Earle K. Bergey (August 26, 1901 – September 30, 1952) was an American artist and illustrator who painted cover art for thousands of pulp fiction magazines and paperback books. One of the most prolific pulp fiction artists of the 20th century, Bergey is recognized for creating, at the height of his career in 1948, the iconic cover of Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) for Popular Library.
Bergey was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to A. Frank and Ella Kulp Bergey. He attended Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1921 to 1926. He initially went to work in the art departments of Philadelphia newspapers including Public Ledger , and he drew the comic strip Deb Days in 1927 for the Public Ledger Syndicate. Early in his career, Bergey contributed many covers to the pulp magazines of publisher Fiction House. By the mid-1930s, Bergey made a home and studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and he married in 1935. In the late 1940s, he also started to sell cover illustrations to the rapidly expanding paperback book industry. Bergey died suddenly and unexpectedly on September 30, 1952 in New Hope, Pennsylvania with family at his side. Cause of death according to his death certificate was acute coronary thrombosis due to coronary artery disease.
Throughout the 1930s, Bergey worked freelance for a number of publishing houses. His eye-catching paintings were predominantly featured as covers on a wide array of pulp magazines, including romance (Thrilling Love, Popular Love, Love Romances) as well as detective, adventure, aviation, and Westerns. Bergey also illustrated mainstream publications during this time, such as The Saturday Evening Post , and produced cover art for fitness magazines. Along with pin-up painting peers such as Enoch Bolles and H. J. Ward, Bergey was one of the first prominent American pin-up artists, contributing hundreds of covers to influential magazines including Gay Book Magazine, Pep Stories, and Snappy.
During the 1940s, Bergey continued to paint covers for romance, sports, and detective pulp magazines, and he began working on a number of science fiction magazines, including Standard Magazines's Strange Stories , Startling Stories , and Captain Future , and later for Fantastic Story Magazine . Bergey's fine art training and salient gift for depicting anatomy made him a go-to artist across a diversity of genres that required scenes with dramatic movement, from photo-realistic sports portraits of famous athletes including Mickey Cochrane, Lou Gehrig, and Jim Thorpe to his signature Bergey Girls that appeared on risque pulps throughout the Depression and in science fiction scenarios from World War II.
Bergey's science fiction covers, sometimes described as "Bim, BEM, Bum," usually featured a woman being menaced by a Bug-Eyed Monster, alien, or robot, with an heroic male astronaut coming to her assistance. The bikini-tops he painted often resembled coppery metal, giving rise to the phrase "the girl in the brass bra," used in reference to this sort of art. Visionaries in TV and film have been influenced by Bergey's work. Gene Roddenberry, for example, provided his production designer for Star Trek with examples of Bergey's futuristic pulp covers. [2] The artist's illustrations of scantily-clad women surviving in outer space served as an inspiration for Princess Leia's slave-girl outfit in Return of the Jedi , [3] and Madonna's conical brass brassiere.
In 1948, Bergey made the transition to the rapidly expanding paperback book industry along with skilled pulp artists like Rudolph Belarski, whose work is often confused with Bergey's. While continuing to paint pulp covers until his death, Bergey sold illustrations to at least four leading paperback publishing houses, including Popular Library and Pocket Books. His art graced the covers of dozens of novels and helped to sell millions of volumes. His paperback cover illustrations were as diverse as his work for the pulps. In addition to his work on the 1948 Popular Library edition of Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , Bergey painted cover art for well-known authors from Émile Zola to the Western master, Zane Grey, whose 1951 Pocket Books edition cover painting for The Spirit of the Border is a Bergey classic. Many of his paperbacks are now cult classics, some featuring hidden self-portraits.
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
George R. Evans was an American cartoonist and illustrator who worked in both comic books and comic strips. His lifelong fascination with airplanes and the pioneers of early aviation was a constant theme in his art and stories.
Men's adventure is a genre of magazine that was published in the United States from the 1940s until the early 1970s. Catering to a male audience, these magazines featured pin-up girls and lurid tales of adventure that typically featured wartime feats of daring, exotic travel or conflict with wild animals. These magazines were also colloquially called "armpit slicks", "men's sweat magazines" or "the sweats", especially by people in the magazine publishing or distribution trades.
Startling Stories was an American pulp science fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1955 by publisher Ned Pines' Standard Magazines. It was initially edited by Mort Weisinger, who was also the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Standard's other science fiction title. Startling ran a lead novel in every issue; the first was The Black Flame by Stanley G. Weinbaum. When Standard Magazines acquired Thrilling Wonder in 1936, it also gained the rights to stories published in that magazine's predecessor, Wonder Stories, and selections from this early material were reprinted in Startling as "Hall of Fame" stories. Under Weisinger the magazine focused on younger readers and, when Weisinger was replaced by Oscar J. Friend in 1941, the magazine became even more juvenile in focus, with clichéd cover art and letters answered by a "Sergeant Saturn". Friend was replaced by Sam Merwin Jr. in 1945, and Merwin was able to improve the quality of the fiction substantially, publishing Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night, and several other well-received stories.
Ben-Hur Baz (1906–2003) was a painter of pin-up art.
Enoch Bolles was an American painter of pin-up art. He was among the earliest and most widely circulated glamour illustrators. While known today solely as a pinup artist, Bolles was a versatile illustrator who also worked extensively in the advertising industry, creating hundreds of attractive color illustrations for products ranging from bread to cigarettes. His most widely reproduced advertising illustration is the "Windy Girl" for Zippo lighters. This work, produced in 1937, has recently been reissued as the Vargas Windy Girl and has appeared in well over 100 variations on Zippo lighters.
Jack Kamen was an American illustrator for books, magazines, comic books and advertising, known for his work illustrating crime, horror, humour, suspense and science fiction stories for EC Comics, for his work in advertising, and for the onscreen artwork he contributed to the 1982 horror anthology film Creepshow.
Fiction House was an American publisher of pulp magazines and comic books that existed from the 1920s to the 1950s. It was founded by John B. "Jack" Kelly and John W. Glenister. By the late 1930s, the publisher was Thurman T. Scott. Its comics division was best known for its pinup-style good girl art, as epitomized by the company's most popular character, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
Lee Brown Coye was an American artist.
Thrilling Publications, also known as Beacon Magazines (1936–37), Better Publications (1937–43) and Standard Magazines (1943–55), was a pulp magazine publisher run by Ned Pines, publishing such titles as Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories.
Popular Library was a New York paperback book company established in 1942 by Leo Margulies and Ned Pines, who at the time were major pulp magazine and newspaper publishers. The company's logo of a pine tree was a tribute to Pines, and another Popular Library signature visual was a reduced black-and-white copy of the front cover on the title page.
Everett Raymond Kinstler was a most important American artist, whose official portraits include Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan both of which hang in The White House. He was also a pulp and comic book artist, whose work appeared mainly in the 1940s and 1950s.
Mitchell Hooks was an American artist and illustrator known for his artwork for paperback books and magazines.
Good Girl Art (GGA) is a style of artwork depicting women primarily featured in comic books, comic strips, and pulp magazines. The term was coined by the American Comic Book Company, appearing in its mail order catalogs from the 1930s to the 1970s, and is used by modern comic experts to describe the hyper-sexualized version of femininity depicted in comics of the era.
Tom Lovell was an American illustrator and painter. He was a creator of pulp fiction magazine covers and illustrations, and of visual art of the American West. He produced illustrations for National Geographic magazine and many others, and painted many historical Western subjects such as interactions between Indians and white settlers and traders. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame in 1974.
Charles Ashford Binger was an English American artist and illustrator.
Gloria Maria Stoll Karn was an American artist who specialized in graphic art that was published in pulp magazines. She graduated from New York's High School of Music and Art in 1941.
Rudolph Belarski was an American graphic artist known for his cover art depicting aerial combat for magazines such as Wings, Dare Devil Aces, and War Birds. He also drew science fiction covers for Argosy in the 1930s and covers for mystery and detective novels.
Hugh Joseph Ward was an American illustrator known for his cover art for pulp magazines. He is noted especially for his paintings for Spicy Mystery, Spicy Detective, and other titles published by Harry Donenfeld in the "spicy" genre. He also painted definitive images of popular radio characters the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet.
Elaine I. Duillo was an American painter and illustrator known for her romance fiction book covers. She was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2003.