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couple of generations of girls (and some boys) grew up reading the Archie comics with a special fondness for Archie's Girls Betty & Veronica, the title that featured most of the work of artist Dan DeCarlo (1919-2001). Good-boy Archie's affections were always torn between pert, blonde Betty, the plucky girl from humble origins, and sloe-eyed brunette Veronica, the rich, irresistible brat. The wholesome fare published by the Archie Comics company always had a subtext, of course, which became throbbingly obvious in DeCarlo's work — namely, these gals were hot: curvy little minxes who used their wiles, their short-shorts and their bikinis to make Archie happy prey to a lust that was simultaneously brewing in the loins of millions of boys (and some girls).
   The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo (Fantagraphics Books, $18.95) proves once again that loins don't lie. DeCarlo spent a good part of the late ‘50s and early '60s churning out racy, one-panel "gag cartoons" for a slew of digest-sized joke books with titles like Laugh Riot, Gee-Whiz and Zip. The cartoons involved impossibly voluptuous young women standing around in lingerie, tight dresses or bathing suits, batting their eyelashes at pot-bellied old millionaires, straying husbands or lecherous bosses. These golddiggers, secretaries and neglected, horny wives were usually leaning forward to clutch or be clutched by men who were slighter than them. They were girl-women as grinning predators and willing playthings, all with DeCarlo's artistic trademarks: the huge eyes casting sidelong glances; the tiny turned-up noses; the open mouths circled by glistening red lipstick.
    DeCarlo's pin-ups populated a kind of cartoon middle ground, somewhere between Peter Arno's top-hatted New Yorker swells and "Little Annie Fanny" in Playboy. DeCarlo aspired to New Yorker status but never passed muster with the Eustace Tilly crowd. He also wasn't the first mainstream comic-book artist to do "good-girl" (i.e., non-nude, non-BDSM) cartoon art; Jack Cole, the genius behind Plastic Man, limned bustlines and stiletto heels for Hugh Hefner. But Cole came out of superhero and crime comics, so his dip into pulp erotica wasn't much of a descent or a surprise. DeCarlo's women seem all the more alluringly erotic, as their cannonball breasts and big-booty hips strain against their tight blouses, skirts and g-strings. Even more startling: on page 65 of Pin-Up Art, the two bodacious strippers admiring each other's gauzy costumes possess the faces of Betty and Veronica, as do a number of other cartoons.
   In a way, The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo is revenge from the grave. Shortly before his death in 2001, DeCarlo (always a freelance hired hand at Archie Comics, despite four decades of being the fans' favorite artist) was locked in a bitter lawsuit over creative rights to Josie and the Pussycats. Although DeCarlo was the first artist to draw this post-Beatles parody — and despite the fact that his wife was named Josie and served as a model for her — Archie Comics claimed sole ownership of the character, which it was developing into a live-action feature film. (Just how much of a profit do you think they turned from that 2001 megabomb?) DeCarlo joined a long line of impossibly prolific, sui generis comic-book artists who got screwed over by the companies they freelanced for, denied even ownership of their art.
   The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo is published by Fantagraphics, a superlative independent press that has restored great work like George Herrimann's Krazy Kat and is publishing all of Charles Schulz's Peanuts newspaper strips in gorgeous hardbacks designed by Chris Ware. It also puts out a line of hardcore comics under its Eros subsidiary. The company understands as well as anyone that the adult audience for comics ranges from innocent kids to arrested-adolescent pervs and many folks in between. Chances are, few kids who read Betty & Veronica are going to discover Pin-Up Art and be shocked. (It's almost difficult to believe, at a time when kid entertainment is video-oriented and comic-book stores are patronized primarily by people in their teens and older, that kids continue to buy Archie comics.)
   Still, it's fun to have this handsomely designed volume of proto-Bettys and ur-Veronicas around, to see that the fantasies held by so many — of one day glimpsing these girls-next-door as silk-stockinged vamps out for fun, and maybe a bit more — were fantasies that DeCarlo had long ago anticipated.  n°
 

 

To buy The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo, click here.