Cha Cha!!

I've long been frustrated by this cover-or I should say how it was treated.  Published in the waning days of 1937, barely six months later Bolles was gone, not only from Gay Parisienne but also Spicy Stories, Breezy Stories and even Film Fun.  In short he was out of the magazine illustration business entirely. An entire year passed before he painted a new cover for Film Fun, and in the interim the corner of the publishing landscape Bolles had long toiled had been plowed away. With the exception of Film Fun every other magazine he'd worked for had folded, along with just about all the rest of the so-called smoosh mags.  It was as if when Enoch left the building he took the entire genre with him. 

There will be more to say about this when the Bolles book gets published, and frankly this is why the pace of posts on this site has ebbed.  During the last year I've been directing a lot of effort into the manuscript and now that it is off off to my agent I need to become a bit more selective about what goes on the blog, lest I give away too many goodies that need to be debuted in the book.  But not to worry as I have scans of over 500 Bolles covers and plenty else to share.  

So back to this cover. The printing, as far as I can tell (alas, this issue is not part of my collection) was lamentable, as was the rule for this title.  The dramatic shadow over the girl's eyes, her sombrero, and the fan were all overexposed into a dark blob. The color of the entire composition muted. And you know that Bolles would not have painted her this way.  So I judiciously applied a little photoshop to create what I think is a truer version, though you can bet the original (do I wish she was still around) would be even livelier. 
Ole!  

Pattern Recognition: Today is Tartan Day

This cover from late 1942 is one of Bolles very last of all.  Film Fun, which started in 1915 folded two issues later, having had its second class postage privileges revoked by Grant Walker, the Postmaster General. He may have pulled the pulled the plug on the magazine, but it was by the directive of the Catholic National Organization for Decent Literature, which regularly sent his office lists of magazines they deemed too "stimulating" for the general public.  Film Fun sent some lawyers to Washington to plead their case but it was to no avail.  The final issue included a short tribute to Bolles who aside from the occasional fan letter, had not garnered any mention within its pages since the late 1920s.  Along with this being a really nice painting, it's an example of a trend in Bolles work that had only just starting showing up in his art. 

Take a closer look.  Can you see a pattern in this cover and the others I've posted?  Well of course you can, and therein lies the trend.  Bolles was starting to integrate complex patterns in his outfits: tartan, stripes, gingham, none of which were evident during the previous three decades of his career. He had resorted to the occasional polka-dot and a lot of outfits included floral motifs (strategically positioned to hint at anatomical details) but that was about it.  But in 1941 he started a series of covers with excruciatingly exacting patterns, beginning with stripes.  They are great but you have to wonder why all the extra work.  Then there was his mathematical tour de force, the showgirl cover for the first issue of  Titter, with the exquisitely rendered fishnet stockings.  Published in 1943 it was his last cover.  What a going away present for his fans, then and now.

Spring has Sprung

I've been saving this cover for a special occasion and thought it had a nice Spring-like feeling to it.  She was likely painted in 1937 or '38 but I only have the cover, so I can't definitively date it.  Bolles rarely used much pink.  It was hard for engravers to get right, especially next to skin tones and even more so when the printing quality wasn't so great to begin with.  But probably more important, as a printer once advised Bolles, "use any color as long as it is red."

March Two, Dress in Blue

Today
What shall I say?
For this blog
has set me agog

So the web I peruse
until the theme I choose
March two, Dress in Blue

But which girl wins the pose
because of her clothes
Only 550 covers to view I suppose

Then my eyes fall on the wall
today’s choice is the easiest of all!




(with apologies to Dr. Seuss, among others)

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.