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John Ruge gag cartoons from Collier's, circa mid twentieth-century. Click on images to enlarge them. Ruge sold gag cartoons as well to Playboy after Collier's folded in the 1950s. He also created a cartoon character, an Irish setter named Clancy.
John Ruge's illustrations of women were more restrained. Ruge was also published in Collier's in the 1940s and 1950s. This illustration is from a story in This Week a Sunday supplement that had the largest circulation in the world. It ran good fiction and used top illustrators. The production was gravure, which allowed for better reproduction than the letterpress of the time.
Ruge also illustrated fiction by Westbrook Pegler in Sunday supplements published by Hearst newspapers, as shown here. Click on images to enlarge them. The production is pretty bad, letterpress on cheap newsprint.
More from This Week, with better reproduction.
This is a portion of a consumer magazine ad for Pitney Bowes, manufacturer of postage machines.
There's not a lot to say about these beyond the obvious. They reflect the type of fiction that Collier's ran and Hollywood movies were about. Gib Darling could draw and his heroines were cute, but the editors seem to have been hung up on stereotypes. Click on images to enlarge them.
Henry Gilbert Darling was born Feb. 5, 1901 in Wellington, New Zealand and
grew up in Redlands, California. He studied at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, later worked at
Patterson & Sullivan( later named Patterson & Hall) in San Francisco until 1939, then free-lanced in New York City until the late 1950s. He ended his career at the Bates advertising agency in New York at the age of 83. He was vice president of the Society of Illustrators in 1953 and 1954.
He died in Toms River New Jersey on July 2, 1990
Collier's was a very popular weekly, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, with its own stable of freelance illustrators. They were as different in their styles and approach to illustration as was Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post and Gil Darling from Norman Rockwell. Click on these images to enlarge them.
Close-up. I don't think Saturday Evening Post readers would tolerate this type of sexy image. From Collier's issue of 3 January 1953.
Notice how the young women look so much alike. He must have used only one model. Rockwell would have been more thorough.
Before I even begin, I have to tell you that Fred Taraba at this link has a ton of Bundy illustrations and a very thorough bio, so I won't bore you beyond a couple of private observations as an illustrator who has long tried to get a brush line as good as Bundy's.
Click on any of these to enlarge them and you can see for yourself just how good Bundy was. He was a combat artist sent with the Marines to the Pacific Islands war where he was exposed to the profound horrors of Iwo Jima and Tarawa, from which he never really ever recovered. He took his own life 12 years to the day that he spent a night and a day among the dead and dying in a half track that took a direct hit from Japanese artillery. You'll find some of his wartime sketches there if you scroll down after connecting with the link above.
Ad for Munsingwear women's underwear.
Close-up of a terrific brush line and wonderful painting.
Black and white ad for Fels soap products.
The New York Edison gets credit for this ad. Where do you suppose that ran?
Look at that back. Illustration doesn't get any better than this.
An ad for The Borden Company -- before Elsie the Cow took over, I guess.
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