Customer Reviews

The Wonderful World of Bill Ward: King of the Glamour Girls (German Edition)

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It's unfortunate that Bill Ward's most well known pin-up work appeared in down-market, scruffy, digest-sized magazines because it meant that he was not considered with the big names like Varga, Petty or Elvgren and many others who created 'painted ladies'. This huge book (check out the dimensions, above especially the thickness: two inches) will most likely become the standard reference to his work though.

The book divides his career into three sections; the early years show work for various comic book publishers and his Torchy title where you can clearly see the origins of his later glamour style. The second section has 180 of his Conte crayon cartoons for Abe Goodman's various Humorama digest-size titles and this is the art that Ward is famous for.

Between 1947 and 1967 he claims to have drawn more than seven thousand of these sexy females and despite the large number they are each worth serious money to collectors. These drawings are one, two or four to a page and printed in sepia with white highlights. Another book of his work 'The Glamour Girls of Bill Ward' (ISBN 1560975318) has about 116 Conte drawings all one to a page and nicely doesn't seem to have any pictures duplicated with this Kroll book. If you can take your eyes of the dames you'll notice how Ward used embossed wallpaper samples to create curtains, cushions and sometimes filmy negligees by putting the sample under his drawing paper and rubbing the Conte crayon across the relevant area.

The third section of the book covers work after Humorama and here I think his style lacks the creativity of the Conte work. There are plenty of examples of paperback covers, color cartoons, comics, covers to porno magazines and a real surprise, the 1954 Lili St. Cyr lingerie catalog where Ward created precise model drawings with Lili's face on each.

At the front of the book Eric Kroll writes a fascinating fifty-page introduction with many quotes from the artist and illustrated with plenty of artwork and photos, in this beautifully designed and printed book devoted to the glamour work of Bill Ward.

This is, to borrow from its title, a wonderful book. The huge (13 3/4" x 10 1/2" )tome contains nearly 400 pages, printed on nicely textured photos, crammed with trilingual text and hundreds of illustrations, many of them in full-page size, both in color and black-and-white (actually sepia). As the other reviewer has noted, there isn't any overlap between this book and _The Glamour Girls of Bill Ward_, so you can safely get both of them to have an excellent, wide-ranging collection of Ward's work. As with the other work, the core of this book is the middle section containing nearly 200 drawings from Ward's glory days between 1947 and 1967, featuring the voluptuous, gorgeously dressed glamour girls that he's most famous for. The book contains extensive samples from his early work (featuring his well-known "good girl art" character Torchy) and his later, more explicitly sexual projects, but the reader can easily see that Ward's heart and enthusiasm belonged to his beloved glamour girls; the later nude cartoons are as skillfully executed as his classic cartoons, but in my own opinion, lack much of the spirit that animated his great 1950's and 1960's works (indeed, Ward was known to admit that he did much of the later work strictly for the money, particularly the BDSM drawings which form a big part of his later oeuvre). Again, it was the Ekbergesque glamour girls that he loved drawing best, and the reader gets a thoroughly satisfactory helping of them here. Expensive (though not as much so as the out-of-print hardback edition of _Glamour Girls_), but very much worth the money. Strongly recommended.

Titilating stuff from the master of the Conte crayon bound in spectacular fashion inside this huge tome. The book is dazzlingly thorough in its collection of archive material charting the career of Ward with in depth and informative writing.
The artwork is displayed in its most suitable form, I recently bought a pocket sized collection of Ward's work and it is practically useless in comparison to this full size collection. Having the pictures displayed at this large scale allows you to see just how he worked and just how fluid and confident an artist he was.
A must for pin-up fans or alternatively anyone who wants to show off with their taste in giant books.

If you're a fan of Good Girl art, you know that there were few better, in his heyday, than the late, great Bill Ward. The creator of _Torchy_ had no qualms about being a girlie artist, and got even more graphic later in life. But regardless of what period of his career you look at, he never lost his taste for women with huge breasts, tiny waists, and high heels - a feminine ideal, to be sure.

WONDERFUL WORLD OF BILL WARD is a great sampling of a lot of his work. I say "sampling" to save you from making the same mistake I did, of thinking that a volume this big was a comprehensive anthology of all of Bill Ward's artwork. Notably absent are his really adult work leading up to his death, and only a sampling of his _Scorchy_ strips. And the book is as big and thick as it is because it just repeats its content in multiple languages, over and over again. Nonetheless, its real draw is that it contains a comprehensive and fascinating biography of Ward, and some of his better illustrations over the course of his long career. You see the evolution of _Torchy_, many of his famous "phone girl" drawings, and some adult stuff, though hardly all. Perhaps a comprehensive collection of Ward's work is impossible, meaning this volume is as good as you're going to get. I like having it as a handy reference to the man, and chance to see some of who he was in action, and for a fan of large breasts, slim waists, and high heels, that ain't such a bad thing after all.

WOW!

A HUGE volume, filled with great Bill Ward art. Reproduced in rather large format, there is plenty in this hefty volume.

First class material, in a "large economy" size volume.

Buy it if you can!