Virgil Finlay left behind thirty-five years of fantasy and science-fiction art-work - and a reputation as the most meticulous pulp magazine illustrator of his generation. Finlay sold his first professional drawings to Weird Tales magazine in 1935 and within a year he had established himself as the finest artist in his field. Throughout the 1930's, 40s and 50s, Finlay reigned supreme as the acknowledged master of black-and-white fantasy, science fiction and horror illustration. Women of the Ages offers the best of Finlay's artwork - exquisite line drawings, which display the jewel-like rendering of Finlay's painstaking technique. Women of the Ages features ravishing illustrations from the pages of Weird Tales, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Startling Stories, American Weekly and many others. This lavish cornerstone collection showcases the work of a unique 20th century artist.

The term pulp fiction has always had a certain resonance; but it is the artwork--bold, energized, dramatic, garishly colorful, and frequently grotesque--that has made pulp magazines memorable to so many people. Pulp Art is the groundbreaking--and ultimate--book on one of America's most important and spectacular forms of illustration art. At last, preserved in this volume are most of the still-existing originals created for the pulp covers, never before seen in all their sharply focused, vibrantly colored brilliance. Robert Lesser, a pioneering collector of this work and an expert on American popular culture, has assembled a gallery of these now-priceless originals. The dynamically pulp-flavored text is a complete historical survey of the pulps and their most important cover artists--Virgil Finlay, J. Allen St. John, Rafael de Soto, Hannes Bok, George and Jerome Rozen, Frank R. Paul, and many others. Also offered are critical discussions of individual paintings, as well as the major themes of the pulp magazines.

The author’s jumping-off point is the myth of Artemis and Siproites, in which a young man is turned into a woman as a punishment for the attempted rape of one of Artemis’s virgin cohorts. Bunjevac’s retelling follows Benny, a sexually deviant man who, coming across an alluring former classmate, concocts an elaborate, disturbing rape fantasy. Inked in her lush, stippled, illustrative style, Bunjevac crafts a gripping, noirish, Nabokovian tale, by turns surreal and harrowing, that turns the male gaze inside-out. Bezimena is both a radical examination of the misconceptions surrounding rape culture and an artistic and psychological tour de force.

Unrepentant, unapologetic, unbridled and under-appreciated, genre art from the first half of the 20th century reflected subconscious urges of a economically deprived and sexually depressed generation. This popular art set the stage for the advertised expression of today's more liberated consumer culture. Shameless Art explores the influential work of imaginative illustrators who helped create the visual language for everything from today's comic books, magazine and television advertising, as well as imaginative movies like Avatar and sensual films like Y Tu Mama Tambien. Featuring stunning art by such genre masters as Tom Lovell, Virgil Finlay, Hannes Bok, Margaret Brundage, and Enoch Bolles, this beautifully produced full color collection mirrors mid-20th century masculine fantasies.