Backward into the Atomic Future with Mr. America Magazine

In the 1950s, when atomic bombs and nuclear power were relatively new, views about the atom were even more schizoid than they are today.

On one hand, there was constant fear that a nuclear war between the United and the Soviet Union would result in an atomic apocalypse.

On the other, there were rosy predictions that “the peaceful atom” would usher in an era when electricity was “too cheap to meter” and atomic-powered rocket ships would take us to the stars.

Both of these concepts are present in the premiere issue of Mr. America magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, published in January 1953.

Mr. America was one of a number of magazines published and edited by Canadian bodybuilding guru Joseph Weider.

Starting in the mid-1930s, Joe Weider and his brother Benjamin created an interesting business empire built on braun, brains and business savvy.

Their empire not only included bodybuilding courses, products and events, such as the International Federation of BodyBuilders’ “Mr. America Contest,” but also an impressive list of magazines put out by their company Weider Publications.

Many of the Weiders’ periodicals, such as Your Physique, Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Men's Fitness and Shape, focused on weightlifting, bodybuilding and physical fitness.

But in the 1950s and 1960s, they also published magazines oriented toward the men’s adventure market, including Fury, Outdoor Adventures, Safari, True Strange, True Weird — and Mr. America.

The Weiders actually published several different magazines titled Mr. America over the decades. Most were for bodybuilders. But the 1953 incarnation of Mr. America was not.

As Joe Weider explained in his editorial introduction on the contents page of the debut issue:

“This is the first issue of our completely revamped Mr. America. It not only wears a new look, but, perhaps more important, a new outlook...

Probably nothing in the magazine characterizes the new outlook like our slogan, The Magazine For The Man With A Future, and the article, How Do You Fit Into The Atomic Future?

We do believe the young man has a future in the Atomic Age. It was largely because we became sick and tired of the wailings of the Prophets of Doom that we decided to convert Mr. America into its present form.

Without trying to emulate Pollyanna, we hope to stress the fact that the future is not hopeless. The young man of today has more to look forward to than being blown to bits in a foxhole or seared to a crisp by an atom or hydrogen bomb. Indeed, as Mr. O’Reilly points out in his article, we probably are facing the greatest age man has ever known.

While we hope to provide plenty of entertainment on these pages, our primary purpose is to help the young man of today adapt and prepare himself for the golden tomorrow we firmly believe is inevitable...

We say the world is on the verge of the happiest, most progressive era it has ever known.

We say Fie! to the Prophets of Doom — and we hope you agree with us.”

Apparently, there weren’t quite enough readers who agreed. The futuristic men’s adventure version of Mr. America only lasted for six issues. But they are truly fascinating.

The “Atomic Future” story Weider mentioned was written and illustrated by Tom O’Reilly. He also created the cool rocketship pilot painting on the cover.

O’Reilly’s article (which you can download and read in it’s entirety by clicking this link) is a perfect example of the era’s schizoid views of the atom.

“The Atomic Age can be the greatest boon or the biggest bust-up, literally, man has ever known,” O’Reilly says in the article. “An all too prevalent fear exists that practically every man, woman and child now alive will either be slaughtered on the battlefield or blown to bits by an atom or hydrogen bomb. It ain't necessarily so.”

O’Reilly goes on to describe a golden atomic future when planes, ships, cars and houses will run on atomic energy.

He predicts that space travel will be achieved with atom-powered spaceships. Cancer and other diseases will be cured with radiation treatments. He also forecasts:

“New dietary knowledge, new foods and advanced medical knowledge undoubtedly will raise the life expectancy to more than 100 years, perhaps even while some of us now living are still on this earth to witness the miracle.

In the future, foods will be raised chemically and manufactured synthetically and chemistry will advance the use of synthetics to a point where practically everything we now make of metal or wood will be made of plastics.”

That’s the good news. O’Reilly ends the article by reminding readers of the other possible atomic future:

“All this, of course, will come about if some misguided idiot in the Kremlin or some other dictator’s aerie doesn’t push the wrong button and blow the golden atomic era to Kingdom Come before it is well started.”

The vacillation between hope and fear is reflected in other articles in the January 1953 issue of “The Magazine For The Man With A Future” (assuming he doesn’t get fried by a hydrogen bomb).

One article explains how “ANYBODY CAN BE DRAFTED” to help out with civil defense if the a-bombs or h-bombs start dropping.

It features an amazing painted duotone illustration by an artist who signed his work with the single name Wolff, showing “how a 50-kilotron [sic] bomb would smash lower Manhattan.”

The caption for Wolff’s illustration soberly explains that such a blast would “leave some 623,000 dead and more than a million casualties.”

Of course, that’s just in New York. It continues: “A minimum of 140 strikes, expected in a sneak attack, would bring the death toll throughout the nation to more than 20,000,000.”

But Mr. America magazine didn’t dwell on gloomy thoughts. Sandwiched between the atomic age articles were pulpy features and stories that were more in line with a typical men’s adventure magazine.

These include a cheesecake photo spread by “Bernard of Hollywood” (Bruno Bernard), the famous master of sexy glamour photos. One of babes featured is the legendary Burlesque stripper Lili St. Cyr.

There’s an exotic adventure yarn about “The Virgin of Mocambu,” with lush artwork by Charles Dore, and an article about “Impotence in Men,” with an anxiety-laden illustration by Michael McCann.

There’s also a long article about flying saucers written by Martin Caidin.

Caidin was a prolific author of articles and books about aeronautics and aviation. He also wrote some classic science fiction novels, including Cyborg (1972), the inspiration for the Seventies TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman.

The January ‘53 issue of Mr. America also includes manly men-style articles about guns, boats, boxing and hunting, as well as absurdly sexist “Good Girl Art” cartoons and a helpful column of news items designed to give readers “Advice on Important Trends” — like “homes heated with atomic furnaces” (coming soon).

Altogether, this issue of Mr. America is among my favorite odd examples of the men’s pulp magazine genre.

BTW, for more great atomic age and Cold War paranoia, check out the Conelrad site. It’s great!

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Comments? Questions? Post them on the Men’s Adventure Magazine Facebook Group.

Highly recommended reading for fans and collectors of vintage men’s mags… Dian Hanson's 6-Volume History of Men's Magazines

Talking with the “Black Cracker” about the black artist Al Hollingsworth

The publication of Josh Alan Friedman’s new memoir Black Cracker this week reminded me of some things he recently told me about the pioneering black artist Alvin C. Hollingsworth.

In the early 1960s, Josh was the only white kid in the last segregated school in New York City.

His experiences as a “Black Cracker” are the subject of his new book. (BTW, you can buy copies signed by Josh on Amazon now.)

Josh’s father, Bruce Jay Friedman, edited Men, Man's World and other men’s adventure magazines for Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management company.

Because of his dad’s job, Josh got to meet some of the writers and artists who sold stories, artwork and cartoons to men’s pulp mags in their heyday.

One of those artists was Alvin C. Hollingsworth, a.k.a. Al or A.C. Hollingsworth. He was also sometimes known by his cartoon pen name, Alvin Holly.

Hollingsworth was one of the first African American artists to break into the comics and magazine cartoon business.

Among his markets were the men’s adventure magazines that Josh Alan Friedman’s father edited.

“I remember Al very well,” Josh told me in a recent phone call. “I was the ‘Black Cracker,’ the only white kid at my school.

When my dad brought Al on, he was the only black guy working for the men’s magazines that we knew of, at least at Magazine Management, where he mostly did cartoons.”

Al was also a very good painter, who eventually had his paintings shown in galleries and museums.

I remember that he came over for dinner a few times to our house and he would always bring my dad one of his new paintings.

I also remember Al was a bodybuilder. Huge arms. He was a heavy weightlifter. In fact, a lot of the artists who did artwork for the Magazine Management magazines were bodybuilders. Mort Kunstler, James Bama, almost all of them.

Well, not the cartoonists (said Josh with a laugh). Al was probably the only bodybuilder cartoonist.”

Unlike Kunstler and Bama, who provided painted cover art and illustrations to men’s magazines, Al Hollingsworth sold them line drawings and “Good Girl Art” cartoons.

But he is probably better known for his comic book art.

Along with Matt Baker, Hollingsworth was one of the most prominent African-American comic book artists of “Golden Age” and early “Silver Age” comics.

Starting in 1948, when he was only 20, Hollingsworth worked off and on with the legendary Joe Simon and Jack Kirby studio. In the 1950s, he penciled and provided stories for adventure and horror comics published by Avon, Key, Trojan and Comic Media.

By the late 1960s, Hollingsworth had pretty much left the comics and men’s magazine cartoon art behind to focus on painting and teaching.

He became a full professor at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. He hosted a TV series about art for kids called You’re Part of Art and wrote the acclaimed children’s book about the Guggenheim Museum, I’d Like the Goo-Gen-Heim. 

Hollingsworth died in 2000, at the age of 72. But his art is still popular among collectors. You can usually find some Hollingsworth paintings, prints or original cartoon art on eBay.

And, if you’re a comic book fan, you should check out the posts about Hollingsworth on Scott's Classic Comics Corner and the Comic Book Catacombs Website.

Also be sure should also check out Josh Alan Friedman’s website, where he has posted a series of great articles about men’s adventure magazines.

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Comments? Questions? Post them on the Men’s Adventure Magazine Facebook Group.

Recommend reading for fans of vintage “Good Girl Art” (GGA)… Uncovered: The Hidden Art Of The Girlie Pulps A great overview of the art of the Girlie Pulps. 208 full color pages and over 400 cover reproductions.

Daring to compare Norman Rockwell, Norman Saunders and Norm Eastman

Men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s have a special place in the history of illustration art.

The artwork they used was a more modern incarnation and evolution of the pulp art covers created for classic pulp magazines from the early 1900s until about 1950, when the classic pulps finally faded away and the men’s postwar pulp magazine genre fully emerged.

In fact, many great pulp illustration artists who created covers for pre-World War II pulp magazines went on to provide cover and interior art for the postwar men’s pulp mags.

Men’s adventure magazines also helped keep alive the tradition of painted covers and interior art after the classic pulps disappeared and the mainstream magazines, which had also featured painted covers and illustrations for decades, switched to photos.

Some people may look down on the cover art and illustrations used for men’s adventure magazines.

But they are actually very similar to — and often as good as or better than — the artwork done for mainstream magazines, the best known of which are probably the celebrated cover paintings that Norman Rockwell created for The Saturday Evening Post.

They are part of a general school of 20th Century American realism art that was used for slick and pulp magazines, hardcover book dust jackets and illustrations, pulp paperback covers, advertisements and some comic book covers.

It’s a type of painted art that looks realistic in its depictions of people and settings, whether the scenes involved are based on reality or fantasy.

To help make their art look realistic, many of the best illustrators of that era worked from photographs they staged and shot themselves. This technique was used by both mainstream artists like Norman Rockwell and by pulp art masters like Norman Saunders.

At right are photos Norman Saunders took of himself and used for two characters in his cover painting for the November 1962 issue of Man’s Story (shown at the top of this post).

These photos come from a chapter written for the book It’s a Man's World by Norman’s son David Saunders, who is himself an acclaimed artist.

In that chapter, David notes:

“Dad preferred to paint from observation of actual objects, so he would arrange elaborately staged setups for his models and shoot Polaroid snapshots to refer to while he painted. He always used dramatic theatrical lighting, with colored filters for their illusive effects. Many paintings featured a ‘hot light’ (red, orange or yellow ) glowing on one side of the object and a ‘cold light’ (purple, blue or green) shining on the other side. This ‘hot-to-cold’ color scheme was a traditional technique for adding dimensional depth to a painting. ‘Cool’ colors seem to move away from the viewer, while ‘hot’ colors appear to confront the viewer’s eye, but Norm intensified this principle to make his illustrations more eye-catching.”

I was reminded of Norm Saunders’ use of photos recently when I saw Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. This new book, written and compiled by Ron Schick, focuses on the carefully staged photographs that Norman Rockwell created for his magazine cover paintings.

Norman Rockwell had a much bigger budget for the photos he created for his artwork than Norm Saunders. And, of course, their topics were light years apart. But their use of photography was similar. And, although Rockwell’s topics were generally mild and Saunders’ were generally wild, they were both American realists.

There are some other examples of Saunders’ use of photos in the great book about his art, titled simply Norman Saunders. (An example used for See magazine in 1960 is shown below.)

In this awesomely beautiful book, David Saunders provides a retrospective of his father’s work, from the paintings he created for the pre-war pulps and postwar men’s adventure magazines to his famed Mars Attacks trading cards. It’s a must-have book for fans of illustration or pulp art in general and for Norman Saunders fans in particular.

By the way, another vintage illustration artist named Norm — Norm Eastman — also used photos of models and himself. As noted in previous posts on this blog, Eastman was the master of the Nazi bondage and torture subgenre of men’s pulp magazine cover art.

Here’s an example showing a photo that Eastman took of one of his favorite female models, Eva Lynd. He used this to paint the tortured damsel on the cover of the February 1958 issue of Man’s Story. (The photo is from the out-of-print 2004 edition of Men’s Adventure Magazines In Postwar America, which has a chapter about Eastman that is unfortunately omitted in the new 2008 edition.)

Dare I compare Norm Eastman and Norman Saunders to Norman Rockwell?

Well, yeah. I do and just did.

And, personally, I like the wild artwork created by Saunders and Eastman better than the mild stuff created by that other, more famous Norm.

Comments? Questions? Join the Men’s Adventure Magazine Facebook Group.

Highly recommended by MensPulpMags.com: Norman Saunders, by David Saunders A spectacular, 368-page, lushly-illustrated overview of the career of legendary pulp artist Norman Saunders.

When cocaine grew on trees (in men’s pulp magazines)…

By the early ‘70s, the men’s adventure magazine genre was dying out, largely due to competition from more sexually explicit men’s magazines.

“The market slid ever crotchward,” as Josh Alan Friedman aptly put it in a chapter of the book It's a Man's World. (That chapter, plus other great material Josh has compiled about men’s pulp mags, is now posted on his Black Cracker blog.)

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the publishers and editors of men’s adventure magazines tried a number of things to stave off their demise.

Many moved from using the rather tame cheesecake photos they had featured for years to Playboy-style nude photos.

Increasingly, the editors also sexed-up and tabloidized stories with steamy headlines, subheads, photos and captions that often went far beyond what was actually in the stories themselves.

One of the funniest examples of this is the photo spread created for the “INNER SECRETS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COCAINE COMBINE,” a story in the July 1971 issue of Bluebook magazine that was written by Robert F. Dorr. (You can download and read the entire story by clicking on this link.)

Bob Dorr wrote hundreds of stories and articles for men’s adventure magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s. The majority were war and adventure stories. I’ve featured some of them in previous posts on this blog.

Bob went on to become a top military and aviation historian. He has has written dozens of critically-acclaimed history books, the latest of which is his aerial Band of Brothers saga Hell Hawks!.

His 1971 Bluebook article about cocaine is a pretty straightforward account of what was emerging at the time as a new front in America’s “War on Drugs.”

It provides an interesting glimpse of the early coke smuggling business, years before it mushroomed into a huge, multi-billion dollar industry in the late 1970s and 1980s, when “Cocaine Cowboys” and Columbian cartels brought in coke by the tons.

But what Bob Dorr reported about coke in his article wasn’t sexy enough for the editors of Bluebook. So, they “enhanced” it.

Most notably, they added a big two-page photo spread, dominated by a shot of what looks like a Swingers’ party, with an intertwined pile of semi-nude men and women going at it.

Some of them have small black rectangular bands overlaid on their eyes. These eye-masking graphic elements were common in racy vintage magazine photos.

Ostensibly, they were used because the photos were “real” and people in them didn’t want their identities known. Of course, in truth, most were staged shots.

Bluebook’s caption writer added a "Reefer Madness" style comment about this photo in the caption, which helpfully explains:

“Above, cokies take part in ‘jam’ session, addicts’ word for bash in which cocaine users engage in wild sex orgy.”

There’s nothing in Bob Dorr’s article about wild sex orgies.

But the Bluebook guys in charge of photos and photo captions didn’t care about that.

They were focused on having photos and captions that would increase Bluebook’s quotient of sex-related pics and references.

No sexy bits or orgies in the story? Hey, no problem. We’ll just add ‘em!

Equally funny is the small photo to the left of the headline that shows some young black men and a pile of large plant pods. The caption explains: “Coca farmers break pods with bolos.”

Yes, that’s right. The pods in that photo are actually pods from cocoa trees, which are used to make chocolate — not cocaine.

Cocaine, of course, is made from the leaves of the coca plant

Bob Dorr knew this and says it in the article. However, it’s not clear from what he wrote that even he was fully cognizant of the rather complicated coke-making process.

Of course, we’re talking about 1971 — long before most people became at least vaguely familiar with that process by seeing it in TV shows like Miami Vice and countless cop movies made during and since the 1980s.

Back in 1971, few people would have known that the coca pod photo and caption were hilariously off base.

Although Dorr’s cocaine article had to be amped up to fit Bluebook’s need for sexy Seventies-style content, the same issue included a number of stories were directly sex-related.

One actually did have orgies in it. It was titled “SINGLES ONLY CRUISES — 10 DAY FLOATING ORGIES.”

Another “sexposé” story took us South of the Border to go “INSIDE THE MEXICAN PASSION HOUSES WHERE U.S. CHICKS TAKE ADVANCE COURSES IN SEX.”

But stories like those and more nude photo spreads weren’t enough to save men’s adventure magazines from extinction. By 1975, Bluebook and most other men’s pulp mags were out of business.

By the way, the cover painting for this issue of Bluebook, with the great portrait of the cigar-chomping GI, is not credited in the magazine. But Rich Oberg, the top expert on men’s adventure magazine art, took a look and told me it was done by Mel Crair. (Thanks, Rich.)

Comments? Questions? Join the Men’s Adventure Magazine Facebook Group.

New in the Men’s Pulp Bookstore: TEEN-REBEL DOPEFIENDS Drug Mayhem and Juvenile Delinquents from the Pulp Classics (Pulp Postcards)

Norm Eastman cover art: from sadistic Nazis to Harlequin Romance

Men’s adventure art collector Rich Oberg recently told me about a trip he made in 2004 to visit artist Norm Eastman at his home in Lompoc, California, a few years before Eastman died.

Rich noted that Eastman “was as nice a guy and as perfect a gentleman as you’d ever meet — kind, polite, a little shy.”

Rich’s observation highlights one of the many ironies about Norm Eastman.

He was a nice guy, born into a God-fearing Canadian family in 1931, who got his Fine Arts degree at Mount Allison University, a Christian college with an art school. But his wild, politically-incorrect Nazi bondage and torture cover paintings are among the most famous (and infamous) ever done for men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

They are also among the most highly sought after by collectors.

Indeed, Eastman’s sadistic Nazi covers are what many people think is representative of the entire men’s pulp magazine genre. They also played a role in the creation of the somewhat derogatory term “men’s sweat mags” as a nickname for men’s adventure magazines.

The truth is (as you know if you read this blog), evil Nazi covers are just one of the many subgenres of men’s adventure magazine cover art.

Here’s another Norm Eastman irony: two Jewish guys were the masterminds behind the magazines that featured most of Eastman’s Nazi bondage and torture paintings.

I found this ironic fact in the original, now out-of-print edition of the Men's Adventure Magazines book that features Rich Oberg’s art and magazine collection. The comics and pulp art expert George Hagenauer contributed a great interview with Eastman in that first edition, which is sadly omitted from the newer 2008 edition (as are many examples of Eastman’s art that were in the original edition of the book).

In the interview, Eastman explained that, in the 1950s, he started out in the men’s adventure realm by providing artwork to magazines that were part of Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management empire, like For Men Only, Men and Male.

Then, around 1960, Eastman began a long term relationship with the owners of the Reese and Emtee publishing companies, B. R. “Bud” Ampolsk and Maurice Rosenfeld. They were the publishers of some of the most outré men’s adventure magazines, such as Man's Book, Man’s Epic, Man’s Story, Men Today, New Man and World of Men.

Eastman told Hagenauer:

“They both lived in a Jewish neighborhood in midtown Manhattan…Ampolsk was a very relaxed guy. Rosenfeld was also a nice guy. They gave me the feeling that you weren’t really doing these dirty little books.

Ampolsk and I would meet over the covers and talk about what we were going to do. Over time, I made a whole list of torture methods. Starting with fire, water, stretching, ice, and electricity, we’d go through the list and come up with something that we hadn’t done before.

Ampolsk once told me in all seriousness that we had never done anything that the Nazis hadn’t actually done. They were all detailed in files in Washington somewhere. I don’t know if he was fibbing to make me continue doing the covers or what, but it did make me feel a little better about doing them.

I never saw the story before I illustrated it. Ampolsk was the idea man on the covers, so he looked after getting the stories written after we had settled on a cover image.”

Like many illustration artists, Eastman used posed photographs of male and female models to create his cover paintings.

Which brings up another little irony Rich Oberg told me about Norm Eastman: he often used his own face as the model for the evil torturers in his cover paintings.

For example, see the deranged Nazi with the beard, glasses and hacksaw in the cover painting on the September 1964 issue of Man’s Story at the top of this post? That’s Norm Eastman.

And, there’s bearded Norm again in the cover below, playing an evil Satanist on the May 1974 issue of Men Today.

By the time Rich Oberg visited Norm in 2004, his hair and beard were white, as shown in the photo of Norm, his wife Jane and Rich. (This photo and the two covers featuring Norm’s own bearded visage are from Rich Oberg’s collection and are posted here with his permission. Thanks, Rich!).

Rich told me that he hadn’t noticed that Norm often used self portraits in his cover paintings until Norm mentioned it to him during that 2004 visit.

“Sure enough,” Rich said, “when I got home and went through my magazines and the original paintings I bought from Norm, there he was again and again, usually playing the bad guy.”

I’ll end tonight’s post with one final Eastman irony. Starting in the 1970s, after providing over 200 wild cover paintings and illustrations for men’s adventure magazines, Norm Eastman began doing cover paintings for romance paperbacks — including the famed Harlequin Romance series.

For example, below is the cover for Bethany Campbell’s romance novel The Lost Moon Flower, published by Harlequin Books in 1989. Next to it is the original Norm Eastman painting used for that cover (with a small inset image of the book, as shown in a Heritage Auction Galleries catalog for an auction that included this painting).

By the way, although men’s adventure magazines are often tagged as sexist, the covers of the romance novels written for women also feature lots of hunky he-men and damsels in distress. So, are they sexist, too?

I don’t know. But I do know I think Norm Eastman’s cover paintings are terrific — from his sadistic Nazi phase to his Harlequin Romance phase.

Comments? Questions? Join the Men’s Adventure Magazine Facebook Group.

Newly recommended in the Men’s Pulp Bookstore… The new Taschen book True Crime: Detective Magazines 1924-1969 by Eric Gotland. A lushly illustrated overview of the vintage true crime and true detective magazine genre.

Basil Gogos “Good Girl Art” – and a shout out to artist and author Kerry Gammill

Recently, I was pleased to see that artist and author Kerry Gammill dropped by the Men’s Adventure Magazines Facebook group.

Kerry is a multi-talented Texan who has provided artwork for Marvel and DC Comics, special effects and storyboard art for movies such as Phantoms and Virus, and concept and storyboard art for many animated features and TV shows. (Check out his page on IMDb.com.)

He is also the co-author of an excellent, lushly-illustrated book about Basil Gogos.

Gogos is a legendary artist best known for his movie monster portraits. But he also provided artwork for vintage men’s magazines in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kerry Gammill’s book — Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos— focuses on the popular cover paintings Gogos did for Famous Monsters of Filmland, Creepy and Eerie. Those magazines featured portraits of monsters from classic horror films.

As I noted in a previous post on this blog, some of the covers paintings Gogos created for men’s adventure magazines also had a horror film feel.

However, Gogos also did some great “Good Girl Art” for men’s pulp mags, such as the painting on the cover of the August 1966 issue of True Adventures magazine shown above. 

The term “Good Girl Art” was coined in the early 1970s by David T. Alexander, a renowned comic book and magazine collector and dealer.

It’s now commonly used by fans of men’s magazines, pulp magazines, comics and cartoon art.

Many call it “GGA” for short and apply this acronym broadly to vintage artwork featuring scantily-clad babes in various types of scenes and situations.

By the way, David T. Alexander also helped create the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and the more recent Old Magazinesprice guide.

And, if you are a collector of either old comics or magazines, you really must check out the D.T. Alexander "”Culture and Thrills” website. It’s one of the best sources of both on the Internet.

If you search for in the Men’s Adventure section of that site, you may be lucky enough to find some old men’s pulp mags with great “Good Girl Art” by Basil Gogos — like the examples shown below.

One more BTW: if you’re into illustration and cartoons, you should also check out Kerry Gammill’s other book — Kerry Gammill's Drawing Monsters & Heroes for Film & Comics.