero Issue, guest edited by Zack Snyder, explores the genre for what it is: a profound commentary on our shared human experience. Dive into the full issue here.

About the artist: Jojo Aguilar is a production designer, art director, and concept designer with almost 30 years of experience in the entertainment industry. His credits include Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Rebel Moon, Family Guy, The Legend of Korra, Infinity Paradise Lost, Twilight of the Gods, and more. He is the creative art director at Lex & Otis Animation