Here’s a panel that’s been circulating on the internet for near as long as there’s been an internet. It’s one of those smutty vintage comic book panels that’s funny in part because of our unquestioned assumptions about the past: either those old-time fools were so dumb they missed their own double entendres, or their ancient circumstances were so laughably innocent that what’s smutty today didn’t raise an eyebrow back then. For the record, I think both of those assumptions are generally likely to be false. Artists, to coin an apt phrase, like to take the piss. And always have done.
This panel is from Action Comics #337, in a story called “The Green Sun Supergirl”. The golden shower is a healing rain, people! Sure it is. No doubt that’s what inspired this garish and loving and obsessively-luscious scan-and-trace-and-recolor restoration by an unknown fan who loves Supergirl as much as he loved him some golden showers:
You know when I said artists have been taking the piss (so to speak) since forever by painting fetish stuff with the thinnest and not-at-all waterproof veneer of innocence? I’m not kidding about the “forever” part. Perhaps you will remember the long ago post I did about the mythology of Zeus, Danae, and the conception of Perseus. The myth is that Danaë was locked in a basement so Zeus sent down a rain of gold coins, which operated rather more like his vital essences inasmuch as they made the young lady quite preggers. Take another look at those artworks, and this one, dating in one case all the way back to 450 BC, and then come tell me that the artists weren’t quite knowingly using mythology to figleaf their gleeful fetish explorations.
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