In 1946, Bizarre closed temporarily, and also Wink (the periodical pin-up who resumed the publication of the comic entitled Sweet Gwendoline) from 1948 to 1950, suspended its presentation. With the passing of the years the fetishistic aspect of clothing diminished (never forgetting the almost maniacal care dedicated to footwear) and the models gradually got dressed in front of the camera, until they reached total nudity for private clients.īizarre continued to publish texts and comics, Willie explored the theme of “pony girls” in the illustrations for the stories The Magic Island and From Girl to Pony but did not abandon the theme of “damsell in distress” with the sweet prototype of the virtuous Gwendoline, which the name of John Willie was associated on a universal scale. Among the most requested were those of the white Gwendoline and the wicked Countess. The important innovation brought by Willie to the images of bondage was the transition from the fiction of the drawn images (which still continued to produce) to the concreteness of the photographic sequences that portrayed one or more models in situations of “damsell in distress”. To escape justice, he devised the adoption of mailboxes as the sole reference for communications with his clients, he had to make himself untraceable and was forced to change his address continuously.

After the war, Willie, who in the meantime had moved to the United States, founded and sent the magazine Bizzarre alone, which at the time was considered an intolerable scandal for the community.

These editions, of little artistic content from the literary point of view, were richly illustrated with whimsical garments and bizarre gimmicks designed to inflict bodily and psychological tortures on the unfortunate protagonists, fallen into the hands of their fanatic tormentors. In 1937, while he was in Sydney, he discovered the books illustrated by the French Charles (one of the European forerunners of the kind much loved by Willie) who worked in the Paris of the ’30s. He lived for long periods in a sort of exile in Australia, where he met Holly, the model who became his wife. John Willie (born John Alexander Scott Coutts), born in Singapore in 1902, was the rebel scion of a family of bankers. JOHN WILLIE and the adventures of the sweet Gwendoline

The adventures of sweet gwendoline