 James Bond’s cruel nature is exposed on comic book cover. 
This amazing Italian comic book cover for Ian Fleming’s Missione Royal, aka Casino Royale, with excellent cover art by Franco Picchioni, was printed in 1965. We found it over at the blog illustrated007, and there are other items there worth taking a look at if you’re inclined. Casino Royale was the first James Bond adventure written by Ian Fleming, but when it eventually hit the big screen in 1967 it was a Royale with cheese. Or more accurately, it wasn’t a Royale at all because it was a spoof that had nothing in common with Fleming’s work except the title and some characters. Still though, in its own way it was a good movie. But this cover reminds us that one thing we like about Bond as written by Fleming is his seriousness. Fleming more than once described Bond as having a “cruel mouth.” This doppleganger of Sean Connery has a cruel everything. No compassion in those eyes at all. We love it.
 Hot Coffy, no milk or sugar. 
This sultry shot of American actress Pam Grier was made while she was filming the 1973 blaxploitation classic Coffy. It’s an image you see around the internet a bit, but Grier doesn’t have many quality promo photos out there, so we’re sharing it because, well, her presence only makes things better. Interestingly, it isn’t just Grier who doesn’t have many promo shots, but a lot of blaxploitation actresses. We’re thinking Tanya Boyd, Jeanne Bell, Tamara Dobson, Marki Bey, and other examples of pure hotness. We can only assume the shoestring production budgets in blaxploitation didn’t provide for much in the way of promotional materials. Truly a shame.
 Bungle in the jungle. 
During the 1960s the Cleveland Publishing Company, which was based in Sydney, Australia, printed quite a lot of books like the one above—i.e., World War II adventures that in retrospect are subtly racist. Well, actually, who are we kidding? Retrospect and subtlety have nothing to do with it. Even in the context of the 1960s these were overtly racist books featuring depraved and heinous Japanese adversaries putting Aussie soldiers through hell, often in jungle prison camps. We have other examples we’ll share later, but this is probably the most interesting of them, art-wise, with its devilish villain painted camouflage green. Mack Kenton, the author here, wrote many war books for Cleveland, including Beachhead, Operation Solo, Ordeal of the Damned, Fight or Die, et. al., but despite his extensive bibliography there isn’t much info on him. Uncredited artist as well. It’s amusing to imagine that both author and illustrator disavowed themselves from this dubious work, but that probably isn’t what happened. The book is just obscure. As always we’ll dig for more.
 America’s oldest magazine shows signs of advanced age. 
Oh, the poor National Police Gazette. By 1974 it was impossible for the editors to keep claiming Hitler was still alive and hiding out in Argentina. If he’d ever been there he was long dead. Castro was still around, of course, but it was pointless to keep pretending the U.S. was going to send an armada to take back Cuba. Mao was a useful foil for a few years, but somehow he just didn’t resonate the same way for readers. So the magazine turned its focus to pettier intrigues, dogging the Kennedy clan and hoping to move issues by featuring bikini models on its covers. How the mighty had fallen. Launched all the way back in 1845, the oldest magazine in America was now uninspired and out-of-touch with 1970s readers. In this entire issue only a few pages were even worth scanning. Teddy Kennedy, Susan Shaw, Felicity Devonshire, Sliwka… and killer catfish, all below.      
 When good girls go bad. 
Above, a striking poster for 1971’s Furyô shôjô Mako, aka Bad Girl Mako, starring Junko Natsu. We really like the design on this. The movie has the distinction of being Nikkatsu Studios’ last production before shifting into pinku-inspired Roman porno, a seventeen-year period during which it almost exclusively made high budget sexploitation films. Junko Natsu, pictured on the poster, started her career in 1967 with Violated Angels and acted in more than forty movies and many television shows. We haven’t actually seen this movie yet, but if we do we’ll be sure to get back to you about it.
 Cinema killed the Radio star. 
We found this unusual magazine in Bayonne, France last year and picked it up because of its striking cover star, who happens to be French actress Simone Renant. She had a fifty-year career in cinema but we were not aware she also worked in radio. But it says right on the cover she could be heard in Les sept mensonges de l'impératrice, aka The Seven Lies of the Empress. Radio is filled with broadcast schedules. Pages of them for the entirety of France, from metro Paris to Nice to Bretagne. But Renant’s presence hints at cinema overlap and, indeed, film star Rita Hayworth makes an appearance. And because readers cannot live on celebrity alone, there’s a bit of politics, opera, dance and, of course, boobs. This issue appeared today in 1947, which is why 47 appears in the name. The next year’s issues had a 48, and so forth, from 1943 until the publication faded away in the early 1950s, when dramatic radio was also on the way out. We have a few scans below.   
 Toto we’re not in Africa anymore. 
Stuart Cloete’s 1943 jungle melodrama Congo Song was not glowingly reviewed, but was reprinted over and over. Its popularity certainly owed something to the fact that it nurtured all the cherished Western stereotypes about Africa. We’ll just give you the book's closing words and you’ll get the idea: This was the Congo song: the song of sluggish rivers, of the mountains, the forests; the song of the distant, throbbing drums, of the ripe fruits falling, of the mosquitoes humming in the scented dusk; the song of Entobo, of the gorilla, and the snake. The song no white man would ever sing. So, basically white people in Africa are undone by their inadequacies, which are amplified by the deep, dark, primitive, savage, mysterious Congo. Cloete’s characters include Nazis, artists, and spies, but the real creation here is Olga le Blanc, who has a pet gorilla she—wait for it—nursed at her own breast when it was an infant. Le Blanc nursed le gorille, eh? Cloete’s symbolism is pretty thick milk. Eventually the surviving characters are chased away, but they remember the Congo with bittersweet nostalgia. Kind of like in that Toto song “Africa.” It’s gonna take a lot to take me awaaaay from yoooou… There’s nothing that a hundred men or moooore could ever doooo… I bless the rains down in Aaaafricaaa…     
 Publishers provocateur Goliath release a collection of Japanese-bondage-inspired art photos. 
A long while back we mentioned the Japanese art of kinbaku-bi or shibari (we won’t get into the debate over which term is more correct) and said we’d discuss it again, but of course never did. Well, we were reminded of that promise when Berlin-based rebel publishers Goliath sent us a couple of their books. Ostensibly, they’re coffee table volumes, but of a rather provocative type, dealing with bondage as art. Today we’re looking only at Strictly Bondage, and we’ll get to the other book Kinky Bondage Obsession later this week. Strictly Bondage, a compact volume of black and white images derived directly from the Japanese bondage arts, was shot by longtime bdsm photographer Victor Lightworship. Like the master or kinbakushi who restrains women in kinbaku-bi, Lightworship uses ropes in some of his photos to suspend his models. He appears in many of the shots, and while he goes through the motions of dominating his models, the content doesn’t overpower the compositional beauty of the tableaux. Or put another way, while the book generates some raised eyebrows when visitors pick it up from the coffee table, they quickly become aware that they’re looking at the output of someone with talent and a finely honed aesthetic. Lightworship has been at this for thirty years, even studying kinbaku-bi under a rope master, so the sharpness and cohesion of this collection is no surprise, nor is the fact that he can walk a tightrope between the disturbing and erotic so deftly. Some of his non-Strictly Bondage work goes farther, so the effect achieved here is deliberate and is partly due, we think, to the array of expressions his models wear—sometimes a sort of overacted b-movie terror, but other times a resigned serenity comically juxtaposed against the most elaborate of subjugation. The book’s foreword asks: “What is art? What is erotic? What is porn? What is interesting?” Strictly Bondage is a little of all those, and it’ll be living on our coffee table for some time, or at least until our friends bring their kids by. We have several of the tamer images from the book’s interior below, and you can learn more about Victor Lightworship and Strictly Bondage at www.goliathbooks.com, and at the photographer’s site here.    
 Hold me, thrill me, Kissmu, kill me. 
Random Japanese goodness. Here’s a poster for a 1972 movie with Minami Kissmu. No western release means there’s no western title, but the poster says something like “Reckless Driving Woman Biker.” We searched but found no sign of this anywhere on the internet, which is too bad because the title alone would make it worth a viewing. No such luck. And no info on Ms. Kissmu either. What a great piece of art, though. Those striped pants need to come back in style, we think. But what is it with Japan? Based on one or two other examples, we can only assume there’s no penalty for riding under the legal limit of clothing.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1942—Ted Williams Enlists
Baseball player Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox enlists in the United States Marine Corps, where he undergoes flight training and eventually serves as a flight instructor in Pensacola, Florida. The years he lost to World War II (and later another year to the Korean War) considerably diminished his career baseball statistics, but even so, he is indisputably one of greatest players in the history of the sport. 1924—Leopold and Loeb Murder Bobby Franks
Two wealthy University of Chicago students named Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr. murder 14-year-old Bobby Franks, motivated by no other reason than to prove their intellectual superiority by committing a perfect crime. But the duo are caught and sentenced to life in prison. Their crime becomes known as a "thrill killing", and their story later inspires various works of art, including the 1929 play Rope by Patrick Hamilton, and Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film of the same name. 1916—Rockwell's First Post Cover Appears
The Saturday Evening Post publishes Norman Rockwell's painting "Boy with Baby Carriage", marking the first time his work appears on the cover of that magazine. Rockwell would go to paint many covers for the Post, becoming indelibly linked with the publication. During his long career Rockwell would eventually paint more than four thousand pieces, the vast majority of which are not on public display due to private ownership and destruction by fire.
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