Thursday, September 21, 2006

Rugged Men and Luscious Dolls

A friend was commenting yesterday that McCarthy sure did have "that Cooper look", referring to the top New York art studio .

I replied that he could just as well have done the romance illustrations for which some of Cooper's other illustrators were so reknowned. No doubt - but there's a subtle difference to the character of McCarthy's people: the men are just a little more manly and the women just a tad more delicious than the couples often seen in typical romance scenarios of that time. As though they are direct descendants of the archetypes that populated McCarthy's Old West. Perhaps it is this quality that lead to McCarthy's eventual involvement with illustrating movie posters for the James Bond films. Who better to interpret the velvet-gloved iron fist of Sean Connery's character, and those beautiful Bond girls?

Remember, you can find all these images at full size in my Frank McCarthy Flickr set.

4 comments:

  1. Fabulous, sexy, inspiring stuff all week! This has been one of my favorites, Leif--thank you!

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  2. I'm very glad to hear that, chrissie a - thanks for commenting! ;-)

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  3. it's amazing these were in colliers. that was pretty main stream, wasn't it? some of them remind me a whole lot of romance comics! (which when i see them now, my breath still gets a little short!)

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  4. Thanks for your comment, lotusgreen. These are quite typical of what you would find in Collier's or the Saturday Evening Post at that time, and yes, I suspect they would seem reminiscent of romance comics. The artists who drew those comics often used the illustrations from mainstream magazines as inspiration and reference. :-)

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