Actually, this has more to do with the comics than the funnies and with irony than funny.  The career of the comic book artist and co-creator of the Superman character, Joe Shuster, took a turn back in the ’50s, as described by Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times recently …

Joe Shuster drew Superman in the 1930s, which should have made him invincible. But after he and writer Jerry Siegel got into a legal tie-up with DC Comics over rights to the character in the 1940s (DC won), he moved on to other things.

One of those things, which he kept quiet, was a magazine called Nights of Horror. The salacious fictional crime booklet launched in 1954 and ran for 16 issues — with illustrations by Joe Shuster. These are now collected in the book “Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster” by Craig Yoe.

[...] Shuster drew beautiful women who were impossibly stacked and handsome men with impossibly broad shoulders. Once he drew them as heroes; later, he drew them stripped, vulnerable and twisted off into another world.

Apropos “secret identities,” my comic book “heroes” when I was growing up in the ’50s were usually not the men of steel but rather those impossibly stacked, beautiful women. I didn’t know anything about terms like GID or transgender, I just knew what I had.

More …

My Brand Spanking New Book

The Sexy ‘Secret Identity’ Of Superman’s Creator

Fetish Art Of Superman’s Co-Creator