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A LOOK AT
CHEESECAKE MAGAZINES
As the values of the Victorian era made way for the rambunctious 20th Century and the jazz age of the roaring twenties, magazines began to reflect that change. Soon enough there were magazines with names like Titter, Flirt and Wink, to name only a few, that catered exclusively to men.
By the 1930's these magazines, considered quite provocative for their time, were in full bloom. New titles appeared on a regular basis.
The titles became instantly recognizable by their beautifully painted covers of sexy young women. Gil Elvgren was by far the most prolific of the cover artists and is widely known and respected to this day.
Armstrong
http://www.btinternet.com/~brmerc/Pinup1.html
These magazines flurished in the 1930s and 40s but they were eventually replaced by magazines like Playboy, Swank and Cavalierwhich used photography to sell the sexy girl next door image.
http://www.btinternet.com/%7Ebrmerc/girlie/whisper/whisper.html
Fawcett Publications was an American publishing company founded in 1919 in Robbinsdale, Minnesota by Wilford Hamilton "Captain Billy" Fawcett (1885-1940). At the age of 16, Fawcett ran away from home to join the Army, and the Spanish-American War took him to the Philippines. Back in Minnesota, he became a police reporter for the Minneapolis Journal. While a World War I Army captain, Fawcett's experience with the Army publication Stars and Stripes gave him the notion to get into publishing, and his bawdy cartoon and joke magazine, Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, became the launch pad for a vast publishing empire.[1]
The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang combined Fawcett's military moniker with the nickname of a destructive WWI artillery shell. According to one account, the earliest issues were mimeographed pamphlets, typed on a borrowed typewriter and peddled around Minneapolis by Captain Billy and his four sons. However, in Captain Billy's version, he stated that when he began publishing in October, 1919, he ordered a print run of 5,000 copies because of the discount on a large order compared with rates for only several hundred copies. Distributing free copies of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang to wounded veterans and his Minnesota friends, he then circulated the remaining copies to newsstands in hotels. With gags like, "AWOL means After Women or Liquor," the joke book caught on, and in 1921, Captain Billy made the highly inflated claim that his sales were "soaring to the million mark."[2]
The book Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals notes:
- Few periodicals reflect the post-WW I cultural change in American life as well as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. To some people [it] represented the decline of morality and the flaunting of sexual immodesty; to others it signified an increase in openness. For much of the 1920s, Captain Billy’s was the most prominent comic magazine in America with its mix of racy poetry and naughty jokes and puns, aimed at a small-town audience with pretensions of ‘sophistication’.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang is immortalized in the lyrics to the song "Trouble" from Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1962): "Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?" Yet this is an anachronism, since The Music Man takes place in River City, Iowa, during 1912, seven years before the magazine's premiere issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawcett_Publications
http://www.flickr.com/photos/78469770@N00/sets/72157594422569822/
http://www.btinternet.com/~brmerc/girlie/flirt/flirt.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/78469770@N00/sets/72157594422569822/
http://www.btinternet.com/~brmerc/girlie/titter/titter.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/78469770@N00/sets/72157594422569822/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/78469770@N00/512922620/in/set-72157594293188601/
Peter Driben
Peter Driben was perhaps one of the most productive pin-up artists of the 1940's and 50's. Although both Alberto Vargas and Gil Elvgren have extensive catalogues of work, neither came close to the output of Driben.
Driben was born in Boston and studied at Vaesper George Art School before moving to study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925. His first known pin-p was the cover to Tattle Tales in October 1934, and by 1935 he was producing covers for Snappy, Pep, New York Nights, French Night Life and Caprice. His career went from strength to strength in the late thirties with covers for Silk Stocking Stories, Gay Book, Movie Merry-Go-Round and Real Screen Fun.
http://www.thepinupfiles.com/driben.html
Enoch Bolles
After Alberto Vargas and George Petty, Enoch Bolles was the best known of the Art Deco era pin-up artists, mostly because of the massive exposure his images received on newsstands from coast to coast Bolles' art - both in terms of technique and subject matter, the playful, yet somewhat racy flapper girl - clearly exerted a strong influence on many artists of his time.
Bolles began his career in 1915, when he was hired by the Dell Publishing Company to paint front covers for its line of spicy pulp magazines. He, like many other pin-up artists of the early Deco era, found a ready-made audience among the mostly male readership of the pulps. Film Fun was the pin-up magazine that immortalized the Bolles name. From 1921 to 1948, it carried his cover-art pin-ups which the American public came to recognize almost as much as the Petty Girl from Esquire. Bolles worked for many other pulps, including Coy Book and Cupid's Capers, which invited him to design their inaugural covers, and Spicy Stories, which had the biggest circulation among such magazines.
http://www.thepinupfiles.com/bolles.html
http://www.whosdatedwho.com/when/?year=1950
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