The Pin-Up Art of Bill Ward

The Pin-Up Art of Bill Ward continues Fantagraphics' dedication to showcasing the best of the classic pin-up artists. Culling through thousands of images, editor Alex Chun has selected the best of Ward's Conte crayon pin-ups, including many of his infamous telephone girls, many of which have not seen print in almost half a century. When Ward passed away in 1998, he left behind a body of work that spanned six decades and by all accounts, more than 10,000 pin-up cartoon illustrations. Though he is best known for creating comics' Golden Age blonde bombshell Torchy in the 1940s, Ward's strongest work was produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the Humorama line of digest magazines. In those countless cheap and long forgotten men's humor magazines, Ward's voluptuous "girly" drawings shared the pages with photos of Bettie Page and Mamie Van Doren, and pin-up cartoons by the likes of Archie's Dan DeCarlo and Playboy magazine's Jack Cole. Thumbing through those digests, it quickly becomes evident that Ward was Humorama's dominant pin-up cartoon artist. His mastery of the Conte crayon allowed him to produce unparalleled textures, including the wonderful sheen on satiny curve-hugging dresses and on black thigh-high stockings that became Ward trademarks. Ward's other trademark, of course, was his penchant for drawing extremely well endowed women accentuated by tiny waists, and whether playing the role of office secretaries, arm candy at cocktail parties or vamping it up in a boudoir, his women played to multiple fetishes adorned in opera-length gloves, lacy lingerie, and five-inch stiletto heals. Sometimes bawdy, but never tawdry, Ward's top-heavy Humorama women always managed to maintain their allure, innocence and glamour that made Torchy so popular.

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