Thursday, May 14, 2009

Pleased to Meet You!!

Here's a Bolles cover I've long been dying to get my hands on. Up until now I only had a smudgy little scan of her from Snappy Stories/Young's Realistic Stories. It hadn't occurred to me that it was originally from an issue of Breezy Stories, though a lot of Bolles Breezy covers got recycled throughout the 1940s on the covers of both Breezy and Snappy/Young's (they were all out of the same publishing house). I was lucky enough to find this issue tucked into a huge pile of randomly cataloged pulps at the Windy City pulp show a couple weeks back.
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An addition to the hot orange background, I'm attracted to this image because she reminds me a lot of my all-time favorite Film Fun cover (to be featured in a future post), but even more so because it's a portrait. I also am amazed with the treatment of her hair, just a few suggestive brush strokes but so effective.
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For some odd reason just about all the Breezy Stories covers Bolles did in 1938 (the last year he worked for the magazine) were portraits, or I should say close-ups of full figure paintings. Below is the most famous Breezy image of them all (sorry, it's another puny thumbnail. I don't have this issue) and it's obvious she has been cropped out of a "full" figure, as is the case with other 1938 covers. But for I don't think this is true for the image above; she doesn't look nearly so cartoony as other blown-up examples and there's a lot of expression in her features, especially her beguiling eyes. Still I could be wrong. Bolles put a lot of extra detail into his commercial work and it can bear this sort of magnified attention. So unless we find a version of this cover where we see more of this girl, let's hope that she really was just a portrait, and that there are others out there like her.

7 comments:

Gary Underwood said...

What a find!!! Enoch did a incredible job detailing the young lady's eyes. This is the reason you sort thru all those old mags and continue going to the shows, turning over all the rocks and beating the bushes, to find a treasure like this. Thanks for shareing, Jack

Anonymous said...

I love EB's eye work, so beautifully done. My favorites are when he has the girl tipping her head back smiling and you just barely see her eyes through her krinkled lids, but they're still very prominent features in the picture.

Jack R said...

Hi Gary,
I also find her eyes compelling. The only sad thing is that there are so few shows around like the one I went to. The whole antique scene has changed so much since eBay, which itself is very different than it used to be.

Anon: You describe the archetypal Bolles pose. So many artists copied it and so few could carry it off.

Darla: Retro Ways said...

Very interesting posts all of those covers are so lovely.

♥Darla

Jack R said...

Hi Darla,
Glad to hear you are enjoying this. I think you'll get a "kick" out of the post I'll be putting up later tonight.
Jack

Anonymous said...

omg, I know this girl from the cover of some old
8-track tape. think it was a 'various artists' teen hits.
very cool blog here.

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