Virgil In Blue

To wrap up this week's look back at the artwork of Virgil Finlay, let's take a look at some of his more 'adult oriented' imagery -

Original Caption: "Watchers saw her white body gleaming amidst the spray." -Weird Tales, June 1937

We've seen previously how Finlay would sometimes redraw earlier works. The piece above repurposes a figure study from two years earlier...

(The magazine wasn't titled Weird Tales for nothing)

It's interesting to note how much of this work came from the late 1930s leading into the early '40s - the same time period that Margaret Brundage was doing so much of her work for the same publishers. In fact, the first image in this post (among others) comes from an issue with a Brundage cover (The Carnal God - see this post)

artwork by Virgil Finlay

Bonus Brundage

In the front room, we've been running a series on Margaret Brundage, and this evening's post is a collection of paintings for her old Weird Tales covers.
Posted here we have a few non-cover paintings, including a couple quite lighter in tone from what we're used to seeing on the pulp covers.

Duck, Duck, Goosed

We all know Carl Barks, right?
You know...  the guy who taught us all about capitalism when we were growing up:

The Man who brought us those great adventures with Scrooge, Donald, and the family...

...and all those other wonderful ducks...

... what...the...  ducks?

Duckin' A!
It must be another..

This  week featuring (pretty obviously) the great Carl Barks!

Long before he became famous for his work with the Disney characters, Barks enjoyed drawing women and bawdy humor. Early cartoon work for magazines like Calgary EyeOpener provided a playground for the budding artist.

In 1939 he released a Nude Lithograph with work reminiscent of great modern European erotic artists:

Throughout his highly prolific career he continued to use the female form as a way to get away from the ducks and enjoy his art.

 

My favorite works (though i love those simple figure studies above) come from a period when Disney revoked his license to paint the Duck family and he humorously responded with a series of commissions entitled Famous Figures Of History As They Might Have Looked Had Their Genes Gotten Mixed With Waterfowl, such as this delightful piece, Mountain Man:

 

(Yes, that's Myron Moose in the background)

I believe Disney restored his license fairly swiftly after learning of these paintings.

Everything but the logo by the great Carl Barks (spread over half a century or more)

What phase is the moon?

At one point while growing up, we lived in a 'blue' county, so called because it was subject to old Blue Laws. Blue Laws was a term used to refer to attempts to legislate morality, usually by the highly unmoral seeking power or feeling guilty. On Sundays where we lived, the alcohol cabinets in the stores were chained shut, and bars closed. It was illegal to sell alcohol anywhere in the county on Sunday, so you tried to stock up friday or saturday, and hope your friends did, too, so they wouldn't drink you dry before Monday came around.
This was Blue Sunday.

In general, this worked out for most folks with only minor grousing about the situation. But for the hard drinkers, the young partiers who get cut off halfway through the weekend, it was ... well, agonizing - according to them. This led to savagely overdrinking and hard partying on Monday - the kind that leaves you waking up naked and not being able to identify the naked person(s) next to you.
This was Blue Monday.

And so we have a name for our latest feature:

Here we'll take a look at what we'll call 'Blue' comics & art for the sake of the feature.
Sometimes we'll look at various 'adult' comics from around the globe, other times we'll just look at the pretty pictures. Like today.
Here's a news flash - many artists often draw naked things. From learning experiences to expressions of passion to desperate need, the reasons vary widely. Some hide it, some flaunt it. Some do it for pleasure, some for attention, some only for money or to please others. Sometimes, it's the most obvious artists whose work is nearly erotica anyway, other times it's the last artist you might expect. (See our next Blue Monday for a potential example)

For our inaugural episode, let's not focus on any one artist - let's go with a theme. Superman Artists. I'm sure there's lots more out there. It's a new feature on a new blog, so no lengthy research is involved. Just 3x3 pics from 10 Superman Artists, ranging from Joe Shuster to Bruce Timm - the artists who brought us the first Superman, and the modern animated Superman. These are two of the most famous blue art creators among the comics pros - Joe Shuster due to publication of a book not long back calling attention to his fetish art, and Bruce Timm due to the publication of his own collection of paintings and drawings. I'm only using one example from each artist here, and zero context information for this quick review.


Joe Shuster:

Al Williamson:

Jim Mooney:

Curt Swan:

Neal Adams:

Ross Andru & Mike Esposito (Two Superman Artists for the price of One!):

John Byrne:

Jon Bogdanove:

Bruce Timm:

I was all set to start typing about Bruce Timm, but-  He's a feature, not a comment.
Another day...