From Birth to the 1970s

by Tim Pilcher

  Vargas’s Girls were the ideal fantasy women for the soldiers, and everything the wholesome American girl ever dreamed she could be. Often painted semi-clothed in military uniforms, Vargas’s Girls were morale-boosters who came in all shades and sizes, and Vargas seemed to create a dream girl to fulfil every individual man’s imagination. With their shimmering hair, seductive poses, a gleam in the eye, a perfect complexion, and legs to die for, it’s little wonder America became so taken with Vargas’s work. He gave life to his paintings, providing soldiers with a piece of American pie (or, more aptly, “cheesecake”) and became such a celebrity that the U.S. Army flew him around the country to make special guest appearances at bombardment schools.

  Alberto Vargas’s Legacy Girl makes the classic V-sha pe with her legs—one of the artist’s trademarks. ©Astrid Vargas Conte and Patty Conte

  Vargas’s art still inspires aviators to put girl art on their planes. This image was also used by Virgin Airlines on its fleet

  This B-52 Mitchell nose art was painted by the renowned artist and wing-walker Teresa Stokes

  Another nose art painting on a B-52 Mitchel bomberthat’s definitely “in the mood.”

  JANE, WORLD WAR II, AND ALL THAT

  In 1932 a new “forces sweetheart” emerged, when Jane—created by Norman Pett—appeared in Jane’s Journal, the Diary of a Bright Young Thing as a weekly single frame in the London Daily Mirror.

  There’s an old truism that you should always write (or draw) about what you know, and Pett took this literally when he based Jane’s look on his wife Mary, who would model for him. Moreover, Jane’s constant companion—her dachshund Fritz—was based on Pett’s own dachshund of the same name.

  Starting out as a comedy about a society dilettante, the stories soon developed and Jane was often dropped into what would be called—in today’s cinematic censor-speak—“scenes of mild peril.” The danger she faced was often more of a farcical scrape than true menace, and it usually involved her losing items of attire.

  In 1938, Don Freeman started writing scripts, helping to build the background story and continuity. That same year Mary Pett grew tired of posing for her husband and Norman discovered his second muse—the model and actress Christabel Leighton-Porter—at a life drawing class.

  As war broke out across Europe in 1939, Jane began shedding more and more clothes, keeping up the morale—and everything else—of the British men fighting abroad. Until 1943, Jane rarely stripped to more than her underwear, but when an episode finally revealed her completely nude, the American newspaper, Round-up, apocryphally noted that the 36th Division of the British Army stormed forward six miles in one day in Burma. Consequently, the newspaper strip was deemed so important to the war effort that submarine captains were given copies of the Jane strips weeks in advance, so their crews didn’t miss out on any crucial developments.

  Christabel Leighton-Porter toured the music halls with a striptease act as Jane, and she soon became as popular as the character herself. But the chaste side of Jane—her innocence—remained a key factor in her popularity. The strip was never smutty or vulgar, but somehow pure, harking back to the seaside postcard humor of the Edwardian era. In fact, sex was the last thing on Leighton-Porter’s mind. “I didn’t even think about it,” she recalled. “Wherever I have been, people have asked why it was so popular. It’s something I have never been able to answer. It was done in such a way that made Jane a real person. It was more about what you didn’t see than what you did. I was always treated with the greatest respect.” And when Leigh-Porter met the head of the royal household, the Lord Chamberlain asked her, “Tell me my dear, what do you do in your act?” “Well,” explained the real-life Jane, “at one stage I turn my back to the audience, take off my bra, and then cover my breasts with my hands as I turn around.” There was a momentary pause before the King’s aide replied, “You must have very large hands.”

  In support of the war effort, Leighton-Porter stripped for her first nude photo session for the Daily Mirror just after D-Day, following in the footsteps of her cartoon sibling. After the war, the model went on to headline in the 1949 movie, The Adventures of Jane.

  Jane, in a typical semi-clad pose with her pet daschund Fritz, drawn by creator Norman Pett.

  The Daily Mirror collected some of Jane’s earlier adventures into one volume in 1960, a few months after her last newspaper appearance.

  Spurred on by the success of Jane, many other British tabloid newspapers tried to capture some of the glory. The Daily Express tried Paula by Eric R. Parker in 1948, while the Evening News published Judy by Julian Phipps on January 1, 1949. But none achieved the notoriety of their older sister.

  In 1948 Pett was “retired” from the Jane strip and his assistant, Michael Hubbard, took over. Pett went off to create a rival stripping character—Susie—for the Sunday Dispatch, while Hubbard tried to update Jane with a Rip Kirby-style realism. But his changes fell on blind eyes and Jane eventually sailed off into the sunset after marrying her beau, Georgie Porgie, on October 10, 1959. Norman Pett died the following year.

  The Mirror tried to revive the Jane strip several times, culminating in Jane—Daughter of Jane, drawn by Dutch artist Alfred “Maz” Mazure in 1963. Yet each time she reappeared she failed to capture the public’s imagination in quite the same way as her “mother.”

  It was a further 23 years until Jane made another comeback, this time as a British television series starring Glynis Barber in the title role. The BBC’s 1982–1984 show used Pett’s drawings as backgrounds for the real-life actors to maintain the comic strip’s feel, and left the original risqué humor intact. Three years later, Jane had her final outing in the 1987 film Jane and the Lost City, directed by Terry Marcel.

  Jane’s return after World War II, illustrated by Norman Pett.

  Jane’s first completely nude appearance in a newspaper strip in 1943.

  Jane fends off a lacivious Nazi captor in this WWII strip by Norman Pett.

  MALE CALL FOR G.I. JANE

  Jane was syndicated across the globe by King Features and appeared in the U.S. Forces’ magazines Stars and Stripes and Round-up. Despite having to cover up many of his racier strips for the more prudish American audience, Pett’s success at raising the morale of British troops inspired American cartoonist Milton Caniff to create a spin-off series from his popular Terry and the Pirates newspaper strip.

  Male Call was created exclusively for U.S. military publications during World War II and ran from January 24, 1943 to March 3, 1946. Originally the main character was to be Burma, a beautiful adventuress from the Terry… series, but Caniff slowly introduced a new character, Miss Lace, who eventually took center stage. Lace was every inch the pin-up vamp, reducing enlisted men to drooling wrecks.

  Male Call’s demographic meant that the content was racier than Caniff would have got away with in the mainstream American civilian press. Distributed by the Camp Newspaper Service, the strip appeared in over 3,000 newspapers, the largest number of publications in which any single comic strip has appeared.

  After the war, a comic book featuring another dizzy blonde dame, G.I. Jane, appeared. Not to be confused with its British cousin, G.I. Jane was created by Hal Seeger and drawn by Bill Williams. The comic featured the by-now familiar narrative of the sexy shenanigans of a gal G.I. who could turn all the enlisted men to jelly. The comic was published in 1953 by Stanhall, a company that specialized in producing comics aimed at an adult male audience, including titles like The Farmer’s Daughter. Based on classic, bawdy jokes, every cover had the tagline: “She was only the farmer’s daughter, but…” as endless traveling salesmen queued up to bed the eponymous heroine.

  It appeared as though the back streets of erotic prints, saucy postcards, Tijuana bibles, and pin-ups were now merging into a giant superhighway, spanning America from coast to coast. Erotic comics were on a road trip from which they could no longer turn back, one that would force them to stop at every seedy motel along the way and expose the tack
y underbelly of Americana for their lascivious, voyeuristic audiences to gawk at.

  Sally The Sleuth, by Adolphe Barreaux, originally appeared in spicy detective stories in 1934. Many of her adventures involved her being tied up and feeling the lash ofthewhip.

  G.I. Jane followed the familiar pattern of stories where the women were more interested in fashion than fighting, while Stanhall’s The Farmer’s Daughter was quite racy for its time.

  Milton Caniff’s Miss Lace from Male Call was highly popular “cheescake” for enlisted men during World War II.

  2

  Playboys Hustling in the Penthouse

  RISE OF MEN’S MAGAZINES: CAPTAIN BILLY

  At the dawn of the 20th century, American men’s magazines were on the brink of their golden age. From 1900 to the late 1950s, the magazine was to be the premier source of entertainment and information for men, with unbelievably high circulation figures that reached into millions of copies. And with the curvaceous cuties came the comics.

  One U.S. soldier returning from post-WWI Europe, Captain Wilford H Fawcett, began publishing his own magazine, Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, in October 1919. Most likely inspired by the saucy Tijuana Bibles he’d seen handed around, Fawcett printed 5,000 copies of his first issue. After giving copies to wounded war veterans and all his friends, he shipped the surplus to hotel newsstands.

  Any intention of publishing a magazine solely for veterans was quickly abandoned when the magazine’s circulation went stratospheric, allegedly “soaring to the million mark.” But as Wilford’s son, Roscoe K Fawcett, recalled, the figure may have been slightly exaggerated: “My father made a fortune on Whiz Bang. It cost only 4 cents to produce each issue… the cover price was 25 cents and the circulation was [only] around 500,000.”

  Despite its popularity, Whiz Bang (the title was the nickname for a World War I artillery shell) was always considered somewhat disreputable, as was Fawcett’s down-at-heel Smokehouse Monthly, launched in 1926. As may be expected in a male humor magazine, many of the jokes concerned women, but there was a thinly veiled misogyny present throughout. This uncomfortable undercurrent continued throughout many other men’s magazines from the 1920s right up to the 1960s.

  The content of Whiz Bang included off-color cartoons, limericks by convicts (usually on death row), fallen women, and gamblers. Captain Billy also printed hundreds of jokes about scanty costumes: “We call her bridge table because she has bare legs and no drawers.” Whiz Bang was never subtle nor sensitive. Racism was rife in the 1920s, as demonstrated by Captain Billy’s description of Rudolph Valentino as “the romantic wop.”

  During the Depression, Fawcett reduced his cover price to 15 cents, added even raunchier jokes, and briefly experimented with mammary nudity—which kept the magazine going into the late ’30s. The profits from Whiz Bang funded many other Fawcett Publication magazines and comics. These would play a crucial role in the development of men’s magazines, combining cartoons with sexual imagery and bawdy “jokes”—creating the “gags and girls” formula that would become the staple diet for men’s magazines for the next 50 years.

  Animator and Playboy cartoonist Dean Yeagle’s creation, Mandy, discovers some unexpected guests in her bikini.

  Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang from November 1923. An “explosion of pedigreed bunk” that initially used illustrations of saucy ladies on the cover.

  By the 1930s, Whiz Bang was struggling against competition from rivals such as Esquire, so Fawcett dropped illustrations in favor of photographic covers.

  Whiz Bang’s “half brother” publication, Smokehouse Magazine, was launched in 1926. This cover’s line art was poor compared to Whiz Bang’s sumptuous full-color paintings.

  RISE OF MEN’S MAGAZINES: HUMORAMA

  The post-World War II boom held America in the grip of merciless economic prosperity. It was the time of the cash-rich leisure society, and the decade of hot rods, rock’n’roll, and rampant teenage delinquents. It was an era of daily scandals, drugs on every street corner, satanic sex cults lurking in every basement, and thousands of wanton women who were “shecats in the bedroom,” looking to lure young men to their doom. If you believed everything you read in the sensational magazines filling the American newsstands, that is.

  Martin Goodman, like Fawcett and many other magazine publishers, made his fortune in the 1940s, publishing comic books such as the original Captain America under the Timely banner, before moving into the men’s market.

  Timely Comics’ sister company, Humorama, was run by Martin Goodman’s brother Abe, who was the largest buyer of gag cartoons at the time. The company’s line of men’s magazines consisted of titles like Breezy, Gaze, Gee-Whiz, Joker, Stare, and Snappy. A mixture of cheeky cartoons and black-and-white photos of pin-up models including Bettie Page and Eve Meyer, stripper Lili St. Cyr, and actresses Irish McCalla and Julie Newmar, guaranteed success with the male audience. The line was to become the home to some of the best cartoonists America has ever produced.

  Another important “gals ’n’ giggles” publisher was Robert Harrison, whose titles Titter, Flirt, and Wink competed with Humorama and helped raise the profile of pin-up artists such as Peter Driben and Earl Moran.

  Throughout the 1950s, men’s magazines suffered from a schizophrenic relationship with women, and the comics and cartoons reflected this. On the one hand, members of the female sex were admired, adored, and elevated as “honeys,” “dolls,” and “babes,” with curves that drove men crazy. On the other, they were seen as dangerous, manipulative golddiggers.

  Not that the men fared much better. They were often drawn as lusty bosses, dirty old men, hopeless saps, or lascivious Don Juans, and in today’s world every one of them would be in court on sexual harassment charges.

  A selection of Humorama covers, drawn by Bill Wenzel, reveal the artist’s talent at portraying voluptuous ladies. Wenzel also contributed to Eyeful.

  Robert Harrison’s Eyeful magazine, with a cover by Peter Driben.

  A series of Dan DeCarlo’s wonderfully sexy and silly covers for Humorama.

  PIN-UP KINGS: JACK COLE

  The 7½” x 5½” humor digests, aimed at a male readership, were largely populated by two types of cartoonists: those who were past their prime, and those whose stars were in the ascendant, but had yet to get the big gigs.

  Two exceptions to this rule were Bill Ward and Jack Cole. Both artists had made a successful career out of working in comics, but felt restricted by the industry. Having worked in the sweatshop studios of Harry “A” Chesler, and Everett “Busy” Arnold at Quality (which later became DC Comics), Cole finally hit the jackpot with his goofball superhero strip, Plastic Man. First appearing in Police Comics in 1941, the strip quickly gained a following and was featured on the cover of the anthology. Cole’s surreal storytelling and bizarre turn of phrase made the story of “Plas” a unique experience.

  Cole worked for many companies, but it was his strip for True Crime Comics #2 that sealed his fate. A panel featuring a woman about to be attacked with a syringe to the eye became the centerpiece of Dr. Fredric Wertham’s legendary campaign against comics in 1954. That was the final nail in the coffin for Cole’s comics career, and after 17 years he bailed out of the sequential scene and headed for Martin Goodman’s Humorama titles like Comedy, Joker, and Laugh Digest. It was here that he relearned his craft, studying what made a good gag. “I didn’t know a funny cartoon from a stinker, or an old one from a zinger,” lamented Cole in a 1956 edition of The Freelancer.

  But he soon found his feet and settled into his new home alongside classic cartoonists like Basil Wolverton and Bill Wenzel. Cole signed his girlie gag work under the nom de plume “Jake,” his wife’s nickname for him, in order to differentiate it from his more “elevated” work.

  Cole produced fewer than 100 inkwash gags for Martin Goodman before he felt confident enough to approach the higher class “bachelor slicks” like Esquire and an upcoming title, initially called Stag Party, that was being put toget
her by a young publisher called Hugh Hefner. That magazine, of course, was to become Playboy—and it would change Cole’s life for better and for worse.

  Cole left Humorama for Playboy in 1954, was put on an exclusive contract, and first appeared in the fifth issue. Encouraged by Hefner to relocate just outside Chicago, it was here that Cole shone as an artist. He soon became the magazine’s top cartoonist, as well as great friends with Hefner. He dropped the “Jake” signature and produced full-page, lavish watercolor gag ’toons of beautiful-but-dim girls and rich (but equally dim) old men under his own name. Elaborately finished, they provided the template for future artists such as Dedini, Sokol, and many others. Cole had at least one piece published in Playboy each month for the next four years, and his work was so popular that the second piece of Playboy merchandise (after the rabbit logo cufflinks) was a set of cocktail napkins featuring his cartoons Females by Cole.

  This cover for Comedy magazine was originally a black-and-white inkwash that had a red tint added during the printing process. It features Cole’s typically sexy women and goofy guys: “Aw, don’t stay mad, Alice; I promise to keep in step next dance!”

  Cole’s cover for Humorama’s Laugh Digest. “Frankly, I’m afraid to mix her drink; she’s gone that far on plain ginger ale!”