The magazine era: how the small presses fixed the picture

A vocabulary for the dominant woman existed well before 1946. It was scattered across the postcard trade, theatrical photography and the incidental erotics of corset advertising, and it reached people one item at a time, usually by accident. What changed after the Second World War was distribution. Small presses started printing this material on a schedule and posting it to subscribers, and a loose set of private tastes hardened into a shared iconography with recognisable rules.

Two decades of bad paper did more to fix how a dominant woman gets drawn than the century of picture-making that preceded it. The magazines are long gone. Their vocabulary is still in daily use.

Publishing with the post office watching

The trade began from a legal problem. Material of this kind could not be sold across a shop counter in the United States, so the route to a customer was the mail, and the mail put publishers squarely under the federal obscenity provisions the Post Office enforced. That is a specific pressure, and it had specific visual consequences.

An illustrator working for these titles knew the picture had to stop short of whatever would get an envelope seized. Nudity was a risk and sexual contact was out of the question, so the charge had to be carried by other means: costume, posture, the angle a figure is seen from, the implication of a moment just before or just after. Restriction is not the same as poverty. A rule that forbids the obvious forces invention, and a great deal of what now reads as the house style of the period is really the residue of what could be posted.

Production economics pushed the same way. These were short runs on poor stock, printed by whoever would take the job. Fine tonal work reproduces badly in those conditions and costs money besides. Heavy black line survives almost anything, including a wet press. The high-contrast pen drawing people picture when they picture this era was partly a taste and mostly a printing decision made before anyone touched a page.

What the readers sent in

The distinguishing feature of these magazines, and the reason they read so oddly now, is how much of them the audience wrote. Correspondence pages ran long. Readers described what they liked in detail, argued with one another about it, sent in photographs and rough sketches, and asked for more of a particular thing.

Editors needed copy and had almost no budget, so the letters column became a commissioning brief. A theme that produced letters produced pictures, and the pictures produced more letters. That loop was tight and it ran for years, which is why the imagery converges as fast as it does. This was never one person’s vision. It was a feedback circuit between a few hundred correspondents and a very small number of people with pens.

It also explains the peculiar precision of the work. Readers were exact about heel heights, glove lengths, lacing, materials and fit, and the illustrations answer that exactness. The pictures are dense in the places the audience cared about and casual everywhere else. A background is often barely there while a boot is described down to the stitching, which is a distribution of effort no art school would recommend and no subscriber ever complained about.

Bizarre, Exotique, and a working circle

The best documented title of the period is Bizarre, published by John Willie from 1946 to 1959. Willie edited it, illustrated much of it, and ran his own serial comic strip, The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, in its pages. Bizarre is where a modern reader can watch the loop described above actually operating, because the letters and the artwork sit on facing pages.

In New York during the 1950s, Leonard Burtman published Exotique, working the same seam with a different temperature: more photography beside the drawing, a slightly glossier presentation of the same preoccupations. The New York end of the trade was a small world with overlapping contributors.

Two of those names did more than most to harden the vocabulary. Eric Stanton and Gene Bilbrew both drew for this trade, Bilbrew signing a large part of his output Eneg, his first name reversed. Stanton shared a New York studio with the comics artist Steve Ditko, and that detail places the work exactly where it belongs: in the commercial illustration business, next door to newsstand comics, made by professionals turning out pages to a deadline.

Understanding them as jobbing illustrators rather than visionaries explains the consistency. A working artist who has drawn the same figure forty times develops shortcuts, and shortcuts are how a convention forms. The towering woman, the compressed waist, the low viewpoint and the boot that anchors the composition were all, at first, efficient solutions to a recurring commission.

What the paper could not hold

By the end of the 1960s the conditions that produced all this were disappearing. Enforcement loosened, adult publishing grew into a larger and more open business, and photography took over the territory that pen and ink had been holding. The small mail-order press lost its reason to exist.

Its pictures did not go with it. Three things had been settled by then and none of them has come loose since. Height became the primary signal of authority in the frame, usually delivered through a low viewpoint and a heel, a habit examined in the boot. Posture became a grammar rather than a detail, which is the subject of who is standing. And the whole arrangement acquired a period costume it has never fully taken off, even in decades that had no other use for it.

Where the figure came from before any of this is covered in from postcards to print, and the plates include one made in the manner of the pen and ink of this era, which turns out to be the fastest way to learn what those illustrators were actually solving.