Reraizure - Bondage Artist

"Unfinished"

You may have seen this remarkable image before, it's one of the most memorable creations of the bondage artist* 'Reraizure'. The model is precariously balanced on the foot rest of the stool and secured to it by rope across the seat. The whole set up seems to be defying gravity and somehow makes him appear very, very naked and vulnerable. His strapped back arms and bowed head epitomise submission - marvellous.

Reraizure explains that another model was supposed to sit on the stool to assist stability. That would have created a highly erotic alternative image but this one works very well as it is and if there's a bit of trickery keeping the stool stable it doesn't matter in the slightest. 

*I should perhaps explain that Reraizure only does the ropes, he doesn't take the photographs.

"Vision"

 Reraizure makes a speciality of suspension bondage, but in all fairness it's the photographer's vision that makes this image so striking. The barn-like setting suggests a remote and unfrequented location  The window casts a flattering light on the naked captive's body and the highly textured wooden walls and beams contrast with the smoothness of his skin. His position only allows him a tantalising glimpse of the sky outside his lonely prison and a sense of time passing.

This 'open' type of bondage is a stark contrast to the closed submissiveness of the previous image. It shows the captive in a heroic light with his arms posed to fight and folded leg poised for flight. He would be at home on one of Michelangelo's painted ceilings, honouring some deity or other by lounging at his feet.

"Eschereque"

  There's a sense of flight in many of Reraizures suspension images (not surprisingly). In this one the body line cleverly echoes the sweep of the stairs which can be seen spiralling upwards. The running pose seems to suggest a flight of a different sort as though this man is trying to escape the baffling visual maze, which borrows from Escher's idea of endless staircases which bring you back to where you started. There's a better-known companion photograph to this, showing the model seeming to descend with foot outstretched just above the banister rail (below).

Icarus

Icarus was the mythical character who foolishly tried to fly with stuck-on wings. The mirroring of the stair rail slope 'ties in' the model to the idea of a rapid descent. It also reminds me of boyish pranks sliding down banisters. The nudity of the model seems more noticeable here.

Invite

This is one of my favourites, an archetypal suspension bondage image with a very desirable captive neatly parcelled up in inescapable ropework. We can't see his wrists but the multiple leg tie-backs and supplementary roping around his feet suggests a captor that really means business. Once he's off the ground, this guy ain't goin' nowhere and his face shows an intriguing combination of calm and concern. Quite what the title means I'm not sure!

Connect

This is another moderately familiar image and one in which it's the sporting apparel that immediately 'connects' with me, setting the imagination racing into naughty kidnap scenarios. The raised leg affords an enticing glimpse of buttock and simultaneously pulls down his waistband at the back to tantalise in that area as well. On a more aesthetic level the neatly aligned, body and arm roping is very satisfying

This image has a couple of deceptive ingredients that only become apparent with closer study. The model is less enmeshed than first appears, as the body roping matches his unusual 'band' tattoos.

Also the model in this picture is actually lifted off the ground. It's not obvious, partly because of the lighting and also because the standing pose tricks the eye.

Notice the metal links held in reserve, looped though the door mesh top left.

Lily

This is pretty much the same pose as the sporting 'Connect' above but this model does have one foot on the ground, just. It makes a big difference. That enforced tip-toe introduces an element of stress, nicely echoed in the drawn-up, other foot. The suspension here helps to induce a bowed, submissive head in the model. Suspended by the primary bondage on his arms, escape without help is going to be extremely difficult

Reraizure calls it Lily but I know this as the stork or crane pose. 

I assume it's not the model's nick name! He's called Phil.

Seen alone in an unfurnished room he's either on display or stored out of the way and it's an effective scene setting device. His trendy jeans and bare top conjure the idea of a workman whose work failed to impress as much as his physique. Or one who volunteered for an extracurricular, fee-paying job and now perhaps has reason to regret it!

"Classical"

This study of a cute captive is Classical in the sense that it is a nude in a relatively simple form of restraint, but the body ropework and asymmetrical limb restraint is more akin to Japanese Shibari than the European Classical tradition.

The atmospheric lighting also steers us away from conventional, brightly-lit, academic studies into a more erotic direction. This open leg sitting/kneeling pose is both submissive and sexy even if you can't see anything. You know his undercarriage is touching the ground and  buttocks fully spread. 

He might be displayed on a pedestal but we aren't in a conventional slave market here!

In Balance

 This is a quirky picture with a neatly dressed captive seemingly 'hung out to dry' at the doors of an old garage or workshop. The thigh roping frames his crotch and his hands are safely out of the way. Whether he's gazing at his captor departing or an interested newcomer arriving you can decide for yourself but the image is full of potent uncertainty and opportunity reminiscent of those deserted town, horror movies.

 

Reraizure doesn't really do erotic art and though his bondage images are undoubtedly homo-erotic, he doesn't really do overtly gay imagery either. This gets close though, even though the two men are tied to each other back to back. Both are attractive and you immediately wonder what connects them in their nudity. As I have observed above, the flat kneeling position is full of implied eroticism and the interlocking heads are not devoid of sensuality either.

See more at Reraizure on Deviant Art

There's also a Reraizure tumblr page, it doesn't have different material or as much as the Deviant Art page has but it's easier to navigate and view, with different commentary

For other 'Bondage Rope Masters' click on the label below

First Catch Your Rogue - 10 The Bondage Apprentice

Reading The Instructions

Jeff had always fantasised about a buff burglar breaking into his home

About how he'd over-power him and have his wicked way with him.

He always kept his bondage gear handy for just such an eventuality.

Then one night it actually happened, 

he woke to find a stranger in his room.

But it turned out that the burglar was stronger than he was

He was rough too, not at all friendly or playful.

He tied Jeff up tight with his own rope

and settled down to go through all his stuff.

When dawn broke he was still there, totally engrossed in a book he'd found.

Being a delinquent ruffian he had read out loud and quite slowly

But he seemed to find it quite inspiring - the bits he understood. 

Jeff hadn't minded what he did after reading the first few chapters.

But Chapter 11 had been quite embarrassing for him

 and his bottom was still tingling red from Chapter 12

He was hoping he'd lose interest before he got to Chapter 21.

This fabulous image is from the legendary 'Bound and Gagged' Magazine

No website, all that survives is Bob Wingates blog (sadly inactive since 2016)

Read my tribute to 'B&G'

Malex in space

I tend to think of Malex as a purveyor of teeth-gritting, snuff imagery but there's plenty of less scary fetish material from him. His Sci-Fi and Space images are particularly interesting. 

This image showing a helpless, naked captive gazing out of a space ship window where a battle seems to be in progress. It's not obvious why he is in this position, a hostage hoping for rescue perhaps. The picture makes him seem highly vulnerable, as indeed he is should a stray blast damage the air tightness of his vessel. The sense of danger is subtly erotic in quite a powerful way. 

Seeing Malex's familiar and rather austere 'black and white' technique applied in a Sci-Fi context brings out it's relationship to the style commonly used in commercial adventure and war comic books. Perhaps Malex also worked in this field.

Notice how the spaceship overhead (if that's the right expression in space) bears a striking resemblance to the Starship Enterprise. Malex often borrows from contemporary movie imagery for these pictures*

(*look out for the laser cutting scene from 'Thunderball', the half-buried Statue of Liberty from 'Planet of the Apes' and the frame whipping scene from 'Starship Troopers')

  

 This picture reworks the same visual idea but the scenario is even more obscure. (Some of these images come from the old Katharsis site so I dare say the there's a reader out there who knows the story line please let me know via 'comments'). Two space crew seem to have been turfed out of their bunks and tied up naked. Once again a (vaguely phallic) spacecraft hovers overhead seeming to pose an ominous threat which the blackness of the sky seems to accentuate. 

It seems to be the 'situation' that interests Malex most here, the two captives in this image seem fairly tokenistic representations of men, lightly built and relatively ordinary looking, you don't get a strong idea of their personalities or emotions in this situation, even their erotic state seems ambiguous. It seems that it's their nudity, vulnerability and captivity that is important.

It this image the unspoken threat is realised but not fully resolved as the captive is carted off by heavily-armed, robotic dinosaurs to face some further unknown fate. The method of transport invokes the representations of primitive natives in 20th century exploration/jungle stories, Tarzan being a regular 'customer' of the technique in that genre. The captive's suspension is reversed by Malex to make a more erotic display of him and incidentally give him a much more exacting ride to his destination. Whilst the captors here seem to be impersonal, clumsy automatons, the phallic log from which he is suspended hints at more organic tests ahead.

In this picture, the naked captive is not tethered to anything but is completely immobilised and unable to move. Tightly bound and hooded he's placed in a kneeling position that immediately suggests a sacrifice or execution. Surrounded by a bleak wilderness, his body is covered in perspiration indicative of his fearful anticipation. 

One threat to him appears to be from below, underground where a strange alien creature can be glimpsed possibly able to burst out of the ground and and consume the hapless spaceman. Materialising imaginary creatures is a risky business in terms of credibility (as the images below and tentacle art generally illustrates). The partial cropping here helps perpetuate the sense of an ill-defined menace

The starbursts in the background may be meteors, raising the possibilty that this man's fate is to endure a meteor shower out in the open and exposed while his captors hide safely underground. A sort of extra-terrestrial stoning.

 

 In this picture the castaway astronaut is being spread out and tied down in a similarly bare landscape by a fearsome-looking, horned, spider-like creature. We finally get a decent glimpse of the victim's face. He looks up in awe at a plant-like entity which looms over him with fluid dripping ominously from it's tendrils. Notice how the shadow of the plant seems to suggest a threat to the young man's neck. 

The background geology here is quite intriguing. What we initially take to be weird rock formations bear a striking resemblance to crashing waves and the more you look at it the more it looks like sea. Perhaps it's a petrified sea.

This unfortunate traveller faces a threat of a different sort, that of medical experimentation by curious humanoid aliens. In all of these images it seems these inhospitable distant planets have a perfectly breathable air for humans but not apparently for these creatures who are suited up as full blown astronauts rather than medical technicians. 

The human's face is covered by what looks like a tentacled creature inspired by the movie, 'Alien'. It's tail is wrapped round the guinea pig's neck making a none-too-subtle suggestion of suffocation or some other deeply invasive coupling. I use the word coupling deliberately, because at this point the captive seems to be quite excited by the experience. Of course that doesn't mean he is going to survive it. The unpleasant threat posed by this creature may explain the protective suiting worn by the observers and it may be that these are humans too, with a warped sense of scientific curiosity. 

It's interesting to compare the tentacled creature here to the ones that took Harry Chess and Mickey prisoner in my Ajay article (Part 3). Humour aside, these images are exploring similar ideas of being totally taken over, engulfed by a more powerful being, one not constrained by normal human rules.

.

This scenario too would be worthy of a Harry Chess tale for it's sheer outlandish complexity. The image of a terrified, tied up man dangerously balanced above a pit containing a tentacled creature is fair enough. Quite why the caterpillar-like captor is using this contrived method of 'delivery' requiring considerable dexterity to set up and quite how it managed to capture and tie up the human in the first place is baffling. That said, the danger ingredients here are quite compelling. It seems unlikely that the creature in the pit is planning to tickle it's captive and the caterpillar 'feeder' is suitably powerful and repellent. It's another example of inter-species collaboration like the spider and plant above. Malex's drawing of the captive is one of his more realistic and physically attractive human creations.

At one time, these bleak landscapes were standard sci-fi territory but I think Malex's folio is unique in terms of fetish art. Modern artists, helped by the power of computers, seem to have moved on to more fantastical worlds and creatures in lusher settings more akin to earth.

Malex's spacemen all appear totally naked, ramping up the hostile threat of alien worlds and airless space. He doesn't appear to have explored the erotic power of tight-fitting spacesuits which have always interested me. I have published two astronaut pictures here 'Astronaut by Mitchell' 
and 'Space Cadet Chastised' by Mitchell

I don't think there's any decent repository for the work of Malex, 

visit my original A-Z article on Malex for search advice and more about the artist's other work.

Bareass blogs No 15

Bareass Baggage Bloke

(he loves to sniff the leather-bound boxes, when no one's looking)


Go to No 16
 
View series from No 1

for more bareass boys click on the 'bareass' label below

Bareass Blogs No 14

Bareass Building Sight

 That's a real working man-butt!

Go to No 15

View series from No 1

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Bareass Blogs 13

Bareass Bungling Burglar, Bound and Butt-Ready

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A-Z of Fetish Artists - Ajay (Part 3)

Read this series of articles from Part 1

Boys in the tub - Harry Chess & Mickey Muscle

The two principal characters of the Harry Chess adventures in relaxed mood, indulging their interest in sleazy, fetishistic activities. It's slightly less caricatured than the comic strips conveying more of their relatively youthful personalities. In the comic strips they are shown as adventurous and open to erotic experiences but they always seem to encounter the wrong man. Ajay described Harry Chess as his alter-ego but the characters that interested him most were his villains and their generous pecs. The other images presented here capture that fascination with big, dangerous men.

Ajay - Getting Off

A much meatier, masculine man showing an equally meaty attitude to the enjoyment of bondage and domination. Whilst some take pleasure in maltreating weedy boys, the possibility of a beast such as this submitting to discipline seems much more exciting to me.

The fleshing out of the comic-style character seems surprisingly effective in conjuring up a more believable erotic ideal. But notice the sophisticated, angular shading technique on his six pack and the accomplished detailing of the biceps. More than a mere caricature.

Ajay - Marine Discipline

 In images like these, the frivolity of similar Harry Chess scenarios is transformed into something more substantial with impressive, equally muscled men engaged in earthy and forceful erotic encounters. The milder caricaturing allows deeply masculine qualities to emerge that would not be apparent in more realistic imagery.

There's still humour present of course but in this case it's the intimidation of the captive, the imminent, unexpected stretching of his limits that amuses, rather that the incongruity or absurdity of the situation which has mysteriously evaporated.

I'm not a fan of the "Yes Sir! No Sir!" style of submissiveness, but the Marine Corps labelling provides a legitimate context for it here. It's strange how potent dressing two men in identical clothing can be. Be it jockstrap, team kit or uniform, just telling them what they have to wear and giving it to them, assigns to them a subordinate status. It also links them together and curtails their individuality in a mitchmen-esque 'putting them in their place' sort of way.
 

Ajay - Nipple irons coming up!

The bubble reads "Go...Fuck! ...I gotta think fast. He's heating up those nipple irons"

In this image Ajay explores the concept of limits and danger more explicitly. An array of S&M implements and paraphernalia seem to indicate that this hunky brute is receptive to a wide range of fetish exploitations but he shrinks from more the prospect serious pain and permanent scarring. The danger of submitting to inescapable bondage in an S&M situation is part of it's intrinsic excitement and the trust needed to enter into it can be intense bonding experience for the men involved. 

But do you ever really know someone that well, can you truly trust someone who wants to engage with you in this way? The discovery by a captive, that his trust may have been misplaced, that his captor's intentions are misjudged or even malign, that is a moment that sets in motion excitement of a different sort, an emotion that forms the foundation of every horror pic.

Ajay - In the Lair

 I've tagged this image 'In The Lair' because it seems to encapsulate the ever-exciting allure of the mysterious, dark and dangerous, big and masterful man, here given a hint of Latino as an extra exotic twist. His captive, caged for his master's pleasure and discovering the delights of being dominated is pretty hunky himself. Contrastingly blond and still dressed in remnants of his clothing he seems to have a degree of innocence or inexperience about him that is already going the way of his clothing. 

You'll find Ajay's characters' sex equipment' quite often migrates to impossible but convenient places, I suppose you just call it artistic licentiousness!

Ajay - Cauldron

 This poster for a fetish club shows something of Ajay's softer side and more serious application of his technical skills to create an image that seems stylised rather than caricatured. However 'straight' images like this by him are hard to find. 

For more about Ajay, the man, I recommend you read his interview with Jack Fritscher

There's a decent archive of Ajay's work  at Daddy's here. It includes 4 of the Harry Chess comic stories (not all complete unfortunately). They are presented in deconstructed format for easier screen reading. The strips do work better in their original crowded multi-frame format but you can only still see Harry Chess in printed form in some of the 'Meatmen' comic compilations (including Nos 1, 2, 3 and 11), also old issues of 'Drummer' if you can find them. I believe there was also a collected edition of his work at one time.

Read this series of articles from Part 1

for other A-Z articles click on the label below or search using the artist index page or the search facilities in bloggers navigation bar or top right sidebar

A-Z of Fetish Artists - Ajay (Part 2)

Read this article from Part 1

Tentacle capture from 'That Man from AUNTIE' *

The methods used by the bad guys to foil Harry and his companions are often inventive but few are as unexpected as this scene where Harry and Mickey are captured by their lunch at a beach-side, seafood restaurant. Despite it's absurdity there's something quite erotic about this situation with the overwhelming tentacle restraint spiced up by the double-capture 'buddy effect'. The men's matching, swimming trunks highlight their nudity in the octopus's intimate embrace. There's a mouth down there, I believe!

The image has connections to the famous Japanese watercolour of 'The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife' and I would also mention the beautiful homoerotic reworking of this theme by Priapus of Milet in 'Force of Nature' plus a more recent tentacle animation of unknown origin. These pictures concentrate on the seduction and sensuality of the imagined encounter. Ajay, however, has transformed it into a tight bondage capture. This is surprisingly absent from most renderings of tentacles which generally depict spread-eagle restraint as a facilitator for penetration (click on the 'tentacle' label below for examples).

Buddy torture capture from 'That Man from AUNTIE' *

A few frames later Harry and Mickey (minus swimming trunks) are lined up for a sort of 'Pit and the Pendulum' experience in the baddies dungeon. The coup-de-grace, however, turns out to be something quite different to what you expect, the continuation is shown below. Ajay's Ying and Yang style of buddy restraint is most original, if a little confusing visually. In this close-up we can see that the anatomical detailing of the men is pretty comprehensive and only held back from being full-blown sensual erotica by the caricaturing style. 

("Gee!" is Muscle Mickey's regular catchphrase, part of his 'dumb jock' persona).

from 'That Man from AUNTIE' * (click to enlarge)

Ajay's talent for inventing complex erotic tortures and dispatches is well illustrated by the villain's environmental management system (top right) and in the final frame where a 'simple' telescopic lance is chillingly augmented by curved, spiked side pieces, presumably designed to 'embrace' the victim on impact. Ouch! As we can see, the heroes are just as inventive in finding ways of escaping.

In this example of a full page you can see how dense Ajay's Comic style is, with compacted pictures and a good deal of funny (and sometimes mis-spelt) text crammed in as well. This means that they are not exactly a quick read. The style is designed for and probably best suited to the magazine format in which they first appeared. That way they are able to be read at leisure, undistracted by the myriad other thrills which always seem to be just round the corner on the web. Printed pages also seem to allow 'zooming in' by the brain which doesn't quite work on a computer screen for some reason, but even in this medium they richly repay patient reading if you set aside the time and get in close.

The Drums of Bang Kock Wong

Ajay recreates another classic B-movie scene in this excerpt, the old 'trap door and hidden pit' trick. The phallic eels infesting the waters below seem to have the transmitting powers of modern zappers but I don't think Bound God's ever tried this scenario. Even in comic form the sight of 3 naked men struggling to avoid the plunge out-does the average Hollywood 'dangling hero' cliche by a considerable margin.

from 'Daredevil', the abduction of B.O. aka Amyl Arm Pits

While the comic images are not exactly sensual in themselves, there are exceptionally sexy glimpses on occasions and the fetishistic captivity scenes provide fertile ground for erotic fantasies which are not quite fully realised on the printed page (not altogether surprisingly given the date and the mainstream publication medium used). The hunky captive's little cry of dismay here in response to an ambiguous threat from his captor, is a wickedly well-judged elaboration.

With images like this it's tempting for admirers to separate out the most erotic elements, view this example. If you compare these two images you can see more clearly the painful tethering technique used on 'B.O.' but something else gets lost in the simplification. The richness of the original image largely disappears as does the sense of panoramic flow from frame to frame. In fact you can see now that the character with his back to us is actually participating in both scenes and it's a satisfying and sophisticated integration device.

The overlapping of B.O.'s tackle with his captor's trunks (and presence of a hand nearby) are suggestive of intimacy in a general way but I can't see any specific 'hidden eroticism' in the juxtaposition. The tantalising little star (which is baffling in the cut down version) may be be the answer (is it referencing electricity or anatomical clenching?). It's possible Ajay was deliberately obscuring risky detail here or simply teasing his readers, but there's not a lot of evidence of such caution or coyness elsewhere in these works.

from Bang Kock Wong

Ajay does not idealise his team of heroes into handsome hunks nor the villains they face of course, but occasionally a good guy happens by who is allowed to look 'interesting'. This Marine, Lieutenant Rimmer, arrives with his men just in time to cart off the dejected villains and immediately attracts the universal, wistful admiration of the crew.

from Daredevil Doll

This equally rugged looking character is one of the FUGG* support team,

It's James Bond's techie 'Q' reimagined as big 'F' for gay consumption (so to speak)

That bull neck and jutting jaw is reminiscent of former English rugby player Lawrence Dellaglio

*There's a good round-up of acronyms and characters in the wiki article on Harry Chess


It's easy to dismiss Ajay's contribution to gay culture and liberation through his Harry Chess comics, but his assertion of all things gay, both sexual and social, serious and camp back in the mid-sixties, represented a rare (if not unprecedented) public expression of a completely formed and genuine, gay, cultural identity which was contemporary and not glorified by classical precedents. All gay men could potentially see and recognise themselves in the references, gags and political barbs, something that had never happened before in such an open way. As such he deserves to stand proudly alongside Armistead Maupin whose 'Tales of the City' stories set out on their similar (if less pornographic) path much later, in 1978.


In Part 3 of this article I will look at Ajay's more convential erotic images
which give a more rounded view of his artistic capabilities.

Go to Part3

Note: Part 1 of this article was originally published in 2008 
but entirely re-written in 2018 and Parts 2 and 3 added

Ajay revisited

Ajay - from Harry Chess - Bang Kock Wong

As part of my on-going updating of early mitchmen A-Z articles, I have completely rewritten the piece on Ajay and expanded it to three parts. In retrospect I underestimated his importance in the fetish art world and I admit I was put off in those early days by the rampant explicitness and sadism, which the example above graphically illustrates!

from Daredevil Doll

These days the political incorrectness troubles me more, but then he was Jewish!

You can read part one of the revised article at

A-Z of Fetish Artists - Ajay