December 11 is National Stretching Day: Enoch Bolles has you covered!

Who would have thought that our man Enoch would have painted a cover to celebrate National Stretching Day?!  This appeared in 1934 and if you are familiar with the title you'll know it was one of the under the counter magazines that Bolles did covers for. Moreover, nearly all the covers featured Bolles girls in contortionistic poses, this cover being the most suitable for gym class (and a general audience). Yoga Day is coming up later in December and there's another Cupid's Caper cover involving a very advanced yoga pose, but it's also Monkey Day and Enoch did not one but two covers with monkeys. And then Flashlight Day is also coming up, and there's a perfect Bolles covers for that and what about... Decisions, decisions.
 

Happy Belated New Year, courtesy Enoch Bolles

  A bit late but worth the wait. This new year's greeting from our man Enoch is doubly special. Not only is it a rare example of two Bolles girls adorning a cover, it's the first "new" cover discovery in over four years. 

Laughter was a monthly humor magazine that lasted for barely over a year and Bolles painted nearly all of the covers. Unlike his other magazine assignments during this period, Bolles applied dramatic backgrounds for all of his Laughter covers. This addition brings the count of Bolles magazine covers to 581. Let's hope that there are more to be found!

Yet Another Swipe

Today's entry features perhaps Enoch's best cover for Judge, the magazine that launched his career as a cover artist back a decade earlier in 1914. The theme of dancers doing the Can-Can brings to mind cover art to French magazines of the time such as La Vie Parisienne and Le Sourire which featured the works of talented artists who specialized in the female form, particularly George Barbier, Chéri Herouard, Georges Léonnec. I'm not alone in wondering if our man Enoch may have been influenced by their creations, particularly covers such as this where his girls look like they could be kicking up their heels in the Moulin Rouge. Bolles produced other examples in the 1920s that seemed to have a bit of French flair to them.

I've long kept an eye out for any whiff of a connection, be it a hint of inspiration or wholesale imitation. And finally, I've uncovered the smoking gun, but it was pointed in the wrong direction. It turns out it wasn't Bolles who was being influenced. This double truck illustration appeared in Le Sourier five years after Bolles painted his dance line. The poses of the first four girls on the left match up closely with the Judge ' cover, and the differences are most evident in their faces and headdresses. The remainder of the lineup is a variation on a single pose. So while clearly not an exact duplicate, the work certainly qualifies as a serious swipe.

 

     

Bolles' influence on American pinup illustrators has been well documented, the surprise is that he also had an impact on the French school, especially given the ephemeral nature of periodicals like Judge. The covers of  unsold magazines were typically torn off by distributors, and the daughter of one of his Enoch's art editors once told me that he would home stacks of magazines to burn in their fireplace. It makes one wonder how any copies ever made it across the pond.
 

Enoch Bolles has teed up for Women's Golf Day

After a hiatus our man Bolles is back on the course and teeing up for today's official celebration of Women's Golf Day. But don't be mistaken, this 1936 cover of Spicy Stories is nowhere near the first time a Bolles girl showed up on the fairway. 

The earliest example appeared in 1925 on the cover of Laughter, a short-lived humor rag very much along the lines of Judge, the magazine where Bolles began his career and was still doing the occasional cover for. His covers for Laughter represent a real departure, not thematically but because of the total absence of white backgrounds. Instead Bolles uncharacteristically turned to saturated primaries and deep hues that completely filled the backgrounds.  

The final example for today appeared a year earlier, not on a magazine but from what was then called a Street car card. During this time Bolles was not only churning out covers for several monthly and bi-monthly periodicals but also painting scores of ads that were slotted in the space above windows in trolleys and busses. Many of these images were dramatically rescaled for other uses from blotters to billboards. Bolles plays it straight with this image but he played with a variety of looks and other examples toe closer to the style of the Laughter cover.    

But despite these and other examples, Bolles never once set foot on a golf course.  

Merry Christmas from our man Bolles

 

*\November 1st is International Pet Groomer Appreciation Day

 Wouldn't you know it, our man Enoch came through with an image appropriate for today's celebration. This comes from a 1930 issue of Pep Stories. Bolles began his run of covers in mid-1929 and continued until early 1932. R.A. Burley then took on the cover duties for the next year and then passed the baton off to the other "B" artist, the gifited and prolific Earle Bergey. His run continued without a pause until the magaznie folded at the end of 1938, along with the rest of the spicy titles that he and Enoch were working for. The only survivor for Bolles was Film Fun but Bergey kept busy working on a wide variety of genres including romance, sports, and most notably, Science Fiction, a genre I could never Enoch delving into.

September 27 is Scarf Day!

 Back to posting after a bit of a layoff. Today we celebrate Scarf Day with a sassy cover by our man Bolles. This issue of Gay Parisienne debuted at the turn of 1935, just a few months after Enoch took over the cover art duties. He his cover run ended in June 1938, and the magazine sputtered on for a few more issues until it disappeared from the newsstands, along with virtually the rest of the lineup of smoosh mags. 

All this transpired at the very time when Harry Donenfeld, the publisher of Gay Parisienne and other magazines Bolles worked for, was transitioning into the comic books. His National Allied Comics published the debut issue of of Superman in April 1938. This also coincided with Enoch's hospitalization, which snapped his 16 year streak for Film Fun.  But Bolles would be back a year later with new covers until the magzine was pressured into folding in 1942 by the Postmaster General of the United States, operating at the behest of the Catholic Church. But this is another chapter in the story of Bolles' life and career.