Tag: Bettie Page

With Further Ado #202: Greg Hildebrandt Part 3 – Rita, Bettie, Shannon and a Pin-Up Calendar

With Further Ado #202: Greg Hildebrandt Part 3 – Rita, Bettie, Shannon and a Pin-Up Calendar

In the third part of our With Further Ado conversation with Greg Hildebrandt, we (finally) get to discussing his two new calendars, and start with why this famous fantasy artist has a new Pin-up Calendar coming out.

Please enjoy Part 3 of my interview with Greg Hildebrandt:

Ed Catto: That’s fantastic! And let’s shift – I want to be mindful of the time – let’s shift to the Pin-Up calendar. You’ve been inspired by pinups and it looks like it’s going to be beautiful.

Greg Hildebrandt: Well, I was born in 1939. So, I was aware of these things. You became aware of these things, even before you got to puberty. I was a little kid, and my grandfather had all the calendars. My father’s father. We’d go over to Grandma and Grandpa’s, and back in the day, they were very “old worldly” almost, even though my grandfather was born here, his wife was born in Austria. He had all these calendars in the basement, but basically, they were all Gil Elvgren‘s! (i.e., Pin-Up Calendars)

And I remember them lined all up. And going down (to the basement). Tim and me would go down and study them. Aside from once you were interested in girls, aside from that aspect. and we would go down and study them. We were just blown away by the painting of them, especially the style – that broad painterly look that he did. That was my first really focus for knowledge, or information. about Pin-Up art.

And then, of course, a man would always have the magazines. You would look at the magazines. With the photography that would never match the art. It would never match the art in those men’s magazines. They just didn’t have it.

EC: Yeah, the Vargas painting would be better than the photography.

GH: Absolutely. Absolutely! It’s like they’re trying for some perfection thing, or idealization. You know, I know, it’s dangerous to talk about this stuff these days, but there was a certain standard that they were after.

For a lot of them, their women start to look alike, and then there’s almost too much of a kind of a similarity. When I started my series, I wanted to have very individualistic people.

My approach was for each to be individual, and in each of these are I’m trying to tell a little story.

EC: There is so much story in each image!

Editor’s Note: There is more art from the calendar past the jump.

Continue reading “With Further Ado #202: Greg Hildebrandt Part 3 – Rita, Bettie, Shannon and a Pin-Up Calendar”

Everything We Read This Week – 7/15/20

Everything We Read This Week – 7/15/20

Welcome back to Everything We Read This Week. This is the place that we make our weekly trip through this week’s pull-list. It features mostly spoiler-free brief analysis and commentary of each book.

This week we read a bunch great comics.  We encourage you to go out (or order in) and find the comics you like, and remember, Read More Comics!!

We reviewed books from DC Comics, Vault Comics, Marvel Comics, Dynamite, AfterShock Comics, Boom! Studios, and Image Comics this week. There were plenty more good books out there this week but this list is all we have gotten through so far.

As always, we hope you might find what we say interesting enough to try some of these comics. Don’t forget we welcome comments on these and any other comics that you read. Feel free to leave a comment and get the conversation moving.

And here are the books we read in alphabetical order: Continue reading “Everything We Read This Week – 7/15/20”

New Number Ones: Comics Coming in July 2020

New Number Ones: Comics Coming in July 2020

Welcome back to new month of New Number Ones!!

After a three month break, we are finally able to give you a run down of the new comic series coming in the month of July.

This is where we give our readers a preview of the exciting new comic book series debuting each month. We have compiled an alphabetical list with cover art and the official solicitation text from PREVIEWSworld. Check below for our PCS NOTES to find out what we just have to tell you some more about the new comics in question.

There are a bunch of new series of interest starting in July. Some very familiar titles are coming back, and there are a lot of new series from some of our favorite creators, by a diverse set of publishers. We are very excited to see what they have in store for us.

We hope you will take a look and think about giving these a try. We will bring you reviews of most of these debut issues as they come out, and don’t forget to use the comments section to let us know what you think of this list.

Continue reading “New Number Ones: Comics Coming in July 2020”

Brainiac On Banjo #065: Got A Light?

Brainiac On Banjo #065: Got A Light?

Time once again to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear – well, my thrilling days of yesteryear. You know I like to share.

A half-century ago there was a place where all the hippies met. Well, there were lots of such places: the just-referenced South Street in Philadelphia, St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, the Haight in San Francisco, and the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago, among many others. Gentrification runs deep, and into the hippies’ lives it crept like a summbych. We’ll catch up to present-day “reality” by the end of this piece.

The heart of Lincoln Park hippiedom was the intersection of Fullerton, Halsted and Lincoln streets. Festive little places like head shop Head Imports, our community restaurant the Feed Store, the Army-Navy store which sold the finest hippie clothes at affordable prices – as well as gas masks, which came in handy from time to time. The underground paper where I planted my roots, the Chicago Seed, moved to the neighborhood after being Nazi-bait across the street from the Moody Bible Institute, the place where Bettie Page went to school. The neighborhood grew into a formidable Weed of Destruction and I remain a very proud Seedling. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo #065: Got A Light?”