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From Spanking Art

The Interview series continues!

• Interviewer: Spankart
• Interviewee: Gauis Marius
• Date: 21 February 2008

[edit] Interview

Spankart: Hello Gauis Marius! It's my special pleasure to interview a highly creative person who is not only a merited spanking artist but also a regular and very productive contributor here at the Spanking Art wiki. At your article, you already gave a lot of very interesting personal details that are bound to make people curious to learn more about you. You seem to be a very international person.

Gauis Marius: Yeah, I've always been a bit of gypsy, I guess it comes from my parents moving around a lot when I was a kid. Even during my student years, I found I couldn't stand being in the one place too long, and usually transferred from one university to another every couple of years. I first started travelling abroad looking for teaching work; we were going through a recession back home, and Asia was full of opportunities. In a sense, travelling was a matter of necessity, but I eventually found I prefered the lifestyle.

S: What languages do you speak?

G: Smatterings of Japanese, Korean, Thai and French. Mainly survival language, just enough to get by in everyday life. You tend to pick up common expressions from your students when you're teaching English as a second language, especially slang and idiom. Japanese teenagers have some particularly interesting phrases and are quite eager to teach them to you.

S: When and how did your interest in spanking begin?

G: I started very young, before I entered grade school, as a matter of fact. Like many people of my generation, my first "sexual" experiences were mediated via TV. This was the early sixties, OTK scenes were still fairly common in those days, so it was just a matter of time before something turned up on the tube. Almost inevitably, it was a fairly routine M/F sequence from an old school romantic comedy, but it made a huge impression on me. I remember being frankly astonished by the sequence; I'd never realized that adults punished each other the way they did children. The idea that a man could reduce a woman to the status of a little girl was something entirely new, unexpected, and utterly consuming. It quite literally altered my worldview, adding a sexual dimension to my perception of life.

S: You also seem to be a great connoisseur of art. What art forms, genres, styles, etc. do you like best, or have you studied the most?

G: High Art: Rubens, Turner, Titian, Ingres.

Graphic Art: Norman Rockwell, Marcel Marlier, Frank Frazetta.

Comics: Jack Kirby, James Steranko, Barry Windsor-Smith.

Manga: Osamu Tezuka, Eguchi Hisashi.

My main interest has always been the human body and narrative form; this probably stands out in most of the artwork I've contributed to this site.

S: May I ask about the story of your pen name?

G: It's a misspelling of 'Gaius Marius', one of the later dictators of the Roman Republic; reportedly a brilliant tactician and one of Julius Caesar's childhood role models. Ancient history is another one of my prime interests, I chose the name 'Gaius Marius' because he was an interesting historical figure (but mostly because no one else was using it at hotmail).

S: When did you draw your first spanking cartoons?

G: I suppose I would have been around nine or ten. I'd shown an aptitude for art since about the second grade and began drawing comics a couple of years later. I went through this phase of doing strips about things I found 'sexy' - almost always based on something I'd seen on TV.

Naturally, they were extremely simple at first, following the dialogue of the movie (or whatever) word for word. Then I began developing my own characters a few months later. My main area of interest was superheroes, and I started incorporating OTK scenarios into the storylines (not difficult to do, given the universal Good vs Evil archetypes commonly employed).

I worked exclusively in M/F pairings at the time, chiefly because that was what I was most familiar with - child spanking wasn't common in the superhero genre (and I considered myself waaaay too mature to read Audrey or Lulu). Another reason was that being a ten year-old kid myself, I had absolutely no interest in girls my own age - young women were infinitely more fascinating, and consequently more "spankworthy".

I suspect that's actually quite common in childhood sexual development - most kids play at being grown up, casting themselves in adult roles - cops and robbers, mommies and daddies, doctors and nurses etc - gendered stereotypes, in other words. It follows that in their sexual fantasies, young children would see themsleves - and their imaginary partners - in much the same terms.

S: This must have been 30 years before the advent of the Internet. How long did it take you to discover that you're not the only one with this special interest in spanking?

G: In one sense, I'd always assumed that the feelings I encountered were 'normal' - ie, something that everybody experienced but simply didn't talk about. It was an easy assumption to make back in those days; people weren't as open about sex as they are today, and most kids were left to figure things out on their own.

On the other hand, I first began to understand it as a fetish around the time I entered high school; I would have been around twelve or thirteen. I never met anyone who admitted to a similar interest, but I'd reached that point in life where most kids start assimilating new knowledge through a kind of natural osmosis.

S: Have you been a consumer of early (printed) spanking novels, spanking magazines, or spanking videos?

G: Not really. Material of that kind wasn't easy to come by in my home country when I was growing up, so I never really developed much personal interest in pornographic literature or photography. On the other hand, I was very interested in the more mainstream sources - 'saucy' postcards, newsprint advertisements, magazine illustrations and the like. By and large, they were of much higher quality than anything that was sold in a brown-paper wrapper. These were a major source of inspiration when I eventually began selling my work to overseas fetish publishers.

S: What kind of work was that, and who were these publishers?

G: The artwork covered a range of subjects, from 'straight' vanilla porn to transgendered fantasy, bondage, tickling, spanking and various combinations of the above. For privacy reasons, I can't mention the actual magazine titles, but I can mention that a few are listed on this site, and one of them has achieved iconic status within the online spanking community.

S: Is there any place where we can see some of your pre-computer era works?

G: If you know where to look, yes. Again, you need to think about well-known British journals catering to particular tastes and interests. Some of them went online a few years back...

S: Do you enjoy consensual spanking - active or passive - in real life?

G: Not to any great extent. I occasionally dabbled with role-playing during my twenties, but never found it particularly satisfying. In my experience, real life rarely - if ever - measures up to the fantasy.

That's only me, though.

S: Besides drawing spanking cartoons and comic strips, do you also do non-spanking or mainstream artwork?

G: I used to do a lot of exhibition work back home before I took up teaching in Asia. The subject matter usually involved 'transgressive' themes - hermaphrodism, the transgendered body, sado-masochism, the Male Gaze, etc. I never sold very much, but the work often attracted a fair deal of notoriety. I was sometimes asked to contribute paintings to group exhibitions soley for the controversy they were likely to generate.

S: Your comics - including the American one, Glory Bee - seem to be strongly influenced by Japanese cartoon style of the 1950s/1960s, the precursor of modern manga and anime. Also the settings and characters of much of your work are clearly Japan-oriented. Is that for stylistic reasons, for nostalgic reasons, or because of your main target audience?

G: That's a very complex question, SA. Visual influences aside, a recurring theme in my most recent work has been the depiction of younger females in the mass media. As you've probably noticed, much of my art references venues such as comics, cartoons and advertising - areas which demonstate how much our perceptions have altered over the past 50 years.

Images which were perfectly acceptable to our grandparents are considered inappropriate in the present day (something of a paradox, considering our grandparents were far more conservative people than we are). A similar process has occurred all across the popular culture - children have to be represented in sterile, sanitized, politically correct terms or the depiction is labeled a damaging stereotype. Even a clearly inoffensive image - the Coppertone Girl for example - is considered bordering on child porn due to the mild nudity.

Much of my artwork questions this perception by drawing on old-school depictions of little girls. Glory Bee is a composite of several child characters including Little Audrey, Li'l Jinx, Little Lulu et al. Historically speaking, such characters were never particularly numerous (even at the height of their popularity), and are all but extinct in the present day. In recent years, we've seen a resurgence of interest in shows like Powerpuff Girls or Kim Possible, but again, they're much less prolific than their male counterparts. In many respects, the "classic" little girl archetype has been replaced by the Japanese magic girl.

The interesting thing about the Mahou Shoujo genre is that it was vastly more successful than its Western counterpart. From the very first of its line (Mahou Tsukai Sally, 1966), magic girl cartoons have dominated Japanese animation, and, unlike the American product, have largely resisted uneccessary political correction. Shoujo characters can be cute, ditzy, girly and scatterbrained without it being considered a damaging stereotype - mainly because, like real children, they can also be brave, resourceful, intelligent and confident at the same time.

The classic era of Japanese animation (1963-circa 1975) is a fascinating period; a time of experimentation when the rules hadn't been set in concrete and the conventions were still being developed. One of the things I find most interesting is that the Japanese depict children in realistic terms (even in cartoons revolving around a fantasy scenario) - Nobita spies on Shizuka while she's bathing, Melmo examines her body in a mirror trying to figure out how a woman breast-feeds a baby, Rabi wonders what his older sister looks like naked. These are all normal forms of behavior in any child, but they were never depicted in American cartoons of the corresponding period. We see it more often in the present day, but it's significant to note that the change has come about since anime became popular in the West.

In short, for various reasons, I've fallen under the potent influence of Japanese animation, which has become a dominant force in Western popular culture.

S: You largely published your Internet-age spanking cartoons and comic strips in MSN groups. Did you make good experiences with MSN?

G: At its peak, Glory Bee had over two thousand members, four contributing writers and two regular artists (myself and William J. Griffin). From the very start, it was never a spanking group per se - it was a fansite dedicated to little girl characters like Jinx, Mary Jane, Audrey and Lulu. There were some spanking scenes and panty shots, but they were visual conventions common to the genre. I made no apologies for their inclusion, as they were completely relevent to the site's primary topic.

I also made sure to weed out anyone who posted questionable images or messages to the group (and there were quite a few, I might add; perverts who wanted me to illustrate their sexual fantasies), so there really was no basis for anyone to complain regarding the content.

The problems really began after MSN shut down all of its adult groups two years ago. Glory Bee - and its predecessor, Megu-Chan - were initially unaffected by the purge, but within a few months, we were getting complaints from various individuals claiming we were "promoting" child porn. This was, of course, a complete lie; all of our material came from mainstream sources, none of which contained any sexual references or innuendo.

Unfortunately, in the present day, even the most inoffensive spanking picture can be interpreted as inherently sexual, particularly if the image involves a minor - even an imaginary child like Little Audrey. As you already know from recent events, it is impossible to reason with a fanatic, particularly one with an axe to grind.

Evidently, someone took offense at the site's content and demanded MSN shut it down. Under normal circumstances, MSN usually contacts the group's owner and gives them 48 hours to remove the contentious material. However, when an accusation of child pornography is made, they don't seem to bother with the formalities. Originally, I had five egroups dedicated to comics and animation. Two of them were terminated during the purge, the remaining three - Glory Bee, Megu-Chan and Fanservice - were all deleted in the space of a month - most likely due to the actions of one individual. By a catastrophic stroke of bad luck, this happened around the time my PC suffered a massive disk failure, meaning that we lost a huge amount of material unavailable elsewhere.

Happily, the principal members of the group reformed at Shoujo Imageboard, which is actually much larger than Glory Bee ever was. In retrospect, maybe the closure was good thing, as it led to the creation of a site encompassing all of its precursors.

S: You are one of the few artists who never draws bare bottoms. Your girl characters always get spanked on the seat of their panties. What's the reason for that?

G: Well, it's actually a matter of context. Much of my work references earlier material; Glory Bee draws on kiddies' comics of the 50s, Miho-chan is derived from 1960s anime. Bare-bottom spanking was not a convention of either medium at the time; panty-spanking was the norm in both cases (and, as I've argued elsewhere, it was most probably done to reinforce gender stereotypes). I'm simply following the original sources in that regard.

You might notice, on the other hand, that Gomen Nasai 1 and 2 (still in production) employs some degree of bare bottomed imagery. This is because Gomen Nasai references modern day anime games, many of which utilize BB spanking as a lead-up to more hardcore nudity. Once again, this is a matter of context; I have no problems with bare bottomed spanking pics as long as it's an established convention of the artform or genre.

S: What projects are you currently working on? When do you estimate Gomen Nasai 2 will be released?

G: At the moment, I'm dividing my time between Shoujo Imageboard, Gomen Nasai 2 and a third project called Ikusa no Yukai (a non-spanking anime game). I'm also trying to get a Lolicom Wiki off the ground (though I'm having trouble finding a server willing to touch the idea, naturally enough).

I'm hoping Gomen Nasai 2 will be available towards the end of the year, though a lot of that depends on my RL working schedule. Sorry, I can't be more precise than that, but the project is always on the drawing board, so to speak.

S: Thank you very much for this interview, and keep up the good work!

G: My very great pleasure, SA. And thank you for all of the tireless work you've done on behalf of the online community.