Are we in the golden age of superhero porn? It sure seems like that. The Avengers continues to break box office records, and meanwhile a ton of superhero porn spoofs come out every month. There will probably be a dozen Justice League porn films before a real Justice League movie ever comes out.


But superhero porn has a long, if not necessarily proud, tradition, going back to 1940s comics featuring Superman and Plastic Man doing weird and obscene things. Here's the history of superhero porn, of the last 60 years.

Note: This is necessarily an incomplete history, because there's never going to be perfect archiving or cataloguing when it comes to teh pornz. Also, we're leaving out things like Flash Gordon porn, or Barbarella, because they're sort of grey areas in terms of being superheroes.


Tijuana Bibles

In the 1930s and 1940s, one of the most popular forms of porn consisted of tiny erotic comic books called "Tijuana Bibles" — including some which parodied popular characters of the time like Flash Gordon... or Superman. According to TijuanaBible.org, there's an early 1940s comic called Superman and Lois, in which Superman "rescues Lois' virtue," and then has sex with her himself. (So if someone asks you what the worst Superman comic of all time is, now you know.) And of course, Superman co-creator Joe Schuster drew a series of fetish/bondage comics depicting Superman and Lois look-alikes doing BDSM. (Pictured at left.)

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In the late 1940s, an artist called "Mr. Dyslexic" (who's come in for harsh criticism from Art Spiegelman) produced a series of erotic parodies of various National (DC) superheroes, including Superboy, Captain Marvel Jr. and Plastic Man — see a panel at left where Plastic Man turns himself into a chair so an unsuspecting woman will sit on him. (Warning: Links very NSFW! Also, some of these comics are rapey.) Also, apparently Superman made frequent appearances in a 1950s TJ Bible called "Boarderless and Barber Pole."


Eric Stanton's Blunder Broad

Stanton is one of the most famous bondage/fetish artists of all time, and classic Wonder Woman comics are all about bondage and strange fetishes like women dressing up as deer — so it's probably not surprising that Stanton produced his own erotic version of Wonder Woman in the 1970s. As the name suggests, Blunder Broad is sort of an inept superhero who gets captured and tied up a lot. And true to form for Stanton, the Blunder Broad comics tend to be both slapsticky and wildly sadistic. At one point, Blunder Broad gets put into a corset with a saddle on it, so the supervillain Count Dastardly can ride her around like a pony. These are easy to find online.

Bat Pussy

This 1973 Batman porn spoof is widely described as the worst porn movie ever made, thanks to some incredibly unarousing sex and a general attitude of awfulness. There's a lengthy and painful deconstruction of the film here, but let's just quote from Something Weird Video's description:

Are you sitting down? In the grand tradition of superheroes like Aquaman. Green Lantern and Wonder Woman comes... Bat Pussy! That's no typo. Bat Pussy sits around her secret hideout waiting for her super senses to tell her when a crime is about to be committed. Her * begins to twitch" and she jumps up. Clad in green tights, a ratty cape, a tee shirt with the famous Batman insignia on it and gym shorts (!), the masked avenger hits the open road on her Hoppity Hop. (For those who didn't have one as a kid, these were big rubber balloons you squatted on and bounced around with!) Jesus Christ!


Souperman

This 1976 porn film starred Marc Stevens as the eponymous hero, whose alter ego is Clark Bent, a reporter for a sex magazine. Yes, it made sense in the 1970s. The villain is Luther (not Luthor), who has developed a special formula that will kill everybody's sex drive — but luckily Souperman has some magic nuts (actual nuts, get your mind out of the gutter) that will save everybody's libidos. Not making any of this up. This film is usually paired on a DVD with Super Lady, the 1975 film about a superheroine whose superpowers have the side effect of making her a nymphomaniac. She fights the supervillain Zabor, whose "sphere of influence" threatens the entire world. According to AVManiacs, "The soundtrack for this movie is amazing. It's all 'oodle doodle wee wee poot poot doo da doo' computer noises and moog sounds. For some reason the movie also cuts to illustrated comic book style pictures of Super Lady at really random moments. It's horribly directed and the sex is pretty plain but the soundtrack is so completely bad ass." Yes, it's porn that you love for the soundtrack alone.

Ms. Magnificent

Released in 1979, this film is pretty much a straight-up spoof of the then-new Superman: The Movie — to the point where Warner Bros. sued. Supporting characters include Lois and Clark, who both work at the same big newspaper where Ms. Magnificent has her secret identity as a reporter. Ms. Magnificent is sent to Earth from her doomed planet, and develops superpowers including flying and super-strength. Oh, and the supervillain Kreetia Borgia has a dildo made out of the one substance that Ms. Magnificent is vulnerable to. (Yes. Really.) We've assembled a collection of Kreetia Borgia's greatest moments from the film, at left — including the insane moment where she announces, "I LOVE MYSELF." The wrongness of this film pretty much knows no bounds, and it's easy to see why more recent superhero porn spoofs have avoided such out-and-out supervillain tropes.


Hup! Comics

Famous underground comics artist R. Crumb hates superheroes, so it's not surprising that he took the opportunity to make fun of them in this 1987 comic. It's basically a zany mind-control sex romp, in which a ridiculous superhero team, the Mighty Power Fems, gets hypnotized into becoming sex kittens and helping to destroy capitalism. You know, the usual. It's very, very smutty and as weird as you'd expect.


Penthouse Comix

Back in the early 1990s, when Penthouse was still a publishing empire, they started a regular comics anthology — which was chock full of weird superhero spoofs, alongside barbarian comics and various other things. What made Penthouse Comix unusual, though, was the fact that real comics superstars like Jim Steranko, Adam Hughes, Luis Royo and Ernie Colon contributed artwork to the stories of superheroes like Captain Adventure and Hericane. It was 33 issues of lavishly illustrated, often incredibly silly smut, with some of the greatest creators involved. Check out a gallery of some Penthouse Comix covers and interior art, at left.

The Internet and Rule 34

You can pretty much divide superhero porn into two eras: before the internet (when it was hard to find) and after the internet (when it was everywhere.) There's simply no way to catalogue all of the superhero erotic art that's been posted online, in places like Deviant Art and a million paysites. Plus there are sexy/porny cosplay pics everywhere, including people like Tanya Tate and Meow Misti Dawn. (We've included a gallery of a few random images at left.) The website Literotica.com has a whole superhero category. So, too, does the alt-sex-stories-erotica text repository. Since about 2000, you'd have to have all your search filters on and make an active effort to avoid superhero porn. Special mention goes to Superheroine Central, a site that's chock full of superheroine bondage art and photos, mixed in with a ton of other bizarre fetishes. (Warning: That last link is not for the faint of heart.)


The Pro

Not, strictly speaking, porn as such — but probably worth mentioning. This 2003 one-shot by Garth Ennis and Amanda Conner features a sex worker who gets superpowers and basically uses them to be a super-sex-worker.


Stripperella

Stan Lee created this weird porntastic superhero spoof, voiced by Pamela Anderson, which debuted in 2003 and featured some of the weirdest attempts at humor ever, including a villain called Cheapo who only commits really cheap crimes. Not, perhaps, the highest point in Stan Lee's career. But probably not the lowest, either.


Empowered

Quite possibly the most famous superhero bondage art out there. Artist Adam Warren, who had previously done a lot of Dirty Pair comics, created some superhero bondage stories as private commissions for a fan. But then he wound up building them out into a whole running storyline about the heroine Empowered, who's always getting tied up. Over time, the characters get a lot more nuanced and the story gets a lot less porntastic, but it's always quite "bondage-riffic."


Gay Superhero Erotica

There probably was gay superhero porn prior to ten years ago, but we haven't been able to find much out there. (It was probably in small-press zines and anthologies that aren't well preserved online.) But there's been a ton in the past half dozen years, including Anti-Heroes.net, which seems to be your go-to site for images of the X-Men having sex without any X-Women present. And what the Incredible Hulk looks like when his purple pants finally get shredded completely. And so on.


And there are tons and tons of gay superhero erotica anthologies out there, led by the Unmasked: Erotic Tales of Gay Superheroes series edited by Eric Summers. (The first story in the first book features thinly-disguised Batman and Mr. Fantastic archetypes trying to figure out what to do when your spandex costume keeps getting torn. The Mr. Fantastic knockoff goes to a superhero tailor, who measures his naked body and tells him, "Do not expand"... with predictable results.) But also, looking at Amazon.com, there are tons of other gay superhero erotica ebooks and print anthologies out there now. (Not to mention a ton of straight ones.)


There's also Stonewall and Riot, an X-rated gay superhero animated movie from 2006, which you can check out at the link.

The Axel Braun era

Which brings us up to the current era in superhero porn — when there appears to be a brand new X-rated spoof coming out every week or so. We exclusively premiered the SFW trailer for the Avengers porn a while back. There's so much of this stuff, there's even a porn parody specifically tied in to the 1960s Batman TV show. Here are an assortment of random SFW trailers for these films:

The Dark Knight Rises XXX

The Dark Knight XXX



Batman XXX



BatfXXX: The Dark Knight XXX



Katwoman XXX



Supergirl XXX



Superlady



The Avengers XXX



Incredible Hulk XXX



Captain America XXX



Thor XXX



Iron Man XXX



Spider-Man XXX



Superman XXX



More Superman XXX



Justice League XXX



Wonder Woman XXX Hardcore Parody



Wonder Woman XXX Interactive



Superheroine 3D XXX

And so on. It's all Joss Whedon's fault, really.