Good girl art

Good girl art

Harold W. McCauley illustration for Imagination
 
This topic covers comics that fall under various genres.
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Bad girl art

Good girl art (GGA) is artwork featuring attractive women in comic books, comic strips, and pulp magazines.[1]

Richard A. Lupoff defined good girl art as:

A cover illustration depicting an attractive young woman, usually in skimpy or form-fitting clothing, and designed for erotic stimulation. The term does not apply to the morality of the "good girl", who is often a gun moll, tough cookie or wicked temptress.[2]

History

The term "Good Girl Art" was coined by the American Comic Book Company in its mail order catalogs.[3]

Torchy #5 (July 1950) cover art by Bill Ward.

It was during this era that the terms Good Girl Art and Esoteric Comics became widely used by the collecting community. Use of the phrase has since expanded to indicate a style of artwork in which attractive female characters of comic books, cartoons and covers for digest magazines, paperbacks and pulp magazines are rendered in a lush manner and are shown in provocative (and sometimes very improbable) situations and locations, such as outer space. The artwork sometimes involves bondage or damsel-in-distress situations.

A strong influence on the movement was illustrator Rolf Armstrong (1889–1960), labeled the "Father of Good Girl Art" because of his creamy calendar art for Brown & Bigelow and iridescent illustrations for such magazines as American Weekly, College Humor, Life, Judge, Photoplay, Pictorial Review and Woman's Home Companion, along with his advertisements for Hires Root Beer, Palmolive, Pepsi, Oneida Silverware and other products.

During the peak period of comic book Good Girl Art, the 1940s to the 1950s, leading artists of the movement included Bill Ward (for his Torchy) and Matt Baker, who was one of the few African Americans working as an artist during the Golden Age of Comics. Today, Baker's rendition of Phantom Lady is considered a collectors item, and much of his GGA is sought after. During this period, GGA also found its way into newspaper comic strips. One of the early examples of good girl art was Russell Stamm's Invisible Scarlet O'Neil, a superheroine who was regularly shown in her lingerie.[4]

Two of the leading creators of GGA for science fiction magazine covers were Earle Bergey (Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories) and Harold W. McCauley (Imagination, Fantastic Adventures). In the '70's pulp fiction, Hector Garrido drew the GGA book covers of The Baroness spy thriller series by Paul Kenyon and The Destroyer men's adventure pulp novels by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir.

Publications

In 1985, Bill Pearson edited and published Good Girls, a collection of artwork by himself, Vince Alascia, Richard Bassford, John Beatty, Stan Drake, Brad W. Foster, Frank Frazetta, Frank Godwin, V. T. Hamlin, David Karbonik, Roy Krenkel, Bob McLeod, Ed Paschke, Victor Perard (author of Anatomy and Drawing and How to Draw), Willy Pogany, Trina Robbins, Kenneth Smith, Wally Wood, Mike Zeck and others.

Since 1990, AC Comics has published 19 issues of Pearson's Good Girl Art Quarterly (incorporating several issues of Good Girl Comics), featuring a mix of photos and new comics with reprints of vintage stories. In addition to Baker, Black, Frazetta, Ward and Wood, the artists in this series include Nina Albright, Chris Allen, Nick Alton, Dick Ayers, Frank Bolle, Gill Fox, Brad Gorby, Mark Heike, Chad Hunt, Jack Kamen, Ed Lane, Steve LeBlanc, Bob Lubbers, Billie Marimon, Mark Moore, Ralph Mayo, Pete Morisi, Rudy Palais, Nick Poliwko, Bob Powell, Richard Rome and Maurice Whitman.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Jolley, H. Scott (April 2008). "Heroine Chic". Vanity Fair (572): 122. Archived from the original on 2013-09-26. Retrieved December 20, 2014.
  2. ↑ Lupoff, Richard A. (2001). The Great American Paperback: An Illustrated Tribute to Legends of the Book (1st. American ed.). Portland, Or.: Collectors Pr. ISBN 9781888054507. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
  3. ↑ Goulart, Ron (2007). Good Girl Art. New Castle, Pa.: Hermes. ISBN 1932563873. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
  4. ↑ Tom Heintjes. "Not Seen but Not Forgotten: The Invisible Scarlet O'Neil | Hogan's Alley". Cartoonician.com. Retrieved 2015-12-16.

Further reading

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