Customer Reviews

Best of Bizarre (TASCHEN Icons Series)

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This book is a compilation of historical "Bizarre" magazine black & white photos and sketches of fetish women in various attire. The body type is always the same stylized extreme hourglass, large conical breasts, a tiny waist and round (rear). I was expecting something a little more diverse, given the title, and didn't know that in this case "Bizarre" was more of a title of a source magazine than a description of the book's contents.

In some of the sketches you can see the form become so stylized that the arms are not even bound behind, but removed, and sometimes the shoes and hands have the same shape. You can see that the R. Crumb the cartoonist may have read these magazines, and took it to a new extreme.

To me the pictures are endless slight variations on a theme, in other words in the first pages interesting, but in the end, boring. You really have to be a fan of this style to do more than flip through the book.

Taschen's collection, sampled from issues of John Willie's BIZARRE, is a delighful look back at the work of a man who was in the forefront of eroding the 1950's, Ozzie and Harriet, twin-beds-in-the dark, missionary-style attitudes about sexuality. Back in the day, this was hot stuff, 'the-kind-men-like', (pre-Playboy) underground publishing. But be warned, it's a book more from historians than personal titillation. Our sense of 'what's shocking' has evolved so far that the average PG-13 movie probably eclipses any page in BIZARRE. One is left with a sense of 'what-was-all-the-shouting-about', yet John Willie was constantly skirmishing with the U.S.Post Office about whether BIZARRE was too pornagraphic to be sent through the mails. It's all here: dark, but still innocent, an opening salvo in the sexual revolution. It's a one-of-a-kind show. Don't miss it.