Craig Yoe has a knack for putting out great books – the second you hear the title of one of his books, you’ve just gotta have it. From BOODY: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers (which will be published by Fantagraphics Books on March 1) to Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings which was published last October by Last Gasp, you know that Yoe is dealing with fascinating lost, forgotten or secret aspects of comic book/comic strip/cartoon history. Yoe has the gift, yo.

His latest book is Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster, and the material inside is quite a find. You can read online about the financial difficulties Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster encountered once they sold Superman to DC Comics and pursued options to get a piece of the multi-million pie their creation was soon to become. But by the 1950s, artist Shuster needed money. He took a job doing fetish illustrations – bondage, S&M, you name it - for an under-the-counter magazine called Nights Of Horror. There’s a sneak preview available online which is probably NSFW.

The whole sordid enterprise involved not just Shuster and the magazine, but a murder trial and Fredric Wertham (author of Seduction Of The Innocent). Oh, what a tangled web Yoe has uncovered! And you know you’re in good hands. Yoe’s won the Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators, two Addys, the Mobius, and an Eisner Award and he’s got mad design skills as well.

The 160-page hardcover is scheduled for release on April 1 from Abrams ComicArts. Stan Lee wrote the introduction.