By what? I’m the one who told you to look for good girl and headlights shots from the 40s. I only denied that Batman was using them in 1939.
But you shouldn’t think that any of these poses, any of the bondage imagery, or any of the dishabille comes out of the comic world. These illos are stolen almost directly from the pulp magazines of the 20s and 30s. Women in bondage was an almost constant theme in every type of pulp. In crime books, the bad guys tied them up. In science fiction, aliens tied them up. In weird fantasy, monsters and ghouls and mad doctors tied them up.
You haven’t seen anything until you page through the illustrations from the Spicy line - Spicy Adventure, Detective, Mystery, Screen, and Western Stories. The girls are nuder than in other pulps because it’s easier to torture them while naked. Check out Saucy/Spicy Magazines.
And check out both the headlights and girls in bondage on this series of Fight Comics covers on this page.
Lots of the publishers, writers, editors and artists switched over to comics when the pulps lost favor at the end of the 30s compared to the rocket success of comic books. You can see a clear line between them.
Are you restricting yourself to American comics, because otherwise you might look up the British WW2 cartoon, ‘Jane’. And for a humourous side-swipe, look up the “Phil’n’Dixie” cartoons by Phil Foglio (Of Xxxenophile fame) in earlier editions of Dragon Magazine
It’s important to understand that in the 1930’s & early 1940’s, the newspaper strips were the definite big-time, & the dedicated comic books were sometimes seen as fannish efforts–a bit like webcomics today. Don’t think you’ve seen the whole picture without comparing comic-book ladies to the femmes fatales in strips like Terry & the Pirates.
And of course, the further out of the mainstream a format is, the more uncensored it can be. As comic books sold enormous quantities to children in the 1940’s, the seeds of being seen as a monolithic mainstream enterprise in their own right (like “network television” today) were planted. Of course, that perception of comic books as all one thing was a function of an adult society to whom they were newfangled. But it’s that perception which fed the calls for censorship.
Since Biffy the Elephant Shrew never posted to this thread, I’m guessing you meant to post in another thread, one where someone named Omaha having two or six of something might have meaning.
Throughout THE SPIRIT’S weekly run from the the thirties to the fifties, Will Eisner and his staff of cartoonist assistants all drew some astonishing beauties – Ellen Dolan, Lorelei Lox, Sand Saref and Silk Satin, among others, culminating with the incomparable P’Gell.
Didn’t Al Capp’s Lil’ Abner feature outrageously curvy women from the get-go?
And is the focus of this thread just on graphics, or content too? For example, when was the first time a female character was explicitly in danger of being raped? When was the sex life of two married characters first implied? The first pregnant female characer? (that used to be a tremendous no-no, believe it or not)
