John Willie: A Love Letter

The Bizarre Godfather of Bondage Art & Design

photography by john willie

John Willie is one of my favorite fetish & bondage artists. Known for his fetish magazine Bizarre, cartoons such as The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, and his bondage photography & costume design, Willie is a true, iconic auteur within the fetish underground. Out of all of the variety of Willie’s work, his photography feels particularly timeless to me. Often when I’m flipping through hundreds of fetish & bondage photographs online, an image will appear that is particularly visually striking. It’s almost always a John Willie photograph. I’m still stumbling across work of his that I’ve never seen before. I wanted to share a bit of John Willie’s work & highlight his artistic legacy.

John Alexander Scott Coutts, better known by his pseudonym John Willie, was a photographer, artist, illustrator, cartoonist, costume designer, editor, and publisher of the first 23 issues of the underground fetish magazine, Bizarre.

John Willie was born in 1902 in Singapore to a British family. His family later relocated to the United Kingdom, where Willie grew up. In 1925, after being forced to resign from the Royal Scots for marrying a night-club hostess without the permission of a commanding officer, Willie migrated to Australia, where his marriage ultimately ended in divorce in 1930.

After moving to Brisbane in 1926, Willie joined a local High Heels Club, where he was most likely introduced to the print media of a community of shoe lovers and other fetishists. In 1942, Willie married his second wife, Holly Anna Faram, who became his muse and often modeled for him. Using the High Heel Club’s mailing list, Willie began producing and selling his own illustrations & photographs. In 1945, Willie moved to Montreal while Holly chose to stay in Australia. She died there in 1983 at the age of 70.

John Willie was introduced to the American fetish underground by Charles Guyette. Bizarre was created in 1945 and was published at irregular intervals from 1946-1959. The magazine included many of John Willie’s cartoons, drawings, and photographs, which often included his wife. John Willie is probably most famous for his fetish cartoon character, Sweet Gwendoline. In Willie’s The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, Gwendoline appears as a naïve & blonde damsel in distress, who finds herself tied up in scene after scene. She is rescued and also repeatedly tied up (though for benevolent reasons) by Secret Agent U-69. The villain, Sir Dystic D'Arcy, was based on Willie himself. The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline was first published as a serial, usually two pages at a time, in Robert Harrison’s mainstream magazine Wink from 1947-1950. Willie’s unique drawing style influenced later fetish artists like Gene Bilbrew & Eric Stanton.

Bizarre was suspended entirely from 1947-1951. In 1956, Willie sold the magazine to someone by the name of R.E.B., who published six more issues before Bizarre’s official end in 1959. After Willie sold the magazine, he moved from Canada to Hollywood. In 1961, he developed a brain tumor. Amidst his sickness, Willie destroyed all of his archives and moved to the British Isles, where he died in his sleep on August 5th, 1962. John Willie’s imagery, photography, drawings, & design remain highly influential & iconic within the fetish underground & beyond.