Her first comic, simply titled The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, is a racetrack mystery melodrama with Sir Dystic D’Arcy plotting to get his hands on Gwendoline’s home. The mood always remains playful and lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek. Sir Dystic d’Arcy is such a bungling villain that we never feel that Gwendoline is in any serious danger. Agent U-89 is basically one of the good guys, although sometimes she’s a tad morally ambiguous. Gwendoline is sweet and naïve but while there was the danger that such a heroine would end up being a bit saccharine she is in fact likeable and has her occasional feisty moments. The Countess is unscrupulous and scheming but again she’s more of a melodrama villainess than a genuinely threatening figure. Sir Dystic D’Arcy is a stock melodrama villain, but really he’s more of a spoof of a stock melodrama villain. Her adventures are lighthearted, goofy, outrageously melodramatic and amusing. Gwendoline is continually falling into the hands of the villains and invariably finds herself being tied up, in varied and elaborate ways.

What will strike the reader immediately about the Gwendoline comics is just how good-natured they are. Gwendoline does however have an ally - a beautiful glamorous lady secret agent code-named U-89. Poor Gwendoline finds herself the victim of sinister plots by dissolute aristocrat Sir Dystic d’Arcy and d’Arcy’s henchwoman the Countess. John Willie was a writer, artist and photographer and was the editor and publisher of Bizarre magazine but he is probably best known for his comic strips featuring his heroine Sweet Gwendoline.

Willie was himself inspired by early movie serials such as The Perils of Pauline. Just Jaeckin’s wonderful and delightful 1984 movie Gwendoline was inspired by Willie’s comics. John Willie became something of a cult figure in the 70s and he has had a considerable influence on pop culture. You might be wondering what on earth I’m doing reviewing his work here but if you read on you’ll see that he is not an entirely inappropriate subject for this blog. John Alexander Scott Coutts (1902-1962), who used the pseudonym John Willie, is perhaps the most famous figure in the history of fetish art and literature of the 20th century. The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline is a hardcover volume published in 1974 which collects most of John Willie’s comics and many of his drawings.

He Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline