Film Fun, October 1927
Enoch Bolles · 1927
- Artist
- Enoch Bolles (1883–1976)
- Published
- Film Fun, October 1927
- Medium
- Cover illustration
- Reuse
- Public domain in the US
Film Fun, October 1927Source record & reuse status
A second Enoch Bolles cover for Film Fun, from October 1927. A woman in green shorts stands on a rock holding a fishing rod, and the cover line reads “WANTED — A CASTING DIRECTOR”. The joke is the whole picture: the caption tells you to read her legs as a job application.
What the cover is doing
Bolles sets a large figure against a pale sky and puts the punchline above her head in small capitals. The rod, the rock and the shorts are only there to carry the line, and the line only works because of the pose. It is the same economy as the July cover from the same year: one figure, one colour accent, one sentence.
This file is a scan of the printed cover and is reproduced whole. The source scan is 650 by 888 pixels, which is the resolution the archive holds; this page serves that image without upscaling it.
Two covers, one month apart
Placed next to each other, the July and October 1927 covers show how little Bolles varied his method and how much he varied the gag. Both are costume pictures with a caption; both make the woman the author of the joke rather than its object.
That is the part of pin-up that survives into the calendar art of the 1940s and 1950s. The drawing gets smoother, the props get smaller, but the structure stays: a readable line, a pose that answers the line, and a figure that looks like it chose to be seen.
