by Tim Pilcher
A pair of classic Donald McGill postcards from some 12,000 images that the artist ranked as “mild, medium, or strong.”
This saucy French postcard by G Mouton (1906) is a very unsubtle allusion to oral sex. The caption reads “How they eat asparagus.”
WORLD WAR I
When World War I broke out, thousands of British and American troops departed for France to fight. They were pleasantly surprised to find that the natives were sexually more open and expressive. Against the dark backdrop of war, American soldiers first experienced the earliest girlie art, mass-produced for a wide audience. Often, these salacious scrawlings were posted to pals back home, or brought back in soldiers’ private collections. In the main, these “French Postcards” showed saucy shots of various mademoiselles, but more shocking, “hardcore” cards depicting various sexual acts have also been discovered. In addition, French magazines such as La Vie Parisienne (1863) and l’Amour (1902) were full of illustrations of ladies in various states of undress.
Although the term “pin-up” had yet to be used, there were already “forces’ favorites” such as the elegant and sophisticated “Gibson Girl” and the more earthy and emancipated “Kirchner Girl.” The former was created by Charles Dana Gibson and made her first appearance in 1887. She was the embodiment of everything pure, beautiful, and “modern” in America, and was adored and admired by men and women alike. The Gibson Girl is generally regarded as the first American pin-up, and paved the way for future generations—the Petty Girl, the Varga Girl, and many others.
Yet while the Gibson Girl was a chaste ideal, the Kirchner Girl—who first appeared in England in The Sketch magazine (1909), as well as La Vie Parisienne—was much more daring and risqué. She actually bared her breasts and was altogether more natural and comfortable with her own nudity. More importantly, she smoked—a major taboo in intimate paintings of women at the time. Unsurprisingly, she became a popular attraction in the trenches, taking the minds of the men off the hell they were experiencing, and perhaps reminding them what they were fighting for. Ironically, the morale-booster’s creator—Raphael Kirchner— did not live to see the end of the war, dying in 1917.
The Connoisseurs from The Pleasures Of Eros by Gerda Marie Frederike Wegener (1917).
Charles Dana Gibson’s Girl engaged in a rare, highly emotive clinch.
An early cover of the erotic French magazine L’Amour, from 1902.
A classic saucy postcard by Raphael Kirchner.
This postcard by Chéri Hérouard, shows an American “Doughboy”soldier with his French mistress.
ARTHUR FERRIER
World War I also saw the rise of one of Britain’s most important “cheesecake” artists, Arthur Ferrier. Born in Scotland in 1891, he was originally an analytical chemist working in Glasgow. He started his career by sending cartoons to the local newspaper, the Daily Record, but as his art took off Ferrier moved to London, where he worked on numerous magazines, including Blighty.
Blighty was a collection of the best articles, cartoons, and stories from the British press, given free to 100,000 troops in France during the war. The magazine had General Sir Douglas Haig as a patron and was launched on May 31, 1916. That year’s Christmas editorial wrote, “You boys who are doing the fighting for us on land and sea, we have nothing much to say beyond wishing you good luck and God speed this Christmas time—and come home safe to us, because we love you. Thank you many times and very heartily for the hundreds of sketches and stories and jokes you have sent us… some of the sketches have been redrawn, because they could not be reproduced for printing.”
One of Ferrier’s jobs was to reinterpret the troops’ drawings, and he soon became the cover artist. Ferrier also drew “gag” cartoons and caricatures for Punch, London Opinion, The Humorist, and many other weekly magazines.
In 1938 he started his first weekly strip for the Daily Mirror newspaper, Film Fannie, which charted the adventures of a naïve actress at a time when British cinema was at its peak. This strip pioneered the “glamour girl” cartoon in Britain, and Ferrier’s sumptuous brush strokes and sleek lines made his leggy ladies hard to resist. When his newspaper contract ended in 1939, he created another girl in Our Dumb Blonde, for the Daily Mirror’s sister publication, the Sunday Pictorial. The strip ran for seven years.
In 1945, Ferrier started Spotlight on Sally for the News of The World as an obvious foil to Norman Pett’s incredibly popular Jane strip in the Daily Mirror. Ferrier’s only attempt at a daily strip—Eve—ran in the Daily Sketch from 1953. During this time the Scottish cartoonist also contributed cartoons to numerous men’s magazines—including Blighty and its numerous incarnations—and continued to do so right through to the 1960s.
Ferrier had caught the public’s attention to a remarkable degree, with his work appearing on exclusive headscarves and even highly collectable, fine bone-china tea sets. He died on May 27, 1973.
Film Fannie appeared in the Daily Mirror, while her younger sibling Our Dumb Blonde made her debut a few years later in the Sunday Pictorial.
Albert Ferrier’s cartoons graced the inside of Blighty magazine for years and were the first thing readers saw when they opened the cover. This example, from October 19, 1957, condenses the alpha-versus-beta-male conflict into one sentence: “The devil with tossing for it. Let’s fight!” Notice how the beautiful woman is referred to as “it.”
THE RISE OF THE TIJUANA BIBLE
When the boys who left for the French trenches returned to the U.S. as men, they naturally wanted more of the explicit material they had found in France. And as the 1920s began and the Jazz Age started in earnest, the young were becoming more liberated and experimental. Drugs like opium and marijuana were being used, and sexually open and aggressive ladies, known as “flappers,” were coming into their own. Women bobbed their hair, elevated their skirts from the ankle to the knee or above, and discarded corsets in favor of exotic undergarments like step-ins or teddies. Into this sexually charged climate emerged the “underground” miniature comics known as “Tijuana Bibles.”
The Tijuana Bibles didn’t necessarily come from Tijuana, Mexico, and they definitely weren’t Bibles. They were small booklets, clandestinely— and illegally—produced and distributed, that chronicled the sexual adventures of America’s beloved comic-strip characters, celebrities, and folk heroes. In the first half of the 20th century, between 700 and 1,000 Tijuana Bible titles were produced, with the ludicrous writing and unbelievably shocking graphics combining to form a heady and stimulating brew.
The origins of the name “Tijuana Bible” are unclear. It may have been a racial slur against Mexicans, a ploy to throw the FBI off the trail, or simply a result of the fact that the Mexican/U.S. border towns were a hotbed of all sorts of felonies, where these pornographic tracts were often printed and sold. In parts of the U.S., the Bibles were also known as Eight-Pagers, Two-by-Fours, Gray-Backs, Bluesies, Jo-Jo Books, Tillie-and-Mac Books, Jiggs-and-Maggie Books, or, more flagrantly, Fuck Books.
Whatever you called them, the books began appearing in the late 1920s and flourished throughout the Depression years, being passed from hairy-palmed hand to sweaty-palmed hand. Distribution was strictly under the counter or from outsized overcoat pockets, and they were sold in schoolyards, garages, and barbershops— anywhere that men and boys gathered.
A new “Bluesie” could set you back between two bits (the equivalent of a shave and a haircut) to as much as five bucks, but the price was the only thing that was expensive. From their production values to the lewd jokes, everything else was cheap.
Mickey and Minnie Mouse got the “South of the Border” Tijuana treatment back in the 1930s. Understandably, the creators were uncredited for fear of litigation, and their names are forever lost in the mists of time.
The color cover for a classic Tijuana Bible that recounts the sexploits of a travelling salesman.
This rarely seen art by Bazooka Joe creator Wesley Morse is simultaneously explicit and cute.
A typical Tijuana Bible consisted of eight poorly printed 4” x 3” black and white (or sometimes blue, or red, and white) pages stapled together, with covers of heavier, colored stock. However, there were occasional variations in size and format, including a number of especially rare 16-page “epics” and even 32-pagers.
The comic-strip panels often portrayed well-known characters and celebrities in wildly outlandish situations. Many were outrageously racist, sexist, and of course totally “politically incorrect.” But as Pulitzer Prizewinner Art Spiegelman pointed out, “Though there are bound to be those who loudly declaim that the Tijuana Bibles demean women, I think it important to note that they demean everyone, regardless of gender, ethnic origin, or even species. It’s what cartoons do best, in fact.”
Nearly all the “adult-only” cartoon pamphlets were produced anonymously—possibly out of shame, but more likely to avoid prosecution by the FBI and the stars parodied inside. However, one artist who has been identified is Wesley Morse.
Morse drew the strip She Saw the World’s Fair—and How in 1939 to “commemorate” the event and is credited with producing at least another six Bibles. His sub-New Yorker cartoon style was vastly superior to the majority of his contemporaries and he went on to work for Topps Chewing Gum, creating the Bazooka Joe bubblegum strips, which he drew until his death in 1963.
Another rarely identified Tijuana Bible artist was “Doc” Rankin. Rankin was a World War I veteran who started out drawing girlie pics in magazines for his fellow ex-soldiers returning from Europe. His Adventures of a Fuller Brush Man Bibles caught on and are regarded as classics of the genre.
Even Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit and one of the most important comic creators of the 20th Century, was approached by a Brooklyn mobster to draw Bibles as a young teenager. Offered a huge rate of $3 a page, he turned the work down, calling it “one of the most difficult moral decisions of my life.”
The Fuller Brush Man gives another “obliging lady” his “injection of hot fat.” The insatiable door-to-door salesman was the focus of numerous Bibles and, like the ice man, was the housewives’ choice in the 1930s.
Wesley Morse was one of the few Tijuana Bible artists to be identified. This romantic New York story has all the curvacious pen strokes that made Morse, who dated a showgirl in the 1930s, such a talented artist.
The “stars” of the Tijuana Bibles ranged from obscure cartoon characters and movie stars to well-known public figures. Popular newspaper strip characters such as Blondie and Dagwood, the gangster John Dillinger, Popeye, Disney characters, Betty Boop, Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Mahatma Gandhi, and even Adolf Hitler all featured in the Bibles, and nothing—and no one—was too sacred or taboo to turn into a Tijuana. Everyone from bellhops to Ingrid Bergman, through Al Capone and Chiang Kaishek, to farmers’ daughters and Lou Gehrig were liable to drop their pants, and caricatures ranged from fairly good likenesses to the ugly scrawls you’d expect to see on a toilet wall.
One surreal title—Boys Will Be Girls—featured a gay gangbang starring James Cagney and his Warner Bros. co-stars Pat O’Brien and Dick Powell, while another thinly disguised Hollywood star, “Gerta Gabbo” (Greta Garbo), gets it on with her director, Rouben Mamoulian. The ludicrous situations and pat dialogue (“Come on darling, drop that great big hand-made thing in the slot,” for example) inevitably made the male partners look like sex-starved buffoons, with enormous erections that sometimes dwarfed the rest of their bodies.
Yet despite all their prurience there’s a certain wacky innocence to the Bibles, even though—like all powerful media—they were also used as propaganda tools. Benito Mussolini and Joe Stalin are shown enjoying the fleshly perks of dictatorship, and in The Great Leader, Stalin announces at a mass rally, “As long as everyone gets an equal share under Commuist [sic] rule I don’t see why one woman should get more prick than another. And I’ll start the ball rolling by fucking the first girl that feels cheated.” At the bottom of the frame in which Stalin proudly exposes his monstrous phallus to a pleased woman, the artist—an oddball of questionable spelling and drafting ability—comments, “That’s right, Joe, not only do you have the biggest prick in Russia, but you ARE the biggest prick in Russia.”
The Tijuana Bibles were America’s original X-rated underground comics, evoking a time when sex was dirty yet innocent and handmade. They finally began to fade out after World War II, although some continued to be produced as late as the 1960s. While many of these “dirty comic books” now seem at best bizarre, and at worst disconcerting, there is no doubting the influence they would have on men’s humor— “Sex and Laffs” were here to stay.
“Jimmy Cagney” enjoys some manly fun.
No subject was taboo and even the Indian religious leader Mahatma Gandhi—or “Matty”—is exploited for laughs in Gandhi Had Them Handy.
This anti-Communist propaganda piece is representative of some of the more politically charged Tijuana Bibles.
BIRTH OF THE PIN-UPS
As with the “Great War” of 1914-1918, World War II saw another leap forward in sexual liberation as young men were sent off to possibly die for their country. Thanks to the rising popularity of girlie calendars produced by American companies like Brown & Bigelow, several artists were raised from mere commercial “hacks”—as the fine art world regarded them—to household names with celebrity status. Ironically, many of the commercial artists were classically trained— like Rolf Armstrong, “the father of pin-up,” who studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s Armstrong painted everyone from Greta Garbo to Boris Karloff and was responsible for helping The Pictorial Review (1899) sell two million copies per issue in 1926. The following year he became Brown & Bigelow’s best-selling calendar artist.
It was during the 1930s that the giants of the pin-up world—Alberto Vargas, George Petty, Gil Elvgren, Earl Moran, Peter Driben, and Billy DeVorrs—began to hone the craft that would make them some of the most popular artists in America in the ’40s.
While many continued working on advertising assignments and calendars, more and more began to turn to the men’s magazines as a source of income. The “slicks,” with their full color, glossy covers, proved more than adequate for the numerous artists as the demand for glamorous gals on covers and in center spreads became insatiable.
The artists who worked on these stunning paintings very cleverly walked the razor’s edge of “innocent erotica,” producing paintings that, while certainly sexually arousing, also remained socially acceptable—not unlike a milder form of the Japanese shunga prints of the 18th century.
Undoubtedly the two biggest names to emerge from the ‘30s were George Petty and Alberto Vargas. When issue one of Esquire was published in 1933, it saw the debut of Petty’s “Petty Girl”—a beautiful, idealized, and unattainable goddess of beauty and desire, surrounded by cartoon-looking goofball fellas. Petty honed his craft and continued to improve his formula over the next eight years, while he was associated with Esquire.
The magazine also made Petty’s replacement—Vargas—a household name, albeit under the nom de plume of Varga (dropping his “s”). Vargas’s first painting appeared in the magazine in October 1940, and two months later Esquire launched the first Varga calendar. It was their bestselling calendar ever. In 1941, Vargas painted the film poster for Betty Grable’s film Moon Over Miami, which went on to become the most successful pin-up that year.
This sumptuous piece by George Petty was partof a series depicting girls on the telephone—a theme that would be picked up later by cartoonist Bill Ward.
One of George Petty’s first cartoons, for Esquire #1 (1933). The caption reads “Darling, what—kachoo—difference does age—kachoo—make anyway?”
George Petty’s illustration for the appropriately named Rigid Tool Company calendar.
Fresh Lobster (1952), by the amazing Gil Elvgren, was a repainted pin-up based on an earlier design.
VARGAS AND BOMBER NOSE ART
Born on February 9
, 1896 in Arequipa, Peru, to renowned South American photographer Max Vargas, Alberto Vargas was the eldest of six children. Alberto was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, but it soon became obvious that he had a natural talent for drawing. Sent to Europe to be educated, he studied in Switzerland, but fled to New York in 191 6 during World War I.
He planned to head back to his native Peru, but while in Manhattan he experienced an epiphany in the form of the American girl. “All of a sudden the doors opened and out poured these girls. Oh my gosh, so many beautiful girls. So right then and there I decided to stay.” Vargas’ passion for American beauty would stay with him for the rest of his life and help him build a hugely successful career. After a series of freelance art jobs, during which he met the love of his life and muse—showgirl Anna Mae Clift—Vargas received his first big break in 191 9. He was commissioned to paint the showgirls and stars of the famous Ziegfeld Follies, and it’s highly likely that his path crossed that of Tijuana Bible artist Wesley Morse, who was dating a Ziegfeld Folly showgirl.
During World War II, Vargas worked frenetically, but still managed to accommodate requests from overseas soldiers to paint mascot pin-ups for their squadrons and divisions. It became customary for USAF bombers to have their own “Vargas Girl” painted on the front, a trend that became known as “nose art.” These images soon became cultural icons, closely associated with America’s war effort.