In 1957, just before marrying, he packed a decade’s worth of his comics in a sack with a big rock and threw it off a bridge into the Cumberland River. He swore never to make such material again. Less than two years later, he began “The Saga of Valkyria Barbosa.” The protagonist, Valkyria, is a barbarian princess secretly raised by a commoner as a boy and later trained as a warrior. At 19, she becomes Queen of Veltria. It eventually ran 120 separate books, totaling 4,000 pages, depicting the torture of women.

He invented a barbarian culture crossed with the highly advanced science of Atlantis. Aging was quickened to bypass childhood, as Dad would certainly have preferred. Breasts were enlarged with special serums, and they could grow and lactate upon command. Permanent skin dye replaced clothing. The healing process was hastened, with no infection or scars. The dead could be resurrected. Hymens were restored. The only permanent disfigurement came from branding and amputation. Every character was female, with the exception of an occasional hermaphrodite. According to Dad’s notes, the pictorial domination of women by women was a practical decision — he simply preferred to draw them.

Along with the comics was a personal document dated 1963, with the caveat that it be read after his death. He was 29 when he wrote it. I was 5. He didn’t believe in diaries and it is his only long personal writing. He refers to the comics as his great secret and reveals a deep shame about his zeal for the material. He worried that he hated women. He wondered if there were other people like him, and if so, how they dealt with their urges. He began drawing comics portraying women in torment at 14, before any exposure to fetish material or knowledge of sadism. The impulse was simply inside him; he’d always been that way. He referred to the comics as an atrocity. The locked box in which he kept them was “full of my shame and my wickedness and my weakness.”

My father often told me that if not for pornography, he’d have become a serial killer. On two occasions he described the same story: One night in college he resolved to kill a woman, any woman. He carried a butcher knife beneath his coat and stalked the campus, seeking a target. It rained all night, and the only person walking around was him. He went home, soaked, miserable and alone, regretting the action. He began drawing a comic about stalking a woman.

Many years later he read a biography of a serial killer who owned bondage magazines at the time of his capture. According to Dad, the details of the killer’s childhood were “eerily, extremely similar” to his own, including three warning signs: bed-wetting, cruelty to animals and setting fires. This is known as the MacDonald Triad, named for the psychiatrist who studied a mere hundred patients at a mental hospital. Subsequent research has refuted these behaviors as causes of future violence. The traits have no predictive capacity. They are regarded as indicators of a distressed child with poor coping skills — one who might develop a personality disorder like narcissism or antisocial behavior — not as a recipe for a killer.

If my father was correct in thinking that porn prevented him from killing women, then I should be grateful for its continuing presence in his life. Far better to be the son of a pornographer than of a serial killer. But I don’t believe my father’s theory. The sight of blood, even his own, made him lightheaded enough to faint. He was not athletic or even strong and therefore incapable of overpowering most people. He was also a physical coward, having never been in a fistfight. His weapons were cruel words, the infliction of guilt and intimidation through rage. The idea that porn prevented him from killing women was a self-serving delusion that justified his impulse to write and draw portrayals of torture. He needed to believe in a greater purpose to continue his lifelong project. Admitting that he liked it was too much for him to bear.

After finishing the project, my feelings for Dad didn’t change as much as I anticipated. The more I delved, the more I discovered similarities between my father and me, a surprising result that at times left me dismayed. I didn’t like him more or love him less. I gained a greater respect for what he managed to do despite his limitations. His prodigious output is proof of commitment, discipline and endurance. Dad was among the last of the old-school American pulp writers, a journeyman for hire. In his office hung a hand-lettered sign that read “Writing Factory: Beware of Flying Participles.” Stacked beside his chair at his death were notes for a new book. My father was a workhorse in the field of written pornography. After five decades, he died in harness.