In the rarefied realm of classic cartoon pin-up art, nobody did it better than Jack Cole. With his quirky line drawings and sensual watercolors, Cole, under Hugh Hefner's guiding hand, catapulted to stardom in the 1950s as Playboy's marquee cartoonist, a position he held until his untimely death at the age of 43.
Jack Cole has been justly celebrated as the creator of Plastic Man and an innovative comic book artist of the 1940s (especially in Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd’s Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits). After finishing his 14-year run on Plastic Man, he found himself looking for something new. According to Cole, his savior was the Humorama line of down-market digest magazines. This girls and gags magazine circuit proved to be the perfect training ground to regain his footing and develop his craft at single panel “gag” cartoons. His ability to render the female form was already without peer. Though he signed his cartoons “Jake,” Cole’s exquisite line drawings and masterful use of ink-wash — a skill he carried over to Playboy — betrayed his pseudonym. In comparison to his contemporaries, however, Cole was probably Humorama’s least prolific artist. Though his images were frequently used for covers, Cole’s cartoons were few and far between, with scarcely a single drawing appearing every five issues.
Along with a foreword by editor Alex Chun, this volume (originally released in a now out-of-print hardcover edition that now fetches high prices on the secondhand market) collects the best of these hidden gems, including several shot from Cole’s stunning original art. Most of these drawings have not seen print elsewhere since their original publication.
"Cole's goddesses were estrogen soufflés who mesmerized the ineffectual saps who lusted after them." – Art Spiegelman
"Jack Cole was a masterful comic book artist who helped define the golden age of his art form." – Village Voice
104-page b&w/color 7.5" x 10.25" softcover
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By Wallace Wood; collected in one 144-page 10-1/2" x 13" volume -- Woody's mid-'70s foray into the hard-boiled spy genre, full of nekkid girls, violence, guns, nekkid girls, torture, treachery, and... oh, yeah, nekkid girls!
Ed. Alex Chun. No other pin-up cartoon artist over a 30-year period was as prolific or as omnipresent as Bill Wenzel. Virtually every humor and men’s magazine, ranging from Judge in the mid-’40s to Sex to Sexy in the ’60s and ’70s, boasted two, if not a dozen, of Wenzel’s pin-up cartoons. Quick with pen and ink, Wenzel was equally adept with the brush, and nowhere was this more evident than in his work for the Humorama line of girlie digests. The digests, which sported titles like Gaze, Joker, Jest, Comedy and Stare, were crammed full of marginally risqué single panel pin-up cartoons and cheesecake photos featuring the likes of Bettie Page, Irish McCalla, and even Sophia Loren, and as a long-time contributor to the Humorama digests, Wenzel was part of an artistic fraternity that included the likes of Bill Ward, Playboy’s Jack Cole, and Archie’s Dan DeCarlo. Though wasp-waisted long-legged women were de rigueur in the digests, Wenzel set himself apart from the rest of the best with his decidedly more Rubenesque rendering of the female form. Whether they were aloof secretaries biding their time waiting for their bosses to ditch their wives or smoldering vixens preparing for a night on the town, Wenzel’s women carried their weight well, the better to hold up their ample chests. Without a doubt, Wenzel is the most overlooked of all the pin-up cartoon artists of his era, but with this volume, which features a selection of his sexiest and most sensual ink-wash images, Wenzel takes his rightful place among Humorama’s top artists. 216-page softcover.
Renowned pin-up artist Bill Ward gets the full coffee-table treatment in this lavish oversized color paperback edition featuring Ward's most polished, fully-realized portraits of the 1950s. Imagine, if you will, an innocent but stunning young woman boasting the most unlikely Barbie-like proportions — and then some — poured into a wisp of lingerie or clingy cocktail dress, silky opera-length gloves, and sheer thigh-high stockings, perched precariously but not inelegantly atop a pair of dangerously high stilleto heels, and you've got the recipe for the quintessential Wardian glamour girl. Ward's girls became staples of countless men's and humor magazines, where he shared the pages with cult models like Bettie Page and fellow "good girl" artists such as Dan DeCarlo and Jack Cole. Ward became the standard-bearer and justly famous through the '50s and '60s for his angular, high-sheen images of improbably busty glamour girls, a kind of low-rent Charles Dana Gibson. What set Ward apart — and above — his talented contemporaries was his use of a medium called the conte crayon. When drawn on a simple newsprint stock, this potent combination created a charcoal-like effect and color that gave Ward's original art an elegant sepia-tone quality. This volume features the best of Ward's Humorama work, including a selection of Ward's infamous telephone girls. Tame by today's standards, Ward's telephone girls were considered provocative at the time, caught as they were in various states of dress, or, more often, undress. The majority of the images in this volume were drawn between 1956 and 1963 when Ward was at the height of his skill, shot from original art and printed in full color. This book not only reproduces over a hundred beautifully rendered illustrations, but captures a more innocent moment in American pop culture. 176-page full-color softcover.
Edited by Alex Chun & Jacob Covey. For more than 40 years, Dan DeCarlo was best known for his definitive rendition of Archie Comics' Betty and Veronica, two of comics' most beloved icons. But before joining Archie in the late 1950s and unbeknownst to many, DeCarlo was already honing his skills as a good girl artist for the Humorama line of digest magazines. This second volume once again displays DeCarlo's sexiest Humorama pin-up cartoons, and continues Fanatagraphics' dedication to showcasing the best of the classic pin-up cartoonists. 216-page two-color softcover.
In all its many guises, sex has been around for a long time. Back in the 1930s it was these little eight-page sex comics that became the talk of men's clubs, bars and some of the rougher workplaces. Famous Sunday-funnies cartoon characters were the earliest, and most popular, targets of these XXX-rated parodies; a parade of Hollywood actors and actresses madly copulating in a wide variety of positions soon followed. These "Tijuana Bibles" were so popular in their day that fans anxiously awaited new releases; men and boys got a genuine education when they realized there was more than one position that could be used to have sex. As the years went on, pornography evolved into men's girlie magazines, and then today's adult film industry; one look at these sexy, silly little comics will have you hankering for the good ol' days.
This fat hardcover volume collects all of Vols. 1-3 and most of Vol. 4 of the original Tijuana Bibles softcover series. Like those volumes, this book features a new original cover illustration by Pat Moriarity. This volume also includes comics historian R.C. Harvey's introductory essay "Getting Our Pornograph Fixed."
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Edited by Michael Dowers. Another raunchy collection of sex comics from an era gone by. Most of the stories are sixteen or more pages long. "Hot Nuts" is the story of a farm girl who fills her sexual needs behind the barn until she meets a man from the city and decides to move to town for more choices. After she runs out through those choices she winds up in the circus making love to the elephants to satisfy her urges. Add to that tale all your favorite old cartoon characters like Harold Teen, Toots and Casper, Wimpy, The Vacuum Cleaner Salesman, and Tillie and Mac. Plus a whole lot more. 128-page b&w softcover.
Edited by Michael Dowers. Our latest edition of this very popular series of reprints of classic 1930s "Tijuana Bible" comics, as always lovingly assembled by editor Michael Dowers and with a snappy new cover by Pat Moriarity! This volume focuses in particular on the pre-WWII Bibles, in which it was commonplace to find some of the most celebrated comic book characters and movie actors of the day engaged in wild sex acts with their clothes off, doing the "great nasty" with no shame whatsoever. (In this volume, Popeye and Wimpy, Moon Mullins, and Harold Teen are part of the hijinks.) Before TV and the internet, and before the commercial pornography industry we have today, these little 8-page booklets were the beginnings of the immense smut business we enjoy today. Nostalgia hounds, fans of classic porn, and anyone who ever wanted to see Popeye get down and dirty will enjoy this book. 128-page b&w softcover.
Edited by Michael Dowers. Welcome to the ninth volume in this long-running series of vintage dirty comix from the past. This one focuses on cartoon women straight off the pages of the Sunday funnies from those dear departed days. You may not recognize a lot of these women — Dixie Dugan, Fritzi Ritz, Black Cat, Astra, Fanny, Connie, Tillie the Toiler, Boots, Dumb Dora, Winnie Winkle, and even a few who are still around — but in their day they were the cat's pajamas, the bee's knees — sassy girls who were drawn with a little bit of sex appeal to brighten up dad's morning as he perused the comics with his toast and coffee. Although never as explicitly as in these under-the-counter eight-page triple-X extravaganzas, lovingly collected by editor Michael Dowers and printed in their unexpurgated form for your enjoyment! With a snappy new cover by Pat Moriarity!
Ed. Michael Dowers. Finally this treasure of vintage sex comics is back in print. Thick, steaming pages of those naughty little eight-page comics that grandpa used to hide from grandma, but was quick to bring out when company came over. These little comics combine crude wit, the likenesses of famous actors and actresses of the day, popular characters from the funny pages, and a heap of eye-popping smut action. This volume also includes two epic-length stories, "School Days" and "Travelin’ Preacher" (he lays down the law and a whole lot more!) — rarely seen, extreme examples of the Tijuana Bible genre. This collection of rare, if not impossible-to-find strips from America’s golden-age gutter is a fine and filthy addition to any comic library — one look and you will see why.