I'm guessing these hilarious highlights from my recently acquired collection of risqué lil "Bachelor Girl" cartoons 'n jokes were published sometime in the 1940's. I'm also guessing that the uncredited art is by none other than early days Bill Wenzel --at least it seems like his lushly loose, sexy cute style in the up 'n coming making. A fun mix of frisky females, old maids, and pictures coming to life all add up to one of the better square bound paperback joke collections like this that I've found over the years, and I will definitely be on the look-out for more! See ya's in March!
It's kind of interesting how you can draw gags for an entire book and not get any credit, though in 1940s you might not want to get credit in case you get back listed for doing material like this!
ReplyDeleteFor the girdle joke the dresses feel like "ah, that's a bit too far, better draw on dresses!" The picture/art gags are pretty fun, too. The wallflower one is probably the best joke.
It's funny that when I Google image search "Larch Laugh Library" this post comes right up, even though you don't actually use those key words anywhere in it. Thanks Skynet! That's some pretty good machine reading right there.
ReplyDeleteI didn't see a book in the whole run that wasn't published in '44, though the series' GCD page says '43. Speaking of that, you could help them out with your cover. They've only got six out of fourteen, and Bachelor Girls isn't one of them. Only reason I was double-checking was because I thought 25¢ seemed a little high for a novelty mass market paperback in the mid-forties. But I guess not.
You sure nailed the art description. This might be the loosest professionally published artwork I've seen. I mean, it's all really good, but I get the sense it couldn't have taken Cartoonist X more than a hour to do this whole project.
I've noticed my blog posts in all kinds of loosely related search engine hits, it is weird how it works so good for some things, but other times it's oddly disappointing. Anyway, thanks you guys for the comments :)
ReplyDelete