George Pérez’ Drawings of Dick Grayson in Bondage Was My Introduction To Kink
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Before I begin, Robin was already linked to kink long before George Perez.
Above: In Robin and the Making of American Adolescence, Lauren O’Connor discusses the ways that Robin has changed along with our understanding of childhood. She also identifies and explores the way in which his sexuality has always been highly charged.
Pérez, the greatest comic book storyteller of certainly my life time, died today.
Above: George Pérez. Photo by Luigi Novi.
The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer.
He was 67.
RELATED: George Pérez, Greatest Comic Book Creator of a Generation, Has Died
Above: Actor Burt Ward in one of the many bondage situations he was captured by villains on the show.
Even as a very young child, I was titillated by actor Burt Ward, who played Robin on the titular ABC TV show Batman, who was often left in shall we say compromised positions at the end of most of the always cliff hanger endings of the show.
So by the time I encountered the character again in the pages in The New Teen Titans “Runaways” storyline, it was common feature if many of his predicaments.
Ward has written about some of the kinkier sides of the role that emerged in and outside the show, he alleges he was prescribed pills to shrink his junk because the bulge was too big .
Both he and Adam West say they had up to eight sexual encounters a day with groupies.
Ward told the New York Post that West was definitely the ringleader when it came to their own adventures.
He recalled decades later: “When I entered ‘Batman’ as a naive 20-year-old who had only dated a couple of girls, I met Adam West, who immediately introduced me to the wildest sexual debauchery that you can imagine. We often found that women were banging on our windows while we were bedded down with other women.”
He added: “We’re talking about wild times in the dressing rooms, on the set, between the shots, in the lunch wagon. And then of course, doing the personal appearances on the weekend, that’s where it really got wild. And I have to be honest with you, we became like sexual vampires.”
He added that the costumes seem to be part of the lure for women: “If you look at our show, you’ll see that we always stood with our legs open, our fists on hips and our bat bulges forward, which had a profound effect on women.”
West was 37 years old and twice divorced when he was offered the role that would define his life.
Ward wrote an autobiography titled Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights. In the memoir, the actor revealed what went on behind the scenes. And in a 1990s interview with Peter Anthony Holder, he suggested he and West slept with women in between takes.
I mean when you come into the set at 7:30 in the morning, and you come out of make-up and the first thing you know, the ladies start coming into our dressing rooms at 7:45. We’re talking about wild times in the dressing rooms, on the set, between the shots, in the lunch wagon.
After their 14-hour workdays, Ward said the actors got home and “redefined” the meaning of the phrase “pleasure pad.” But he noted that it was their off-time when things got wilder.
“And then, of course, doing the personal appearances on the weekend, that’s where it really got wild,” Ward recalled. “I have to be honest with you, we became like sexual vampires.”
Ah yes, Dick Grayson and the thighs that launched a thousand sighs. As much as I love the work of George Perez, the original Robin suit was incredibly outdated by the time this panel was done. Let’s face it, once DC aged Dick up (because of the Batman TV series back in the mid 60s) having a 16 year old in the classic outfit was an exercise in questionable taste. I’ve always maintained that it gave poor Dick a soft core porn vibe. He was essentially a young adult wearing half a costume that left almost nothing to the imagination. Where can’t you stick money into it for a private dance?
Needless to say, by time of the classic Marv Wolfman/George Perez New Teen Titans run, an 18 or 19 year old running around in the armoured underoos and pixie boots was making less and less sense by the issue. So DC decided to give him his own identity – Nightwing!
But Perez took the fetishization we saw in the TV show to whole new levels of lustfulness.
If you think you might enjoy an image of Dick Grayson in peril as only George Perez can draw him! 🙂 Enjoy!
Not sure that this qualifies as NSFW, but I wouldn’t necessarily open it on a work monitor. George Perez was one of the defining mainstream comics artists when I was growing up, he was critical to the New Teen Titans becoming a best seller and made each member look fantastic and individual. And perhaps there is no finer example of that process than his work with Dick Grayson’s Robin, who he made look REALLY sexy not in spite of, but partly BECAUSE of his fantastically silly outfit.
And with that, I shall leave you to ogle, admire, drool, or whatever you might want to do over this piece.
On fan asked: Is this artwork by George Perez meant to be homoerotic?? Ok, so here is the original cover to New Teen Titans #39…
Well, George has always seemed quite LBGTQ friendly, so it’s not surprising to me that he does commissions for that community. And you can’t go wrong with original Perez art!
Lovely artwork, but I’m not sure how intentionally homoerotic that cover is. You could be seeing what you want to see here.Then again, maybe it is intentionally homoerotic! But that’s kinda the point I’m making, I guess. It’s like a lot of the supposedly sado-masochistic or bondage-themed Wonder Woman artwork; is it all intentionally bondage-themed or is some of it just a superheroine tied up by a villain?
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Between the incredible musculature he added, Pérez also was attuned to the powerful effect of weaponizing a queer gaze of the character. You can clearly see it in the aforementioned private commissioned BDSM sketch.
Art: George Perez Color: DEPRAVED4YAOI-X depraved4yaoi-x.deviantart.com… Modification by: DEPRAVED4YAOI-X original: www.comicartfans.com/gallerypi…
As we wrote last May: Dick Grayson’s leap from Batman and Robin to sex symbol status has been something of a phenomenon for DC Comics.
Initially introduced in 1939 in Detective Comics as a wide-eyed sidekick to the so-serious Batman, Dick Grayson’s Robin era captured the hearts of people everywhere. But as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed our young Robin was, comics fans will know that there was no shortage of controversy.
Above: Even cosplayers have adopted bondage themes into their iterations of the characters.
The character launched the era of a thousand sidekicks, all who took their tropic cues from the boy wonder from Green Arrow’s Speedy to the Human Torch’s Toro.
Without getting too into detail about the issue, fans and armchair theorists went back and forth about the latent homoeroticism of the idea of this older rich dude living with his young, undeniably twinky sidekick. This matters only because it started a ripple effect within DC Comics and all other stories of the same medium.
To keep things brief, this obsession with the existence of homosexual undertones (this was the 50s, after all) birthed the CCA, or the Comics Code Authority. For the uninitiated, the CCA tended to impose strange and strict rules on what “could” and “could not be,” essentially censoring characters, art, and the experience of comics.
But on the other hand, this did eventually lead to Dick Grayson’s transition from Boy Wonder to the leader of the Teen Titans, which is where his rise to sex symbol status really starts to pick up.
Long-time readers of comic books will know that Dick Grayson has been heralded for two things. The first is that he was the Boy Wonder and Batman’s first sidekick.
The second, arguably the more notable talking point is that Dick Grayson is hot, especially when he shed his short green shorts and traded them for the body-hugging Nightwing suit.
Now, dear readers, the preoccupation with Nightwing’s butt isn’t something we made up. Dick Grayson really did transform from being the butt (ha!) of a joke or two about his tiny shorts to having arguably the greatest superpower in the DC Universe: his ass.
He played the part of a full-time superhero while entering the collective consciousness of fans as the first male sex icon to ever appear on the page in such a spectacular way. The fixation with superhero Nightwing’s butt bloomed (quite literally) into a cultural phenomenon that’s taken over Twitter feeds and eclipsed the stormy legacy of Gotham City.
Mr. Grayson was sexy long before Nightwing strolled into Secret Six, and this was largely because DC gave him the chance to grow up alongside his storylines. From his young male ingenue persona in the Batman comics to the spirited and fiercely caring leader of the Teen Titans, he served as the link for many young readers also getting to know themselves as independent people with unique sexualities.
One of the most notable assertions of the then-Robin’s sexiness is how he handles his relationships throughout the DC comics he’s appeared in. Unlike the ever-broody Batman, he moves past his trauma and morphs into a genuinely caring hunk with the body of an Olympic gymnast.
In short, he single-handedly breaks the rigid mold of a DC series protagonist and replaces it with the image of a slender, strong, and undeniably charming man unburdened by “traditional” masculinity.
Pérez and the objectification of Dick Grayson
Grayson’s transformation from sidekick to thirst trap was almost singlehandedly launched by New Teen Titans co-creator George Pérez who began drawing a sexy, older Grayson never seen before.
Above: “Do you even lift bro?” from Tales of the Teen Titans #44 July 1984.
Between the incredible musculature he added, Pérez also was attuned to the powerful effect of weaponizing a queer gaze of the character. You can clearly see it in the aforementioned private commissioned BDSM sketch.
And of course Pérez oversaw and designed his transformation into Nightwing.
Above: The debut of Nightwing in costume in Tales of the Teen Titans #44 and DC promotional poster and art for Who’s Who in the DC Universe. Below are four private commissions.
The theme continues in Grayson #6, by Tom King and Tim Seeley.
It features Midnighter, a character suffering from a condition that makes it hard for him to remember faces, correctly identifying Nightwing from his butt alone.
So relatable.
“Dick Grayson is one of the only heartthrob heroes for women and gay guys,” Mr. Seeley told the New York Times, “He’s a charming, flirty and good-looking guy, with a legendary good-looking butt.” In 2013, the character finished at No. 1 in a countdown of “The 50 Sexiest Male Characters” by the Comics Alliance website.
The comic book writer and artist Phil Jimenez said: “Imagine Batman’s physical skills, analytic mind and weapons, mixed with Superman’s goodness and hope, and you get Dick Grayson. He’s the best of both those characters rolled into one sexy package.”
And if there was any doubt about Perez’ inclinations, he himself cleared them up in an interview in 2018:
Many will know George Perez from his long tenure at DC Comics where, during the 1980s, he helped relaunch The New Teen Titans and Wonder Woman comic books. He also had defining runs on DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths and Justice League of America as well as on The Avengers and The Infinity Gauntlet for Marvel Comics. But, what many people won’t know is that George also enjoys fetish and bondage.
That year he appeared at Fetish Con and said in an interview that he knew he was into fetish “pretty much when I approached puberty. I was especially turned on by catfighting women and was especially enticed by the 1960s TV series HONEY WEST with Anne Francis and THE AVENGERS with Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson.”
I had done a lot of catfighting sketches as a kid, even when my basic knowledge of anatomy was sadly lacking, but I did draw two one-shot comics stories as a fan which both featured at least one scene of heroines and villains fighting it out. In fact, the very last amateur work I did before turning pro was a story called “The Deadly Sparklers” for a one-shot title called HOT SHOT and featuring a bunch of sexy ass-kicking femme fatales called “The She-Devils”.”
That story contained catfighting, bondage, whippings, toplessness and skintight costumes, which definitely shows just how early my comic book fetishes started to manifest themselves. And of course, some of that insinuated itself into my regular comics work throughout my 44 year career. I even drew a mainstream mini-series for Marvel Comics called SACHS & VIOLENS that featured a badass fetish model as its female protagonist.
Oh, that’s something that I leave for others to diagnose. I just know that it’s always appealed to me. I used to think it was specifically a male fantasy, but have since learned that so many women enjoy the exotic and erotic thrill of playing the damsel in distress and being either the submissive or the dominatrix with equal fervor. Of course, understanding the difference between a fantasy and reality is all important, and the best scenarios, no matter how harsh and sometimes violent the visual elements are, are those wherein all participants are in on the fun and it’s an act of mutual trust, erotic arousal and, in many cases pure love. Outsiders who know only the trappings of fetish and are either critical or actively repulsed by it, really don’t understand that. I’ve known a lot of bound woman and screen victims who are actually the strongest willed people I could ever hope to meet.
So there you go! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes Dick really is a stand in for cock lust… or something.
Rest in peace good sir, for all you have done and all you have given me.
