Bolles inside Esquire

Our saga of the Bolles girl channeled on the cover of Esquire continues, courtesy of mega Bolles-fan, Alan Wrobel who wrote the magazine to alert them of the Bolles connection covered here a few posts back.  While the editors may have been less than open minded about the potential legacy of Bolles' work, they were intrigued enough to write about it in a sidebar in the February issue.  Given the pinup legacy of Esquire; from Petty to Vargas and then Al Moore, Ben-Hur Baz, Ernest Chiriaka and others there is a certain irony that after all these years the work of Enoch Bolles has finally appeared within its pages.  For the record Bolles showed up in Playboy back in 1990 as part of an article on Francis Smith's book, Stolen Sweets.  Before that, Vargas used a couple of Bolles covers as inspiration for a couple of his pinups for Playboy.

A Bolles Valentine's Day

We can't let Valentine's day pass without a cover by our man Bolles. It was a favorite celebration for him, and he created at least a half dozen other versions of heart themed covers over the years, many of which have been well thumbed over on the internet.  So today I've selected a early, neglected and a bit hard to find (well, at least for the next 15 minutes) cover.  It hit the newsstands in 1924, and although Enoch hadn't even been a year at Film Fun in many ways the year remains a high water mark for him. He reworked this particular pose several more times for magazine covers and advertisements and it's one of his earliest examples of what I've labeled as the L-pose.  Subsequent versions, however, omitted the helpless little men, a common motif for several magazine artists beginning about a decade earlier which seemed to epitomize the angst many felt about the rising power of the "new woman."  Aside from his now regular assignment at Film Fun, the year 1924 was a particularly busy for Bolles. He was also producing a couple of covers a month for Snappy Stories and painting dozens of trolley cards.  And there was the occasional film poster illustration for Fox Pictures, an association which began in 1924 and continued off and on until 1931 or so.  Enjoy!!

Super Bolles!

This cover of Film Fun was published in 1932, and its always seemed to me to be a bit of an outlier.  She has a more modern, almost 1950s look than just about another other Film Fun cover I can recall.  I'll post more of Bolles' gridiron girls-including an original that is coming up for auction-in the weeks to come along with other good sports.