For some people, their gay awakenings happen in an instant—after a fateful peek in a locker rooms. For others, it happens in one of the many movies in which Chris Evans appears shirtless. For a shockingly large number of people, gay awakenings happen while watching superhero movies and reading comic books. Thus, in a tale as old as time, a superhero kink is born.
Or at least, that’s how it happened for Paul, better known as Gay Comic Geek, an avid cosplayer and adult content creator. “I grew up reading comic books,” he says. By the time he was in high school, he’d discovered erotic comic books. “Sadly, they were heterosexual,” he explains, “but it was something that really turned me on.”
Paul started cosplaying at Comic Cons in 2007, and it wasn’t long before he began taking suggestive pictures to post online, making or buying costumes for new characters. Now, nearly 20 years later, he’s amassed a following of dedicated, horny superhero lovers. As he explains it, much of the erotic tension in superhero porn comes from an inverted power dynamic—the masculine, powerful, muscly superhero somehow gets defeated (a trope in nearly every comic book series), and, as punishment, the villain has his way with him.
Or maybe people just like looking at hot guys in skin-tight suits with exaggerated bulges.
That’s what creator PicAsssHole, who paints porn performers’ skin to look like superhero suits, is counting on. He began in 2023, when a well known porn performer asked to be painted. “It was always something I’d wanted to do,” he says, though he wasn’t sure there would be an appetite for the very specific genre of video. A viral video helped him find his audience, and he’s been painting porn performers ever since.
His followers enjoy watching the timelapse of a naked body being painted (the hardest body part to paint is the cock, for the record. “It’s a moving canvas!”) just as much as they enjoy watching the two painted characters fucking, according to PicAsssHole. “It’s like taking the skin-tight element of latex to the next level,” he explains. Seeing the shadows and contours of a superheroes muscles painted on—it’s easy to imagine you’ve caught your favorite superhero at a particularly vulnerable moment, his spandex-ed bulge revealed to be a hard cock.
There’s an element of roleplay at play here, as well. Paul usually includes a bit of backstory that’s in line with the canon of whichever character he’s dressed as—that’s part of the fun—but PicAsssHole’s performers get right to it for the most part. Their bodies, painted to resemble Spiderman’s Spidey Suit, or Mario’s iconic overalls, do enough of the storytelling for his audience to get the point.
In essence, a superhero kink is much the same as many others: a sexually charged moment from childhood played out in your adulthood. Or maybe it’s less Freudian than that. Maybe it’s about subverting tropes of masculinity, watching the masculine guy get fucked—and watching him love it.
