The History of Pirate Bathroom Comics

September 7th, 2006 Posted in Essays

Book Excerpt
“The History of Pirate Bathroom Comics: 1947-1954″
by Louis Ward

Had you been a child in the late 1940s, you could not have leafed through the comics at your local drugstore without seeing pirates going to the bathroom on other pirates (or children dressed as pirates). “On the rare occasions in any comic book of the 1940s when pirates were not shitting on one another,” explains Jacob Cophausen, foremost historian of the late-‘40s pirate bathroom boom, “they were certainly planning to, or at least researching more efficient methods for accomplishing same. It was everywhere. It was a craze.”

Released to little fanfare in the summer of 1947 by the near-bankrupt publishing house Pretty Good Comics, Pirate Bathroom Comics would break every existing sales record of the time to become the bestselling periodical in the industry. Over the following decade it would spawn hundreds of imitators, including Tales of Brownbeard the Pirate, Caribbean Steamer Comics, Scat-Play on the Seven Seas, Adventures of the Glass-Bottomed Galleon, Captain Corsair’s Sex Enema Monthly and the incredibly popular Shit On My Face Digest. Wherever one turned, there were pirates sparing back at you from a newsstand, relieving themselves sexually to the delight of children across the country. From 1947 until 1953, American youth had caught Pirate Bathroom Fever.

Yet as cherished as these comics are today—a copy of Pirate Bathroom Comics #1 can fetch up to $800,000 if a stupid collector buys one—few know the story of its publisher Pretty Good Comics, which produced the lion’s share of comics about pirates shitting on each other; or its owner and Pirate Bathroom creator, Winton Poldstein.

Most agree that Poldstein brought obscurity upon himself. The publisher withdrew from the public eye after the comic book witch-hunts of the 1950s, when Congress had openly called into question whether comics wholly composed of adults in pirate costumes defecating on children in fetishistic scenarios were suitable for children. Though Congress would eventually decide that yes, this material was actually perfect for children, Poldstein became disenchanted with the comics industry. He would spend the next several decades publishing children’s Bible stories, most of which involved minimal shitplay.

* * *In the summer of 1947, Poldstein was struggling to come up with new titles for his ailing publishing empire, Pretty Good Comics. Winton had recently inherited the company following the tragic and surprising death of his father—publishing giant Howard Poldstein—in a freak suicide accident. Pretty Good Comics had enjoyed enormous success during the superhero boom of World War II, with such classic titles as President America, Stupendous Man Buys War Bonds and Captain Ant-Man vs. Hitler. But with the war over, children had no interest in superhero books, and Pretty Good Comics was left with warehouses full of comics that were “unreadable garbage,” according to their creators. With bankruptcy looming, Winton had to come up with the Next Big Thing, or close the doors on his family’s legacy forever.

“It was a scary time,” he remembers. “Debt collectors were constantly coming by to break my legs, burn my genitals or sever the tendons in my ankles.” By August of 1947, Winton had had his legs broken over 17 times in one month. Unable to afford a hospital visit, he removed his leg bones and crawled around on his elbows.

Desperate for ideas, Winton would create Pirate Bathroom Comics completely by accident while leafing through his father’s notes. “Most of his ideas were about superheroes, so we couldn’t use them,” Winton recalls. “But in the margin of one page, my father had written ‘Comic about pirates and shit?’”

Unable to place the proper inflexion on written words, a literal-thinking Winton called in Joel Gilbert, the only writer left on his staff, with an announcement that would take Pretty Good Comics to undreamed-of heights.

“He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I need you to write a comic book about pirates shitting on each other,’” remembers Gilbert. “It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.”

It may have been stupid. (”It was,” maintains Gilbert.) But it wouldn’t be easy. Gilbert found it impossible to write the three stories needed to make up the first issue, given Winton’s strict editorial guideline that each story incorporate pirates using the bathroom as its central plotline. “My first try was about a haunted ship of ghost pirates reclaiming their treasure,” says Gilbert. “I added in a scene of the ghost captain pooping on the chest of his first mate on page four as an afterthought.”

Winton stuck to his instincts and rejected the story. “It had shit and pirates in the story, yes,” he recalls, “But was it about pirates shitting? No. Mostly it was about ghosts and treasure. I kept saying, ‘Nobody wants to read about pirates finding treasure!’”

With debts mounting and deadlines approaching, Gilbert would eventually write all three stories “in ten minutes,” writing the first one out, then photocopying it twice and changing the characters’ names in the copies. Gone were the ghosts and treasure, the swashbuckling and adventure. All 27 pages of Pirate Bathroom Comics #1 consisted of a plotless, narrativeless stream of pirate-themed ass-to-mouth shitplay. And the kids loved it.

American children, tired of mainstream adventure comics and starved for something new, embraced Pirate Bathroom Comics #1 with a passion not seen since the release of chocolate boots in the 1870s. The first issue alone would sell over 7 million copies. Winton would purchase brand-new solid gold leg bones for himself the following year.

By 1952, Pretty Good Comics once again pushed the genre forward by including child adventurers in stories. Escape From Bowel Island #29 sold over three million copies with the introduction of Billy the Teenage Pirate as a recurring character, who was used as a human toilet until issue #44.