Pin-Up Art of Bill Ward Paperback – January 30, 2007

Even better than expected -- a wonderful retrospective in a nice, thick chunk of a book. Highly recommend the seller. Will shop here again.

Any book that compiled the art of Bill Ward is going to be magnificent!

Great little book for the pin-up as well as the humor cartoon fan.

very happy

If you're a baby-boomer or older, chances are you've seen Bill Ward's art, even if you didn't necessarily know the name. Ward was one of the premiere and pioneering artists of what came to be known as Good Girl Art in the 40's and 50's. Good Girl Art refers to those comics depicting attractive women in various stages of undress or, quite often, in some form of bondage. These covers were quite popular in both pulp magazines and comic books of the era and are highly prized among collectors today.Ward's most famous creation was "Torchy" Todd, the sexy blonde bombshell who made her first appearance in the mid-1940's. Torchy's run in comics was cut short by the crusade against sex and violence in comics in the 1950's. Leaving comics, Ward moved on to work for editor Abe Goodman's Humorama line of magazines that included titles such as Gee-Whiz, Romp, Snappy, Laugh Riot, and more. There he began his prolific run of sexy one-page cartoons featuring his stunning Good Girl Art.The Pin-up Art of Bill Ward from Fantagraphics packs 260 pages of these classic one panel pin-up cartoons into the book. The Ward female of these cartoons is classic 1950's pin-up: large breasts, thin waist, wide hips, and a round bottom. The classic hourglass figure complete with the pouty lips and eyes that can make any man melt. These women are bawdy and busty and make no apologies for utilizing their physical assets. Fetishists will love Ward's hilarious series of spanking cartoons, which are often girl-on-girl. In one, an angry boss with a black eye is spanking his secretary and telling her, "This will teach you to let my wife catch you sitting on my lap!" In another, a bank President is showing his gorgeous blonde customer what the penalty is at his bank for overdrawing her account.Among the other cartoons in the book is Ward's series of telephone girl gags. These generally feature one of his gorgeous models lying on a bed or sofa in a negligee or other type of lingerie, talking on the phone. There's also a fair share of Ward's burlesque stripper cartoons. In one, two men are ogling a dancer clad only in panties and pasties. One exclaims, "This is one thing television will never replace!"Wardss pin-ups are truly the 50'sand 60's American male view of the perfect female. These classic cartoons and drawings have lost none of their humor even after some fifty years.Reviewed by Tim Janson

The quality of the reproduced pictures is unacceptable.

For those who can't get ahold of the hardcover, now-sold-out _The Glamour Girls of Bill Ward_ (also edited by Alex Chun) or who can't afford the huge _The Wonderful World of Bill Ward_ (published by Taschen), this is a cheap, readily available alternative with enough of Ward's classic glamour girls to satisfy all but the most hard-core, completist fan of Ward's work. The book is published in trade-paperback format, so the illustration reproductions are not as big as in the other two books, but the quality is quite satisfactory.As he did in _Glamour Girls_, Chun has chosen to focus on the art that Ward is most famous for, and the art that Ward himself loved the best; the voluptuous, elegantly dressed, Ekbergesque (as in Anita Ekberg, one of the inspirational models for Ward's beauties) lovelies that populated the pages of so many men's magazines in the 1950's and 1960's - and not the raunchier work that he did in his later years, much of which he did strictly for the fee. These classic cartoons, by contrast, were done as much for love as for money, and it shows; there's an elegant lushness in them that doesn't show up in his later X-rated work. The selection includes a healthy number of Ward's (in)famous "telephone girls". While some of the cartoons and drawings chosen for this book are the same as in _Glamour Girls_, many of them are new to book publication; thus, if you really love Ward's girls, you'll want to get all three of the books that are currently in print. Definitely a "must have" for fans of pinup art.

I like Bill Ward and I probably would have given this product a better grade if it would have arrived with the cover intact. But the glue had completely seperated from the spine.