by Tim Pilcher
“Would you mind slowing down? The last picture I took had six of everything!” Cole’s inkwash for Humorama was signed “Jake.”
Art Paul, Playboy’s first Art Director and creator of the infamous bunny logo, recalled Cole’s appeal: “He had the artistic skill, the appropriate wit, and great ideas, and in spite of the accomplishments he had before, he seemed like a Playboy discovery.” Certainly Cole was favored highly by Hefner.
Cole continued to have a life outside Playboy, however, and in May 1958 he realized one of his lifetime ambitions when his own daily syndicated newspaper strip, Betsy and Me, took off, appearing in 50 newspapers. It chronicled the domestic adventures of Chester Tibbet, his wife Betsy, and their five-year-old genius son, Farley.
Cole attended a Playboy party in August 1958 and, according to Art Paul, the artist had quite a bit too much to drink and was behaving erratically. The next day Cole got behind the wheel of his Chevrolet station wagon, parked on a gravel road west of the intersection of Illinois Routes 176 and 14, put a .22 caliber Marlin rifle to his head, and pulled the trigger. He was 43 years old. He sent two suicide notes, one to his wife Dorothy, and the other to Hugh Hefner. The latter read: “Dear Hef, When you read this I shall be dead. I cannot go on living with myself and hurting those dear to me.” To this day no one is sure what the enigmatic letter actually meant. At the inquest, Dorothy Cole announced that her letter had given sufficient reason, but she never revealed its contents and never spoke to Hugh Hefner or Cole’s family again.
Jack Cole’s mastery with a brush extended to ink-washes as well as watercolors and line work.
“I feel positively buoyant! Mr Farnsworth called me a stupid idiot and you know what a liar HE is.” Another Humorama cartoon by “Jake.”
PIN-UP KINGS: BILL WARD
Jack Cole’s stable-buddy at Humorama, Bill Ward, also had a successful comic career behind him.
Bill Ward discovered his talent for drawing at 17, when he began painting pictures on kids’ jackets and earned enough money to last all summer. Not only that, but “what a fantastic way to meet girls,” reminisced Ward. He enrolled in the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and immediately started specializing in drawing girls. Ward slacked at school, spending too much time carousing, knowing he’d be drafted into the army when he turned 19. By his own admission he wasn’t a good artist when he graduated in 1941.
Ward’s first full-time job was with a Manhattan art service, sweeping up after the illustrators. Bored, he managed to get himself fired after inadvertently slicing a painting in two, and found himself working for Jack Binder, drawing backgrounds for Fawcett’s comic books, including Bullet Man and The Shadow. It was during this time that Binder taught Ward the real skills he needed to succeed in comics.
Like many artists of the time, Ward moved between several companies, and around 1946 worked for “Busy” Arnold, Quality’s publisher, who also hired Cole. When Arnold asked Ward if he had any ideas for a new story for his Modern Comics anthology, Ward suggested Torchy—the strip about the dizzy blonde he’d created while in the Army. Torchy was a stripping morale booster for troops, in much in the same way as its U.K. counterpart, Jane. The strip became a huge success and got its own title, while Ward’s particular skill at drawing women got him moved over to Quality’s massively popular romance comics. Torchy was soon neglected by Ward due to lack of time, and Gil Fox took over the title. Like Cole, Ward was becoming increasingly disillusioned with comics. Decreasing sales saw Quality go bust and so Ward found other work drawing cartoons for Abe Goodman on his Humorama titles.
Lust-driven caricatures of men chasing gorgeous gals were a recurring theme of Ward’s. His use of white-out for highlights was a masterstroke.
Ward, under his pseudonym “Jarrico,” plays with double entendres. “Harold! Don’t you ever tire of toying with knockers?”
Ward came into his own at Humorama and stood out from the crowd thanks to his skilled use of Conté crayon on rough, but incredibly fragile, newsprint stock paper. This gave his pictures a hint of color and style that no other artist had. Because of his choice of materials Ward could work extremely quickly, but it also meant he had to work three times bigger than every other artist—often using paper 18” wide by 2’ tall! But Goodman gave him special dispensation because the work was so good.
Ward’s women were caricatures from the start; with enormous breasts and miniscule waists, they seemed to totter about effortlessly on 12” heels in skintight cocktail dresses. “Like a lot of folks I’ve spoken to over the years, I’ve had conflicting feelings about the man’s art. Certainly, he produced lusciously gorgeous depictions of the female form, but frankly, a lot of what I’ve seen from Ward slipped over the line from sexy to crass, particularly much of his later work, where his ladies were often festooned with a grotesquely gargantuan bosom,” said an uncharitable fellow cartoonist, Fred Hembeck.
Ward worked for other publishers—as well as producing a variety of book covers and pin-ups under the name McCartney—until a fan wrote to him saying that another artist was ripping off his style.
When men’s magazines started becoming kinkier and more fetishistic, Ward followed the market, drawing explicit sex scenes and BDSM comics with powerful dominatrices. His later work is reminiscent of Eric Stanton’s, and both drew for Bizarre magazine for a time.
To say Ward was prolific is like saying that Picasso liked to doodle. Ward produced an incredible 30 cartoons a month for Goodman and was paid a mere $7 for each one. It’s estimated that Ward drew or painted over 10,000 pin-up cartoons during his life, more than any other artist before or since. His influence is still felt today and he is regarded very much as an artist’s artist.
This Ward cartoon, under the pseudonym “McCartney,” first appeared in the black men’s magazine Duke #1 in June 1957. “What kind of living would we make if I stayed in bed all day?”
Tragically, this rare Ward original is deteriorating fast.
This outrageously sexist cartoon was par for the course in the 1950s. “While we’re at it, Miss Atkins, why don’t we take care of next month’s rent too?”
PIN-UP KINGS: DAN DECARLO
Another Humorama mainstay was Dan DeCarlo, best remembered for his prodigious 40-year career drawing and shaping the look of Archie Comics. DeCarlo was also responsible for creating some of the sexiest cartoon women ever to grace the pages of Goodman’s Humorama titles.
Daniel Santos DeCarlo attended New Rochelle High School, New York before heading to Manhattan’s Art Students League in 1938. Three years later he was drafted into the army and stationed in the U.K., where he worked in the motor pool and painted company mascots on the noses of airplanes, echoing the work of pin-up artist Alberto Vargas.
DeCarlo met his future wife, Josie Dumont, in Belgium after the Battle of the Bulge, and the two returned to the States after the war. DeCarlo struggled to find work cartooning and ended up hanging storm windows for a living. Tensions between Josie and the artist mounted and the homesick mother of two returned to France with their twin boys Dan Jr. and James.
In 1947, one of DeCarlo’s sisters pointed out an advertisement stating that Timely Comics (later Marvel) were looking for artists. Dan went along, despite wanting to work in magazine illustration, and editor Stan Lee gave him a job on the spot. DeCarlo was paid $75 a week on staff and Josie returned with the boys.
DeCarlo drew many sexy strips for Timely including Jeanie, Millie the Model, Sherry the Showgirl, and My Girl Pearl. He was incredibly fast and managed to squeeze in work for Archie Comics and other publishers.
It was Stan Lee who finally got DeCarlo into the “gags ’n’ girls” market when he introduced the artist to an editor at Humorama (Timely’s sister imprint)—for a 10% fee from any work that resulted, of course!
“It won’t do any good to call your mother—I forgot to pay the phone bill this month!”
Sherry The Showgirl #2 (1956), one of the many covers that DeCarlo drew for Marvel Comics.
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sp; DeCarlo often reworked gags for different magazines. Here, the door sign has been clearly altered from “Peace Corp. Recruiting Office” to “Speach Corp. Office.” This was probably done in the Humorama production offices. The caption reads: “I’m leaving my job because I was told to do something I didn’t like—I was told to look for another job.” The cartoon originally appeared in Romp, and then Laugh Digest.
DeCarlo produced between five and 10 cartoons a month, on top of his regular comic work, yet the quality never wavered. DeCarlo signed his art DSD (his initials) to differentiate his work, but his style was so distinctive it was pretty obvious that this was the same man who drew the more innocent Archie titles.
DeCarlo’s women looked like they could suck the chrome off a bumper, yet butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. He managed to draw completely naked strippers bumping and grinding, and they still looked like you could take them home to meet mom.
Unlike many of his colleagues, DeCarlo stayed with his strong, delineated black outlines—even when adding gray wash tones— rather than forsaking them for the softer, full-color watercolors that Jack Cole and Bill Wenzel would eventually adopt.
When Humorama’s sales started falling toward the end of the 1950s, DeCarlo moved onto the more wholesome Archie titles and helped define the adolescent’s wet dream fantasy with the two Riverdale honeys—Betty and Veronica—as well as Josie and The Pussycats. As wife Josie explained, “We went on a Caribbean cruise, and I had a [cat] costume for the cruise. That’s the way it started.”
When a film version of Josie and the Pussycats was planned, DeCarlo fought for recognition and remuneration for creating the characters. Despicably, Archie Comics fired DeCarlo in May 2000, after 40 years of service, and the battle obviously took its toll on the artist. The movie was released in August 2001 and Dan DeCarlo died four months later.
DeCarlo’s legacy lives on in his twin sons, Dan Jr. and James, who also worked for Archie Comics. Their father’s work has continued to inspire countless creators, including Paul Dini, Bruce Timm, and Jaime Hernandez.
“What do you mean you’re not wearing a costume?!” Note the (unintentional?) phallic nose on the tramp. The original caption read: “Let’s go back to my place and slip out of these costumes!”
“Oh I wouldn’t mind marrying him—but as a date, he’s a terrible bore!” DeCarlo’s women always wore the latest fashions.
PIN-UP KINGS: BILL WENZEL
Born in 1918 to Hungarian immigrants, Bill Wenzel came from a poor, working-class family and had to struggle more than most to achieve his dream of drawing for a living. The redheaded young man was encouraged by his high school art teacher to apply to Cooper Union in NYC, and he won a scholarship—the only way he would have been able to continue his art studies.
Like many pin-up artists, Wenzel honed his craft when he was drafted into the army and became the staff artist on the camp newspaper The Palisades. There, his artwork sat alongside Milton Caniff’s Male Call strip and Wenzel’s original cartoons soon became highly prized decorations for offices of the army’s top brass. While in the army, Wenzel also worked for several civilian magazines, such as Army Laughs.
Wenzel married his Union High School sweetheart, Marion Moriarty, in 1942, and they had a daughter, Candace, two years later, followed by a second daughter, Dorian, in 1957.
Bill Wenzel’s women were very different to Ward’s, Cole’s, or even DeCarlo’s. With plumper hips, rounded stomachs, and softer curves, his Rubenesque ladies seemed more real somehow. And yet they were just as alluring as any of his contemporaries’ femmes fatales. His daughter Dorian recalled, “Some say the women in the drawings look like our mother. Dad always felt that women should have a little bit of a stomach, big hips, and a hiney.”
Miss Geewhiz, from the magazine of the same name, was quite liberated for the time.
Miss Geewhiz gives as good as she gets in this pen and ink strip by Wenzel.
Wenzel’s work graced many covers of 1940s humor digests like Romp, Fun House, and Laugh Riot, and he even flirted with sequential storytelling for a while with his Miss Geewhiz strip, the heroine from the Humorama title of the same name. Wenzel was published consistently from the 1940s in titles like Judge, right up to the fantastically named Sex to Sexty magazine of the 1960s. The cartoonist’s work was so popular it was collected into an anthology entitled Wenzel’s Wenches.
By now, printing processes had caught up with Wenzel’s talents and he switched from pen-and-ink linewashes to full-color watercolors for magazines like Escapade and cheeky kiss-and-tell paperback books like Fly Me and Coffee, Tea, or Me?
Wenzel spent the majority of his life living in New Jersey and regularly made trips to New York to see his editors and fellow cartoonists. He and Marion finally moved to Florida, where Wenzel continued to freelance until his death.
“Isn’t this kind of drastic punishment just for walking on the grass?”
The caption, “Look, George! September Morn’!” cleverly refers to a painting by Paul Chaba that caused controversy in Chicago in 1913 for its nude content.
Wenzel’s parody of the Kinsey Report. “I not only read it—I sent in 69 pages of information.”
“You might as well come in. You can’t seduce me out in the hall…”
These stunning, archetypal Wenzel women mull over their relationships: “We have a very platonic relationship—he’s too old to do anything about his young ideas.”
PIN-UP KINGS: DON FLOWERS
At the age of 17, Don Flowers didn’t run away from Custer City, Oklahoma to join the circus, but rather to become a newspaper cartoonist. His first job was at the Kansas City Star before he moved to the Chicago American and finally settled at Associated Press (AP). Flowers hung out with other famous newspaper cartoonists and became friends with Lil’ Abner creator Al Capp and Male Call creator Milton Caniff while they worked at AP. It was here that Flowers created Oh Diana (aka Diana Dean) in 1931. He then gave it up, when his other strip, Modest Maidens, became hugely popular.
Like so many cartoonists, while his professional career was taking off, Flowers’ personal life went downhill. He divorced, and spent years leading a heavy-smoking, hard-drinking lifestyle in New York, leading him to contract tuberculosis.
Flowers was lured to AP’s rivals, King Features Syndicate, by newspaper magnate and owner William Randolph Hearst, who offered Flowers double what he’d been getting paid at AP. Since the rights to his cartoons belonged to AP, Flowers simply renamed his strip Glamor Girls and joined the King Features Syndicate. At its height, Glamor Girls was syndicated into nearly 300 papers around the world and the artist drew the daily strip and Sunday pages until his death.
Associated Press continued running Modest Maidens (occasionally called Modern Maidens), putting a variety of cartoonists on the strip including Virginia Clark, Wood Calley, Phil Berubi, Vernon Reick, and finally Jay Allen, until the series was cancelled in 1968.
Meanwhile, Flowers moved to Tucson, Arizona, and then to California, where he met his second wife.
Though never as well known as his contemporary, pin-up strip artist Russell Patterson, Flowers was regarded by many as Patterson’s equal. Author/cartoonist Coulton Waugh wrote of Flowers’ art in his book The Comics, “It dances; it snaps gracefully back and forth; the touches relate.”
Flowers worked with Venus #4 pencils, dip pens, Winsor & Newton brushes, and India ink on three-ply Strathmore art board, but his Sunday pages were colored in-house at King Features with the proofs returned to Flowers for approval.
In Alex Chun’s book on the artist, Flowers’ son, Don Jr., recalled, “Always a heavy drinker, my dad resumed smoking a few years before his death, committing what was probably a form of suicide (he’d already had a lung removed after being stricken with emphysema.)” Modest Maidens, Glamor Girls, and Don Flowers died almost simultaneously in 1968.
Flowers’ work inspired many modern illustrators and cartoonists, including MAD and Groo the Wanderer artist Sergio Aragones
, who learnt to draw women by copying Flowers’ style. The US cartoonist’s work was reprinted in a Spanish-language humor magazine called Ja-Ja in Aragones’ home country of Mexico and Flowers’ influence can be still seen in Aragones’ work.
Flowers’ art style developed a fantastically distinctive look, which is strangely prescient of many European cartoonists, such as Jean-Richard Gevrts.
Biting satire of relationships between men, women, and families were Don Flowers’ forte. Flowers’ economy with line reveals the artist’s confidence in this cartoon from 1966.
HUGH HEFNER: PUBLISHER, VISIONARY, CARTOONIST
In December 1953 an inexperienced young publisher on a miniscule budget launched a new magazine. Its modest 70,000-copy print run sold out instantly, and within six years it was selling one million copies per issue. The publisher was Hugh Hefner and the magazine was Playboy.
Hugh Hefner was born on April 9, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois to strict Midwest Methodists. He possessed a genius IQ of 152 and received his bachelor’s degree in two and a half years by doubling up on classes. Hefner was always a cartoonist at heart and drew cartoons for the Daily Illinois and edited his campus humor magazine Shaft, where he introduced a new feature, Co-ed of the Month. In 1951, after a stint in the army, he landed a job as a promotion copywriter at the groundbreaking men’s magazine Esquire. Two years later, publisher David Smart moved the operation to New York. When Hefner asked for a compensatory raise, and was refused, he quit and stayed on in Chicago to launch his own magazine.
