Quiet! Pin-up girl poster – Whisper magazine cover, November 1948 – Peter Driben
It is almost impossible now to appreciate just how popular the Pulp magazines between the 1920s and 1950s were. At the peak of their popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, the most successful pulps, including Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book and Short Stories could sell up to a million copies per issue. They once held special significance for lovers of adventure stories, detective and science fiction, and horror and fantasy.
With the Wall Street Crash ending the affluence of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the early 1930s, America was going through a rough time. Newspapers were full of stories about violent gangsters, heroic FBI agents, movie star sex scandals and violent murders. Pre-Hays Code Hollywood tried to lure in its cash-strapped punters by offering ever more salacious and exploitative films featuring sex, violence, drinking and gambling. Films like Baby Face (1932), Scarface (1932), and Freaks (1932), contained storylines that reflected glamorous gangsters, sexually-liberated women and class struggle.
During the economic hardships, the pulps continued to provide affordable content to the masses and along with film and radio were one of the period’s primary forms of entertainment. Popular titles included Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown, Weird Tales and Western Story Magazine.
Beginning in the early 19th century, pin-up modeling had “theatrical origins”; burlesque performers and actresses sometimes used photographic advertisements as business cards to advertise shows. Publicity stills and posters of risqué dancers, artist’s models snd early-20th-century actresses were often drawn, painted and photographed to be used for promotion.
Good Girl Art and the Spicy Pulps
Unlike the photographed actresses and dancers of the earlier generations, the Good Girl Art (GGA) produced for the Spicy Pulp Magazines could be more imaginative, alluring and seductive. It gave artists the freedom to use their imagination and draw women in many different poses and situations. Artists including Earle K. Bergey, Enoch Bolles, Gil Elvgren, George Petty, Rolf Armstrong, Zoë Mozert, Duane Bryers, Art Frahm and the artist behind the poster on this listing Peter Driben, became popular and in-demand pulp cover artists. The Spicy Pulps became a popular genre of the pulp magazine market. In the almost endless list of magazine titles, some of the genre’s best-known include Snappy Stories, Telling Tales, I Confess, Spicy Detective Stories, Zeppelin Stories, Pep, Real Story Book, Artists and Models, Broadway Nights, WOW!, Spicy Adventure Stories, Gay Broadway, Spicy Mystery Stories, Wink, Titter, Beauty Parade, Flirt, and, of course, Whisper!
Spicy Pulps and Pin-ups, not exclusively for men!
In the same way people are offended by Tracey Emin’s art installation My Bed, were appalled by Damien Hirst’s Severed head of a Cow or didn’t ‘get’ Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII ‘pile of bricks. Some people do not like Pin-up art. Some even claim that it is sexist and misogynistic. Taste is individual but to simply dismiss the Good Girl Art form as sexist would be a terrible disservice to the genre.
Yes! there is no doubt some of the stories, and granted most of the covers, portray distressed or helpless women. Damsels in Distress, waiting to be saved by a good-looking, square-jawed American hero, only to run off into the sunset and get married. But that does ignore the many stories that were not written that way. The world of pulp magazines was not the sole domain of men. The Pulp fiction world was also inhabited by female editors, authors and artists who all made significant contributions to the industry. And that’s before you include the many strong female characters featured in the stories.
EDITORS: Editors such as Daisy Bacon who worked for Street & Smith’s romance pulps, in particular, Love Story Magazine that was one of their top-selling magazines, reaching a peak readership of 600,000 issues sold. Bacon later took over both the Doc Savage and Shadow pulps.
The pioneering pulp magazine that specialised in horror and fantasy fiction , Wierd Tales magazine was overseen by another female Editor in Chief, Dorothy McIlwraith. She also edited the American fiction magazine Short Stories.
Another well-regarded Editor was Mary Gnaedinger who edited Famous Fantastic Mysteries for its entire 14 year run as well as its spinoff magazine Fantastic Novels and A. Merritt’s Fantasty Magazine as well.
ARTISTS: The pulp magazine was lucky to several high-quality artists that created both pin-up art and cover art for the pulps. One of the industry’s luminaries was Joyce Ballantyne. Her trademark wit and the devilish sense of humor in her work distinguished her from the rest of her peers.
One of Ballantyne’s female peers was the equally notable Pearl Frush. Frush was also an American pin-up and glamour illustration artist during the golden era of the art form. According to the co-author of The Great American Pin-Up, Louis K. Meisel, “Frush’s technical brilliance was such that, upon close examination, her works even begin to take on a photographic clarity. Those knowledgeable collectors who have studied her paintings have often judged her the equal of Alberto Vargas in artistic excellence.” She was commercially successful with pin-up calendars including those titled “Liberty Belles”, “Girls of Glamour”, and “Glamour Round the Clock”. Her “Aqua Tour” series, depicting women in aquatic settings, created such a splash that it broke the company’s sales records.
Margaret Brundage is largely known for her outstanding, if risque, cover art for Weird Tales magazine. She actually created most of their covers from 1933-38, as well as their companion magazine Magic Carpet and Oriental Stories. Pulp covers were notorious for their explicit content, and Brundage’s were no exception. During this time, it would have been seen as unacceptable for a woman to be creating such material so she signed her work “M. Brundage”, to keep her identity in the dark for her readers. Complaints about the erotic nature of her work increased after October 1934, when editor Farnsworth Wright revealed that the “M.” stood for “Margaret,” disclosing that the artist was a woman.
Gloria Maria Stoll Karn was another artist who specialised in the graphic art of pulp magazines of the 1940s. Karn published over 100 full-color covers in her career. Her work often featured images of young couples, brave soldiers, cowboys or grizzled detectives and criminals. from 1941 to 1949, Stoll Karn’s vibrant, sometimes provocative illustrations were highly sought after by Popular Publications, one of the largest publishers of pulp magazines, and her work appeared regularly in issues of Black Mask, Dime Mystery, Detective Tales, New Detective, All-Story Love, New Love, Love Book, Love Short Stories, Love Novels, Romance, and Thrilling Love, as well Argosy.
Zoë Mozert, along with Joyce Ballantyne and Pearl Frush ranked among the top three female glamour artists during the 1930s and 1940s. During her career, Mozert painted hundreds of magazine covers and movie posters. She frequently was her own model, using cameras or mirrors to capture the pose. Her paintings are best known for their pastel style and realistic depiction of women. Her work appeared on the covers of pulp magazines such as True Confessions, Movie Stories, Screen Book, and Romantic Story.
To me, far more disappointing than the Good Girl Art and risqué stories these women produced, was the fact they were largely unknown, unacknowledged or had to use pseudonyms or house names at the time. But then the same thing often applied to their male colleagues as well.
AUTHORS: There was no shortage of female writers either. although, once again, due to the nature of some of the stories, they also had to use pseudonyms to hide the fact that they were women. Although, not all did!
Some of the more popular ones include: Catherine Lucille Moore who is credited with paving the way for female science fiction authors. Leigh Brackett (1915-78) is another science fiction author, who is often cited as “The Queen of Space Opera.” Bertha Muzzy Sinclair wrote westerns as “B.M. Bower”. She was very successful and is known to have written some 50 novels. Clare Winger Harris was another early SF author, with a distinction of having written under her own name. She wrote several short stories for Amazing Stories and other pulps. G.G. Pendarves was really Gladys Gordon Trenery, a novelist and screenwriter who was a popular contributor to Weird Tales and Oriental Stories. Greye La Spin was a another early author who wrote 100 works, mainly known for horror or fantasy. Her stories appeared in The Thrill Book, Weird Tales, Black Mask, among others. Others include Gertrude Barrow Bennet credited as the “mother of dark fantasy.” Leslie F. Stone (Leslie Frances Silberberg), Lilith Lorraine (Mary Maude Dunn Wright), Miriam Allen deFord, Amelia Reynolds Long, Maria Moravsky, Andre Norton and Judith Merril.
To me, far more disappointing than the Good Girl Art and risqué stories these women produced, was the fact they were largely unknown, unacknowledged or had to use pseudonyms or house names at the time. But then the same thing often applied to their male colleagues as well.
We would like to acknowledge that the bulk of the information in this Spicy Pulps and Pin-ups section has been taken from a 2021 online article by ‘Michael’ the Pulp Superfan. The article, Women and the Pulps, is well worth a read and can be found on the Pulpnet website.
Peter Driben and his pin-up girls
Peter Driben was an American pin-up artist, was probably the most productive pin-up artists of the 1940s and 1950s. Whilst Alberto Vargas and Gil Elvgren have extensive catalogues of work, neither came close to the output of Driben. Driben’s pinups delighted the American public from the beginning of World War II until the great baby boom of the 1950s.” Driben was one of the most prolific, and certainly one of the best, cover artists to work on the risqué ‘girlie pulp’ magazines that flourished in the USA between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s.
His first known pin-up was the cover to La Paree Stories in March 1934 followed by a cover to Tattle Tales in October 1934. By the end of the 1930s he had produced covers for Snappy, Pep, New York Nights, French Night Life, Caprice, Silk Stocking Stories, Gay Book, Movie Merry-Go-Round and Real Screen Fun. Dribens pinups delighted the American public and his career went from strength to strength.
In 1941, he produced the film poster for the John Huston film, The Matese Falcon. It is perhaps his most famous work. The same year Driben was contracted to produce covers for a new magazine, Beauty Parade. The artist went on to paint hundreds of covers for that publication as well as Flirt, Whisper, Titter, Wink, Eyeful, Giggles, and Joker. Driben would often have as many as six or seven of his covers being published every month. His output established him as one of America’s most recognized and successful pin-up and glamour artists.
