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By Root 515 0

rush to their aid in times of peril. I had my own imaginary pack of this kind, and therefore was not alarmed by Al Capp’s Wolf Gal of the popular 1940s cartoon strip L’il Abner. Wolf Gal must have been the first Brundage-like carnivorous pinup I ever saw. She had white hair and fierce white eyebrows, she most likely ate men, she was scantily dressed, and like all the members of Capp’s harem of eccentric glamour gals (stunners such as Stupefyin’ Jones, Appassionata Von Climax, and the mud-covered pig-fancier Moonbeam McSwine), she was what was once called “bountifully endowed.” Hubba hubba, men said in those days: a term obscure in origin but most likely a variant of hübsche, the German word for “beautiful.”

Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures—they all have families and ancestors, just like people. What generated Wolf Gal? Probably Brundage’s wolf gals of Weird Tales, which—I’d bet—Capp would have read and drawn from. Was their grandparent Kipling’s The Jungle Book, in which the wolf-raised child was a boy? Did these clawed lovelies devolve from the high art of the late nineteenth century, so fond of depicting femmes fatales paired with animals to show how animalistic they were underneath? Or does the line stretch way back, to folklore and tales of lycanthropy, or even further back, to times when animals were thought to assume human form at will?

The enduring popularity of werewolf stories must be based on something, and that something may be close to a wish. Was Margaret Brundage, unknown to herself, drawing early versions of that trope of female freedom, women who run with the wolves? Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was neither the first nor the last to supply seductive women with canine teeth somewhat larger than is generally desirable in a girlfriend. (It’s to be noted that Wolf Gal has no Mr. Wolf Gal, and we strongly suspect that Wolf Gal—like some furry Turandot or a female spider—has been the death of all lovelorn aspirants to her hand, or paw.)

Then there are the women in the twin tinnies—those two shiny cups, attached to the torso with fine chain link—that abound in Brundage’s oeuvre. Richard Wolinsky produced a recorded documentary called The Girl in the Brass Brassiere: An Oral History of Science Fiction 1920–1950, a title that acknowledges the ubiquity of the trope in early twentieth-century sci-fi and fantasy, but like everything else pictorial, this item of clothing had its visual predecessors.

The message borne by the hard-but-soft frontage is mixed. One part of it derives from orientalism. Before moving to Weird Tales, Margaret Brundage drew covers for another pulp, Oriental Stories. In the exotic maidens she portrayed, Brundage was lifting from a rich vein of nineteenth-century Victorian orientalist painting, some of it purporting to depict such things as harems and girl-slave markets, but some of it purely imaginative, inspired by the hugely influential One Thousand and One Nights. This iteration of the metal bra—non-functional, skimpy, and bejewelled—invokes bondage and/or other depravities. Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame—a frequent publisher in Weird Tales—was quite keen on both slave girls and depravities, and used the Brundage dress code. In The Blind Assassin, I based Alex Thomas’s writhing women with eyes like snake-filled pits on simple-hearted Conan’s encounters with the uncanny seductresses of the corrupt, decaying cities through which he marauds.

Brassiere advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s hint at the second part of the twin-tinnie lineage: impermeability. Maidenform was just one of the brands featuring blindingly white bras with concentric circles of stitching that suggested armour. Their ads that coupled a state of undress with public activities—“I dreamed I was a private eye in my Maidenform bra”; “I dreamed I was a lady editor in my Maidenform bra”—presented the bra less as an aid to seduction than as a guarantee of security and, combined with the name, of chastity. Athene, the maiden goddess, with her shield and spear and her helmet,