[Lingster]

I’ve been fascinated for years by Joe Doolin, an illustrator for the mid-20th century comic and pulp publisher Fiction House. He was a dedicated weightlifter himself – one colleague described him as extremely muscular – but what sets him apart for our interests is that he often drew women with noticeable muscularity, and on rare occasions with startling muscularity. Planet Comics #46 is the best example:

Doolin is respected by vintage comic fans because of his mastery of the alluring (and frequently lurid) cover painting and the anatomical realism of his figures, but I love him for his strong women. Fiction House, his publisher, was known for its strong female characters. The women would be often be depicted as victims on the covers, but in the interiors they were usually at least as capable as the male characters. Firehair, Sheena, Mysta of the Moon, Gale Allen and others were some of the strongest heroines of the era, though most of them are forgotten today.

Doolin is similar to O. J. Heller: a man who was inclined to broadly express his interest in muscular women in a time when it was rarely discussed, I suspect as a way of identifying and building his own community.

Anyway, I’ve attached a bunch of the covers below. They’re all in the public domain as a result of Fiction House going out of business before the contemporary US copyright regime was enacted.

Attachments:

• 66.jpg
• 68.jpg
• 70.jpg
• 71.jpg
• fight43.jpg
• 58.jpg
• 70_2013-03-28.jpg
• 64.jpg
• 66_2013-03-28.jpg
• 57.jpg
• 77.jpg
• 54.jpg
• 50.jpg
• 51.jpg
• 55.jpg
• 62.jpg
• 31.jpg

[Lingster]

Also, sometimes on his covers and his interior art, you’ll find places where Doolin hid “easter eggs” of spectacularly muscular women, such as on Planet Comics #54:

Feel free to post other examples!

[SteveG]

Some of these are genuinely gorgeous.

[iowabeefpackers]

Interesting stuff. Almost hard to believe that’s a real comic from the forties with a woman saving a man from imminent peril. Interesting point you raise as well. When artists such as this depicted powerful or muscular women, was it for their own interest or perceived economic gain in dominating a niche market?
Probably a combination of both, but in any case I was always mystified by why the trend towards equality in the workplace and a more independent feminine ethos that came about as a result of WWII (think Rosie the Riveter) was reversed so quickly after the war. Perhaps it’s a poor interpretation of history on my part.

[Author]

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