Pulp Magazines
Throughout the 1930s, Bergey worked freelance for a number of publishing houses. His eye-catching paintings were predominately 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 illustrated mainstream publications, such as The Saturday Evening Post, during this time. He illustrated covers for fitness magazines, and he was one of the first major American pin-up artists, contributing numerous covers for men's magazines such as 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 Publications' Strange Stories and Captain Future, and later for Fantastic Story Magazine. His illustrations of scantily-clad women in space helmets served as an inspiration for Princess Leia's slave-girl outfit in Return of the Jedi and Madonna's brass brassiere. Bergey's science fiction covers, often 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 worn by the girls often resembled coppery metal, giving rise to the phrase "the girl in the brass bra," sometimes used in reference to this sort of art.
Read more about this topic: Earle K. Bergey
Famous quotes containing the words pulp and/or magazines:
“For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into “the masses.” And where is the David who can slay this giant?”
—Lillian Smith (1897–1966)
“The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)