Monday, December 8, 2008

Do you Prefer Your Bolles Hot or Cold?





















After the post last week on bulls-eye covers my Bolles pal, Beau reminded me about a great one from Spicy Stories that I had omitted. In the middle of composing a post using the cover it dawned on me that Bolles had done a similar composition several years later. So here they are, the Spicy cover from 1935 and the Film Fun from 1942. I've seen this sort of thing before. I'm sure that in some cases Bolles was in a hurry, understandable when you consider that he often painted three or more covers a month. And so he may have decided to go back and rework a theme he developed in the past for the sake of time. When he was in a big hurry he also simply overpainted parts of earlier covers and he pulled more than a few all-nighters to meet a deadline. But with other covers I think his motivation in revisiting old themes was to try something new, perhaps updating a painting to current fashions or putting an entirely new slant on it. I've seen a number of cover paintings where Bolles later tinkered with hair, clothing or jewelry, apparently not happy with the original. In many cases the original was best left alone but I have seen a painting with the lotus flower Film Fun cover that is a lot more interesting, and not just because he decided the updated girl didn't need clothes! One more thing to leave you with. As I've mentioned before, Bolles was fixated with hand position and poses and this Film Fun cover has about the oddest combination I've seen on any cover. What do you think is going on?
Due to several requests, here's the second image in a larger format. Enjoy!


4 comments:

Michael Dooney said...

great stuff, thanks for posting. I'm enjoying the bits and pieces of bio info, since I've always been curious about him ever since I picked up a copy of Stolen Sweets back in the '80's!
I'm curious if you are purposely posting the images at a smallish size. It would be nice to see them at least the size of the original covers.

Jack R said...

Hi Michael,
Glad you are enjoying this site. I'd be happy to post future images the original size. I'm still trying to figure out the in's and out's of blogging so it didn't even occur to me. Keep viewing because I'll be uploading lots of rare material, including never before seen photos of Enoch.
Best,
Jack

Li-An said...

Is it possible to see the second image much larger pleeeease :-) ?

Li-An said...

Thanks :-)