Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo

A handsome collection of rare pin-ups from the late cartoonist who defined Betty & Veronica's look. For nearly half a century, Dan DeCarlo was the Archie comic book artist and defined the look of every adolescent boy's wet dreams, Betty and Veronica, with their trademark upturned noses, tight sweaters, and barely-there mini-skirts.
From 1956 to 1963, DeCarlo also produced hundreds of pin-up cartoons for the Humorama line of girlie digests, where his line drawings and exquisite ink-wash paintings shared the pages with Jack Cole, Bill Ward, and Bill Wenzel, and photos featuring Bettie Page. Culling through thousands of Humorama digests, editor Alex Chun has selected the best of DeCarlo's ink wash pin-up work, with many featuring captions by Marvel Comics' Stan Lee. Along with collecting hundreds of long out-of-print images, the book also features an introductory essay by long time DeCarlo friend and current Bongo Comics creative director Bill Morrison.

The late cartoonist who defined Betty & Veronica's look for Archie comics also produced hundreds of exquisite ink-wash cartoons for the Humorama line of girlie digests from 1956 to 1963. This handsome volume collects many of the best.

Publishers Weekly

For more than 40 years, DeCarlo, who died in 2001, was the principal artist at Archie Comics, not only working on the company's title character and his friends but also co-creating Josie and the Pussycats and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Within the innocent context of these comics for juveniles, DeCarlo's Betty, Veronica and other heroines had a surprising degree of sex appeal, and they influenced the work of younger cartoonists from the Batman cartoon's Bruce Timm to Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame. In the 1950s, though, DeCarlo drew gag cartoons for the Humorama line of men's magazines, and editor Chun and designer Covey have assembled nearly 200 of these pieces into this collection. DeCarlo's cheery caricatures seem out of place in the blatantly risque world of dirty pictures, unable to match the erotic appeal of more illustrative pin-up artists. In his introduction, Bill Morrison (The Simpsons) claims these DeCarlo cartoons reveal the sexual underside of the repressed 1950s. Actually, they depict a dated, anti-feminist world where young, buxom women make themselves available to men who often look less attractive, much older and smug. Intended in their day to be adult and sophisticated, these cartoons now look pathetically adolescent. Moreover, the gags are consistently unfunny. This book produces not titillation so much as tedium. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Alex Chun is a longtime journalist living in Los Angeles. A former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily Journal, he is currently a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times where he covers pop-culture. He also edits a series of art books for Fantagraphics. In his spare time, he collects original cartoon pin-up art and maintains the website www.pinupcartoongallery.com.

His books include The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo (two volumes), The Pin-Up Art of Bill Wenzel, The Pin-up Art of Bill Ward, The Glamor Girls of Don Flowers, The Glamour Girls of Bill Ward, Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole, and The Pin-Up Art of Humorama.

Jacob Covey lives with his wife in Seattle, WA, where he works as Art Director at Fantagraphics Books.

Dan DeCarlo was born in 1919 and passed away in 2001.