More Cute Girlie Stuff: Katy Keene Paper Doll Reprise

The most popular Out of This World blog post for a long time time was actually about paper dolls in comics. I made a one-off post about this topic as a 'thank you' to a fellow blogger who was very kind enough to allow me to use her scan of a newspaper comic strip for a project I was working on. Since then, paper doll fans have been among my most frequent visitors. So I thought it was about time I followed up on that success with some more paper dolls. In today's post I'm using other people's scans that have been passed on to me, and they are all from various Katy Keene issues from the original series and annuals. In the next post I'll be featuring some Millie the Model and Patsy Walker paper dolls from my own collection.

Katy Keene was published by Archie Comics. Katy Keene is something of a phenomenon. Bill Woggon has that 'good girl' look just right, with Katy sort of somewhere between Fritzi Ritz and Torchy. So here's a selection of material from some classic Katy Keene comics - wedding dresses, some covers, a cool beatnik story, and of course, lots of paper dolls! Enjoy!

First here's the story from the beatnik issue:

 

 

Next, some examples of those word and picture narratives that were frequently included in Katy Keene comics. This first one is again from Katy Keene 50:

and this one is from Katy Keene Annual 3:

and this from Katy Keene 45:

Now some paper dolls. From Katy Keene 62:

and this one from Katy Keene 50:

Here's a bunch from Katy Keene Annual 3:

and Katy Keene Annual 4:

Some really old ones, from Katy Keene 16:

and finally (for the paper dolls in this post), I don't know if these aprons are supposed to be paper dolls but I'll put them here anyway, from Katy Keene 45:

Katy Keene (the character) is a model and movie star, pretty much like Millie the Model and other 'model' characters in girls' comics from the Golden and Silver Age. Katy Keene comics have tons of fashion features and reader participation in providing ideas and designs. As an example, here's some Katy Keene wedding dresses, from Katy Keene Annual 3:

from Katy Keene 16:

and Katy Keene Annual 4:

Well that's pretty much it for this one. I found that an interesting jaunt through some of Bill Woggon's Katy Keene artwork, and I hope you all enjoyed it too. Paper dolls seem to have quite an incredible following, so I hope some of those fans stumble across this post. Paper dolls are an interesting piece of culture, and it heartens me to know that there are people dedicated to preserving and perpetuating them for future generations to appreciate and enjoy. Until next time, hopefully you'll think these paper dolls are Out of This World!

 

I <3 Katy Keene!?

The De-Evolution of Nellie the Nurse: Part IV of VI

As the 1950s gets under way, Nellie the Nurse artwork is provided by Howie Post. Howie's young women are all boobs and butts, reduced to those components of womanhood which are of most interest to males. Nellie is advertised across the top of the cover as 'America's Red-Headed Riot'. Along with her accentuated female bodily features, Nellie is not much of a thinker. She's a dumb red-headed provider of visual stimulation for the opposite sex. Stan Lee has obviously pushed the title over into straight gag humor. It not longer seems to qualify as good girl art because it's too cartoony, although the mammary glands and hourglass figure are still there, even the odd lingerie panel. Doesn't have the same effect as, for example, Bill Ward's Torchy, though.

I wonder if Nellie wears one of those bras with the stiff, cone-shaped cups to give her that bust line, or if she's just naturally endowed with such prominent female attributes. I guess we'll never know. Again, there's no longer much to do with the work of nurses or hospitals in the book. It was eventually canceled with the October 1952 issue, to be resurrected in 1957 for one issue with art by none other than Bill Everett. In the next post in this blog series we'll take a look at how Bill interpreted Nellie, before going on to her final demise at Dell. With Howie Post's degenerative female figures I see a parallel with the devaluation of women after World War II, with their enforced departure from the jobs they had held during the war and their return home to suburban domestic bliss. The de-evolution of Nellie the Nurse, with nurses always at this time being the prominent example of the career woman, is the decline of woman's status following the war, the reassertion of male dominance and the re-establishment of full patriarchy in society. Nellie gets dumber and dumber as the series progresses, and more and more reduced to breasts, buttocks, thighs, tiny waist, and a pretty face.

On the topic of good girl art, if Howie Post's Nellie fails to retain sufficient criteria to qualify as GGA, there were certainly good examples in earlier issues of the title, as we've already seen. Many were 52 page comics, containing other Timely career girl humor features, such as Tessie the Typist, and here, Hedy DeVine.

Plenty of lingerie panels in that one, and along with Stan Lee's Hedy as an example of how women stereotypically behave, we've got a nice picture of what women were supposedly about in the 1940s and early 50s.