Of all the illustrators who've labored in the field of comic postcards, the man with the most pedigree has to be Donald McGill.
A prolific artist of both risque and overly precious comic cards, McGill had a career that spanned the first six decades os this century. So ubiquitous was his work that journalist and social critic George Orwell wrote an appreciative essay about him in the forties. A straight-laced Englishman in real life, McGill gave vent to his more ribald impulses in a body of work that's unrivaled in its draftsmanship. This has made him a sought-after artist in postcard collector circles and deservedly so: though many of his "bawdy" gags may be quaint as a Playboy Party Joke, the skill of their execution is marvelous.
McGill did a large number of fat cards over the years, and a good twenty-plus are included in a 1984 appreciation of the artist, Elfreda Buckland's The World of Donald McGill (Blumford Press, Dorset). I recently picked up a copy of this book, and it drove to me to more closely consider an artist that I'd previously only seen in dribs and drabs. With summer nearly here, what better time to ruminate on an art form associated with vacationing?
I'm of mixed mind about McGill's fat cards, though he was a master of the classic Britcard image: the fat, red-faced matron on a seaside holiday. For me, the more consistently enjoyable fat card illustrators (Americans Walter Wellman and E. L. White; German artist Arthur Thiele) make their heroines less shopworn. Wellman and White's fat women are bouncier and more girlish, while Thiele is unparalleled in his renderings of super-sized women.
But McGill's images have their devoted fans, and in their own way, the cards can be quite fat positive. Just the idea of a fat, middle-aged woman being able to enjoy herself without fear on the beach is revolutionary in these fat-phobic days. It was a standard and popular theme in McGill's work, and even if he expressed a preference for other material, he never stinted in his rendering of it.
When pressed, the artist could even present a softer, sexier image of plus-sized womanhood. One my favorite McGills is a card that fatabibliologist Karl Neidhershuh showed me several months ago: a super-sized young couple are confronting a hotel room with two small twin beds. "Two beds?" the rotund male says to his lovely fat companion. "I wonder if they're going to put anyone else in the room." The implications of this joke are anything but insulting: our (honeymooning?) couple are openly sexual beings who don't let their size interfere with their enjoyment. Nobody told these two that they weren't allowed to be sexy - and good for them.
Moments like these - captured with a brightly colored picture and a nudge-nudge/wink-wink punch-line - are what keep driving me into the musty world of old postcards. They show me a land that may never have fully existed but which calls to me just the same. A world of jovial fat women in old-fashioned bathing suits, of huge and happy couples, of uncompromising largeness.
McGill's world.
June, 1999
Copyright 1999 - Oakhaus Designs