Eric Stanton: the line that built the towering woman

Eric Stanton drew the same figure several thousand times and, in doing so, settled what she looks like. Working from the late 1940s for the mail-order trade in New York, he supplied serial illustration to order for customers who wanted a very specific thing and said so in writing. The commissions were repetitive, the fee structure was modest and the printing was poor. What came out of those conditions is the physical type that later illustrators, photographers and film costume designers have been quoting ever since, usually without knowing whose solution they are using.

Drawing to a mail-order brief

The trade Stanton entered ran on the postal service, because the material could not be sold openly across a counter. Irving Klaw operated a mail-order business in New York selling photographs and illustrated serials, and Stanton produced pages for it. The commercial logic of that arrangement shaped every visual decision, in the same way it shaped the entire small-press economy described in the magazine era.

A serial sold by post has to be readable at a glance and reproducible on bad paper. That rules out fine tonal modelling and rewards a heavy, confident contour with strong blacks. Customers wrote in with detailed requests, so the drawings answer detail with detail: lacing, heel height, glove length and the exact fit of a garment are rendered with a care that the backgrounds never get. A Stanton page will often show a boot described to the stitch standing in a room that is barely indicated at all. That distribution of effort is the audience talking, and it is examined more closely on the boot.

He worked in narrative sequence rather than in single images, which matters. A pin-up shows a state. A serial shows a change of state, and Stanton’s pages are almost always about a reversal in progress rather than a settled arrangement.

The studio with Steve Ditko

For a period Stanton shared a New York working space with Steve Ditko, who would go on to co-create Spider-Man. The overlap is one of the better known facts in this field and it is usually reported for novelty value, but it makes a substantive point: this work was produced inside the commercial illustration business, on the same floor as newsstand comics, by people who thought of themselves as jobbing artists.

How much the two men helped each other is disputed. Some accounts describe mutual assistance on backgrounds and inking; Ditko tended to minimise it. The disagreement has never been settled, and since there is no reliable paper trail, this page records that the studio was shared and stops there.

What the line is doing

Three habits define a Stanton drawing.

The first is mass. His figures are heavily built and drawn with real anatomical weight, especially in the shoulders, back and thighs. The woman in the frame is not tall because she has been stretched. She is tall because she has been constructed as physically capable, and the difference is visible immediately when you compare his pages to the elongated, more graphic approach of Gene Bilbrew, who was working the same market at the same time and solved the problem differently.

The second is motion. Very little in his work is static. Bodies twist, brace, pull and lean, and even a stationary figure is usually planted as though about to move. This gives the pages a physical tension that has nothing to do with subject matter and everything to do with draughtsmanship.

The third is the vertical. The composition is nearly always arranged so that the eye enters low and travels up, with the standing figure at the top of the frame and the viewpoint slightly beneath her. That single decision, repeated across decades of pages, is most of what people mean when they talk about the look of this material.

What came after

Stanton kept working long after the original magazine market disappeared, producing and self-publishing his own material through the later decades of his life, and he died in 1999. His work has since been collected in book form and shown in galleries, a fate he would have found funny given how it was commissioned.

The inheritance is easy to trace and hard to overstate. Any modern drawing of a dominant woman that uses a low viewpoint, an emphasised heel, a physically powerful build and a composition that puts her at the top of the frame is running his layout, whatever the medium. The plates on this site include work made in the manner of that pen-and-ink period, which turns out to be the quickest way to discover how much of the style was skill and how much was a printing budget.