Sunday, March 27, 2011

Matt Baker's Romance Covers: Graceful Titillations


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full issue available here

So I've tried to focus on magazine material here on my blog, but today I'd like to post some of the comics I've been working on recently from the St. John line and take a minute to talk about perhaps my favorite artist of the golden age, Matt Baker. I posted an issue with one of his covers and a story (along with some recommendations for further reading) back here but today I want to diverge from my normal pattern a bit and post a number of issues focusing mainly on the covers. The issues I'm posting today all come from the collection of Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., who my the readers of my blog who are fans of magazine illustration might know as publisher of Images, containing lavish printings of classic and re-discovered art from 1880-1922, or from his most excellent collaboration with Everett Raymond Kinstler on the artist's life and work. Comics fans might know Jim from his contributions to so many works in comics scholarship, as he is widely recognized as the go-to-guy for help with artist identification and as the premier indexer of golden age comics. Jim has been generous enough to loan out comics from his amazing collection to a number of scanners working at the golden age comics sites with the goal of archiving the entirety of the golden age that rests in the public domain. So big thanks to JVJ for letting us scan his often-valuable and scarce comics (along with priceless index information that accompanies each issue) and to all the donators who have helped in the costs of shuttling the comics back and forth. Thanks also to my scanning partner on the project, Twobyfour, for his dutiful work in handling and producing the raw scans of Jim's books which I'm editing. Having an instantly available library of golden age comics is such an incredible boon for comics fans and researchers, so thanks to all involved in the project and the scanning of golden age comics in general.

But back to the man of the hour, the inimitable and enigmatic Matt Baker. I first became aware of Baker's work in my initial forays into the golden age, as his good girl art in the Fox and Fiction House comics instantly stands out from many of his peers. And then I came across his covers for the St. John Romances (which I think most would agree represent his greatest achievements), and I was hooked. Doing my first bits of research, I learned something that I found utterly surprising which added to my curiousity. This master of titillation and the female form was a black man, and quite a handsome fellow at that.


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This photo is from John Benson's short-but-thrilling and absolutely informative Confessions, Romances, Secrets, and Temptations: Archer St. John and the St. John Romance Comics, companion to his Romance Without Tears, a reprint collection of selected stories from the St. John line (many by Baker). There's another great photo of Baker in the book together with Archer St. John in front of Grauman's theater standing by Jean Harlow's footprints, these being the only two photos of Baker I've ever come across. Benson's book along with Alter Ego #47 has helped clear up some of the mystery surrounding Baker's life. One nice online biography on Baker can be found here, and American Art Archives has a nice little gallery of varied Baker covers along with a couple of magazine illustrations here.

That Baker was a black man shouldn't matter, of course, but I readily admit I find it adds to his mystique and my curiosity. I've since learned that there were indeed a handful of other minorities and women in the business, but the idea of such a prolific black artist in the medium is surely surprising in a field that was dominated by white men. A black artist circa 1950 drawing a scene like this?!?! Very cheeky, I'd say. Taboo upon taboo:


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full issue available here

Drawing blondes and redheads behaving badly?! Oh, my. Teen-Age Temptations is perhaps my favorite title for a romance comic, and some of the issues seem to have particularly spicy covers. But surely many of the players don't look like teenagers, heh heh. Another cover from the series:



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Sure it's sleaze, with taglines like "Flirtation on Wheels" or "The Powerful Story of a Trailer Girls Love" the cover is meant to play with scandal (the Estrada story within the cover goes with however is actually a thoughtful examination of stereotypes and class bigotry). I even catch the connotation that maybe she's preggers, scandalous! But there's also a subtle artist at work here. Her hands gripping with tension, the agonizing but thoughtful look on her face, the sort of smarmy smirk (a Baker trademark) on her suitor. And the whole scene is flushed out with depth and detail. I love the old trailers and the good ol boys working on the car in the background. Who could resist pulling this off the newsstand? It's no wonder that he penned over 220 covers for St. John during his tenure for the publisher.

One more from the series, more drama, and another fully-rendered scene. Many of the Baker romance covers have a great sense of perspective and are packed with little details. With main players, bystanders, and a feeling of depth, the reader as voyeur can slip right comfortably in and feel unobtrusive...


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full issue available here

Despite the sometimes sensational aspects of his covers (perhaps dictated by market necessity or St. John himself, the mid-50s covers with the approach of the comics code are downright wholesome - not to mention breath-taking), if I had to associate one word with Baker's art it would be grace. He makes it look so easy. I've seen stories of where another artist would be talking with him and sit there and watch him draw out an entire splash page without using the eraser once. There's a flow and an economy to his his art in the St. John period that is just so appropriate for a romance and for drawings of the female form. He had a reputation as a ladies' man, and you can certainly see in his work an understanding of the female form and facial expression that's just a wonder to behold. The cover I started my post with is perhaps unique among his covers for the close-up perspective, and I can see why John Benson used it for a cover for his book. And here's some more covers from the longest running St. John title, Teen-Age Romances.


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I love to work on these covers, but it is definitely a labor of love. I'd say the average cover from the golden age takes me about 15-20 hours. Here are a couple of the before and afters side by side for those of you that are interested in the digital restoration out there to check out.

Teen-Age Romances 14 before
Teen-Age Romances 14 after

Teen-Age Romances 12 before
Teen-Age Romances 12 after

Admittedly, much of the finer detail I seem to obsess about gets lost at screen size, but still I think the proof is in the pudding one way or another. The image I share is much compressed in width as well as quality, so I make sure and always keep my working files in case there's ever a need for the bigger image. Not to mention, some covers are done to a higher standard than others, and I might always return to some of them some day. You can check out an example of the large working tif files for this last cover here for a much closer look at what goes into erasing the tears, flaked inks, stains, page bleed, etc. on one of these covers. I try to always keep textures and printing patterns as intact as possible and avoid anything as tacky as bucket fills or re-drawing. Most of the work is done with the clone stamp at various opacity settings. Even though I'm "restoring" the cover, I like to keep the feel of the original printing methods. A reminder also that the picture hosting site compresses these images before they relay them, so the images in the scan files will be of greater width with less compression and artifacting.

While I'm at it, I'll go ahead and share my folder for all the scanned issues of St. John's romances. A reminder that these and many more golden age comics can be found at the Digital Comics Museum. The St. John romance scans are a work in progress, and many, many issues are left to be scanned (I figure less than a quarter currently scanned). They tend to be pricey and scarce, so it's great JVJ has let us scan his, and once those are done there will still be issues in need of scanning. Some interesting titles to check out are the Adventures series packaged by Leonard Starr and Warren King in a cool, slightly oversized format along with Hollywood Confessions, packaged by a young Joe Kubert for St. John. The scanned St. John issues are all in here, and I'll try and keep those folders current. Big thanks to all scanners represented. There's a hot off the presses batch of Diary Secrets scanned and edited by my pal Snard from the JVJ collection in there, so enjoy those romance fans.

I'll be returning to Matt Baker's art at some point in the future with an update on the JVJ project along with a high-resolution collection of some of his illustrations for men's adventure magazines and crime digests which should be fun for those that haven't seen Matt at work in that sort of format before.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

National Sputnik Monroe Day / Memphis Heat Premiere

Just a quick post tonight to say that I attended the world premiere showing tonight at the Malco Paradiso of Memphis Heat, and IT WAS KICK-ASS. I made it to the 9:00 showing, and it was standing room only - an electric atmosphere for certain. The line to get in snaked outside, and you could hear fans sharing all sorts of crazy wrestling memories.

Jimmy Hart introduced the film, co-executive producer Sherman Willmot had a silver Sputnik-streak in his hair, and Jerry Lawler had a special video-intro for the crowd since he was in Florida shooting for a movie. You could tell the hometown crowd really appreciated seeing all these special wrestling memories, and my hat goes off to the filmmakers for a job well done. The editing, the audio, the soundtrack, the story-telling were all top notch, and fans of Memphis wrestling owe it to themselves to catch this with other Memphians while it's in the theater (it's playing down on the square and also at the Southaven Malco Desoto 16 for the coming week).

I personally really loved seeing some interview footage of Sputnik and Billy, and the story of carnival wrestling and their feud kicks off the film as sort of "the rise of Memphis wrestling". From there it doesn't slow down one bit, and a whole parade of vibrant characters play out the colorful history of Memphis wrestling, a town where Saturday morning wrestling held a completely astonishing 80 percent market share for years. It was great to see Rocky Johnson, Bill Dundee, Jerry Lawler, and many others, but the guys who really steal the show interview-wise are Jackie Fargo and Jimmy Valiant. Jackie's so full of shit, but you can't help but smile when he starts to dish it out. And, Jimmy, what a sweetheart, his positive attitude is contagious. The film concludes with the Lawler-Kaufman feud (with some absolutely fantastic clips I'd never seen before) and the following Hart-Lawler feud and Jimmy Hart going to the WWF. You can't really blame Jimmy, but it does really serve as a nice instrument in showing how Vince and cable really took the air out of the local promotions. If I have any gripes, it'd be that some of the archival footage video quality is rough, but so it goes with old wrestling footage, and the filmmakers have done a service to gather what is available before anything else gets lost. Hot damn, I want to see the movie again just thinking about it - I must be excited to be typing about it 1:00 in the morning the night of - don't miss out!

Did I mention the awesome soundtrack? All Memphis and all awesome. As Don Poier, sportscaster for the Grizzlies, used to say, "Only in the movies, and only in Memphis."


*For a couple of my past posts on Memphis wrestling, click here for a post on the career of Sputnik Monroe or here for a short review of Ron Hall's book that inspired the movie.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Look, January 18, 1949 / Stanley Kubrick as Photographer


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Get the cover to cover scan here! Big thanks to McCoy for his edit work on this issue.

A short detour from planned posts today, let's take a gander at a key issue of Look, a magazine often quickly dismissed as an also-ran competitor of Life though it was hugely successful in circulation and possessed in my opinion a fun and distinct flavor (a bit more sensational, more entertainment-oriented) from Life. Life debuted in November of 1936, and Look started with v01n02 in February of 1937, and PIC actually beat both of them off the block with its first issue in May of 1936. All of these magazines were on an over-sized paper stock and capitalized on printing advances that made the publication of photographs much more affordable, ushering in the photo-dominated slick magazine and the end of the golden age of illustration. Look was founded by Gardner "Mike" Cowles (Executive Editor of the Des Moines Register) and his brother John and began as a thinner magazine (44 pages) subtitled "The Monthly Picture Magazine" with very little text. The captions often told the story or the text would just be a paragraph or two, and there was no advertising whatsoever. The magazine was monthly for its first five issues but quickly moved to a bi-weekly format. In January of 1937, Time published an article describing the origin of Look and and its founders and gives a description of the first issue's sensational contents aimed, the article says a bit condescendingly, at a "lower, broader" audience than the fledgling Life. Doc Lomazow has a nice, big scan of the cover for this first issue over on his blog on a post here. Within weeks, demand for Look soared to over a million copies. Peak circulation was 7.75 million, and it was the second highest selling mag after Life and sold more copies than The Saturday Evening Post. In 1971 when it closed its doors, it still had a circulation of 6.5 million, not too shabby.

My man McCoy happens to have scanned one of the 1937 issues (August 3rd), and I'd be doing a disservice not to post it here in the conversation so that you can get a fuller picture of the magazine's early character.


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Get the cover to cover scan here! Thanks to McCoy for sharing the issue with us. All sorts of oddities in here - an elephant steps on a man's head, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini pay for babies, catching a polar bear, rope dancers, tidal waves, teaching the deaf to speak, what makes fighters punch drunk, a new treatment for freckles, April Fool joke becomes fashion rage, an extended pictorial on the rise of Gary Cooper, and much more...

But back to the 1949 issue, by which time the magazine has moved to a format that the modern reader is more familiar with at 100 pages, plenty of advertisements, some color(though on alternating qualities of paper stock), and articles more in-line with what we think of when we think of Life or other weekly magazines. If you plan on scanning any of this type of magazine, you'll most likely want to use an A4 scanner, as the pages are much too big to fit on a standard scanner, and merging two scans for each page is very labor intensive. Look, from what I've seen on eBay, isn't collected by too many folks. You can find issues fairly cheap there, and the circulation was so wide that it's one of the titles that you can sometimes find at flea markets and antique malls. It's not a magazine I go out of my way to collect (the cover design in later years is not very attractive in my opinion), but I do keep an eye out for issues with cool content. Like the publishers intended, the magazine has broad appeal, and readers today will find all sorts of interesting material in the historical and political issues of the day along with plenty of entertainment and lifestyle topics as well as great vintage advertising.

The indicia page for the January 18, 1949, issue:


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So, I picked this issue up, as you no doubt quickly deduced from the post title, because I'm a fan of Stanley Kubrick and was interested in seeing some of his early photographic work in context. Kubrick grew up with a dark room in his home and was only 16 when he sold his first photograph to Look. He joined the Look staff as a full-time photographer just as soon as he graduated from high school. Fans of his cinema will no doubt be unsurprised that he began his career as a photographer, and the extended article/pictorial in this issue "The Prizefighter" served as inspiration for his first film, "Day of the Fight," which also centers around the life of boxer Walter Cartier. Day of the Fight is public domain and available at archive.org or you can download and see some screencaps and a little more description here. Be warned, though, the video quality at archive.org (and on the other two much larger rips I've found on the web) is truly awful and detracts from enjoying the film. The little doc seems solid enough and would give him the name and footing he needed to further his career. I recently re-watched perhaps my favorite of his films The Killing and saw for the first time Paths of Glory, both films which already have him in great form just five years later. A friend mentioned to me that he wondered if Scorsese's Raging Bull was influenced by "Day of the Fight" and the Look pictorial, and I'd say you can see how the day to day details shown of Cartier's life might have influenced that later film. There are book-length collections of Kubrick's photos out there, and Look donated their photos to the Library of Congress, and there are about 100 Kubrick photos available online here for your viewing pleasure. Many of them are quite good, though some of the negatives seem to have deteriorated. Kubrick is a great example of one of the many luminaries who began their careers in American magazines. For your reading pleasure, "The Prizefighter":


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There are plenty of other neat articles in here, too, I'll put up a couple more articles I enjoyed. First, here's an article a Herbert Hoover commission on the size of government which might almost be considered quaint in light of 60 years of expansion, "Is Our Government Too Big" by William B. Arthur. It's right after the war, and Americans had a pretty positive view of Uncle Sam, so there's really not too much anti-government rhetoric in here, but you can tell there's some skepticism about the expanding role government was taking in our lives. I, like most Americans I'd guess, have mixed feelings about big government. It's certainly a tool for bettering society and checking wanton corporate behavior, but at the same time, the inefficiency and cost of it all can be maddening. The recent report that comes to mind is the one talking about all the layers of duplicate bureaucracy in the Dept. of Homeland Security (which I'd say we could just about do without altogether, I'm sure others would say things about entities I appreciate such as the DOE, etc). One thing for certain, though, rolling back government to the size of operations in the 19th century is an absolute pipe dream - at some point I feel like it's far healthier for the republic to adopt a mindset of management and responsibility for your government instead of viewing it as the enemy and that goes out to personages on both ends of the political spectrum...


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And here's an article on post-war Japan I found very interesting, "The Strange Case of MacArthur in Japan" by Hallett Abend. After reading much on WWII last year, this is an interesting look at Japan 4 years later, still having a very rough time of it. MacArthur is one of those figures in American History that gets almost deified by many, so I was surprised to see the critical stance the writer takes. In light of how quickly Japan would eventually recover and in light of some of our more recent attempts at nation-building, I've always thought of our work in Japan as ultra-successful; it's a subject I really ought to look into more, as I would suppose this was a critical period in the forging of a new way of life and a new national identity. The author seems to foreshadow coming events in Korea and is eminently concerned with the operations of communism in this faltering Japan, the Cold War is at the forefront of his concerns. Anyways, as usual, reading an old magazine has disturbed some of my pat ideas on History, so I'm inspired to do some digging on the subject. But here 'tis:


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And some little odds and ends I enjoyed, more on this stuff in the complete scan. Kiss Me Kate, Cole Porter makes a comeback.

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A fun ranking of stars' money-making power for 1948.

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From a nice article on Elizabeth Taylor. After ogling at the pics I was a little embarrassed to read she's only 16 here, oh my.

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In theaters now. I saw Yellow Sky last week and really enjoyed it. If not for the poor climax and aftermath, it'd be a classic.

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An article on women in homebuilding I enjoyed, as my stepmom has always been involved in my pop's homebuilding ventures.

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Schlitz...

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Buddy Rich!


Next time - back to our previously scheduled programme. How to scan pt.3, editing.