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I’ve been reading these smoosh pulps before bed lately, so I think we’ll just keep at the girlie material today with a scan (edited most excellently by McCoy) of a later issue of Tattle Tales featuring a subdued HJ Ward cover. Ward is most well known for his sensational covers for Spicy Detective and other mags from the Spicy line (there’s a small display of them here ), but he did do a number of covers for Donnenfeld’s Tattle Tales and Bedtime Stories that vary from subdued to whimsical to downright strange. Late 37 is towards the end of the line for this title (and the classic girlie pulps in general) - I believe the title went quarterly with this issue weighing in at 52 pages.
Get the scan here .
Stories within include "Boarding House Antics" in which a lovely young lass always takes her Beau back after his trysts with the newest boarders. Perhaps this time will be different. "The Family Honor" is a tale of a blue blood's family reaction to the saucy radio singer he plans to marry. A plan is hatched to blackmail the family for their blessing. Ken Cooper's "Mistaken Identity" might be the issue's best entry, the protaganist is truly a rake behaving quite poorly from beginning to end. Can love emerge from a drunken and lecherous car crash? Also "Escape in the Night" a tale of music and mischief in South America, and finally something of an advertisment for Bacardi, a tale of moonlight cavorting in the waters of love, Robert Dumont's "Love and Learn". I'm always amazed at how many different ways these writers are able to describe the female form (breasts in particular) and at how the weave this mandatory language into their humorous tales...In addition to the illustrated fiction, jokes, cartoons, and a tinted photo section.
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Samples! It’s my understanding that this gesture always signals red light in the universal language of love
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The pretty young thing in “The Family Honor” isn’t bashful about her bod, I don’t wonder why the hero is a little nervous about taking his new fiancée to meet his parents and announce the wedding
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Great line work here, my favorite illustration in the issue
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And a moment in recognition of the interesting variety of advertising in the smooshes - These pulps helped deliver a whole variety of services to people in need. Here it is 1937 and we've got ads for porn, various forms of birth control, stamina pills for men, etc. Rumor is Donnenfeld even shipped condoms and other products along with his magazines through his distribution chain of magazine stands and burlesque outlets.
Big thanks once again to McCoy for the edit work. Cheers and enjoy, I did!
2 comments:
This is one of my favorite Ward covers. Nice background too (beautiful cleanup, by the way).
Thanks, Jack. My pal McCoy did the cleanup on the cover. Ward did some truly stunning work for Bedtime Stories and has some good ones for Tattle Tales, too. I do like a lot of his Spicy work but much of it is really in a sordid vein that I prefer in small doses. I have a feeling I will be getting more of his girlie pulp work up here sooner or later, but first I'd like to get some more representative issues up of the many other girlie pulp titles.
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