Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo
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 ofLove and Rocketsfame. 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 risqué 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.