The iconic pin-up model Bettie Page has died at age 85, after reportedly slipping into a coma following a heart attack. As an aspiring actress living in New York in the 1950s, Page attracted the eye of an amateur shutterbug and off-duty cop named Jerry Tibbs, who compiled the shots that made up her first modeling portfolio. She soon became a popular subject at "camera clubs" and in the pages of low-rent cheesecake magazines. She became best-known for the photo sessions and short films she did for Irving Klaw, a photographer who might have been named by Charles Dickens who ran a mail-order business peddling pin-up material that was largely pitched to the underground fetish market, including bondage enthusiasts. Page's most memorable work was probably shot by the model turned photographer Bunny Yeager, who photographed Page, looking tanned and happy, on the beaches of Boca Raton and, at a Florida wildlife park, wearing the leopard skin bikini that was to become to Page's image what black tie and tails was to Fred Astaire's. It was Yeager who brought Page to the attention of Hugh Hefner, resulting in her appearing as Playboy's centerfold for the issue of January 1955.

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The illustrator and comic book artist Dave Stevens died earlier this week at the age of 52 after a long struggle with leukemia. Stevens was best known as the creator of the Rocketeer, an adventure character that first appeared in various titles published by Pacific, a short-lived independent comics company in the early 1980s. (After Pacific went out of business, he jumped to other now-defunct "independent" comics publishers--Eclipse, Comico--before winding up at Dark Horse.) Set in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, the comics centered on Cliff Secord, a scrappy young stunt pilot who battles Nazis and performs other acts of derring-do after stumbling across a portable jet pack that turns him into a two-fisted flying fool. The comics inspired a 1991 movie, directed by Joe Johnston, that worked hard to capture the look of Stevens's comics, and with a cast that included Bill Campbell in the lead, Jennifer Connelly as his girl Betty, and Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton (in a role modeled on Errol Flynn), and Terry O'Quinn, of Lost, as Howard Hughes.

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