In his introduction in vol. 2 of this pin-up series, Love & Rockets co-creator Jaime Hernandez wrote about how he marveled over Dan's Archies work; how Betty & Veronica were drawn "with eyelids and longer lashed or overexposed their hips.....whenever he wanted to turn on the heat." It wasn't until he later discovered Dan's pin-up work where he had another revelation. "Absolutely could not believe he was holding back with his Archie work."; He added, "compared to the women in this book, Betty & Veronica were babies. Discovering this girlie mag stuff was expecting a bike for Christmas and getting a car, I had no idea Dan DeCarlo could be better."

 

For those who admired Dan's pin-up quality with his Archie Comics output will probably feel pleasantly shocked as Hernandez was with this set. Betty & Veronica might has been cute and innocently sexy teenagers, but once the curtain was pulled back, there were full-grown bountiful women waiting in the wings as if Archie left Riverdale for New York City (or Las Vegas) with its many nightclubs and street corners populated with showgirls and golddiggers. The clique of a backwater hick going to the Big City is all the blindly obvious.

 

Much like his output for Archies, Dan's pun-up work for publisher Humorama with their titles such as Jet, Gaze and Jest was plentiful and were of consistent high quality. According to the book notes, he averaged 10 illustrations per month. They were such on an artistic level that his work stood out from almost the rest of the standard low-quality art that were used. Almost as there were a very small handful of artists on Dan's level that could found in these same pages like Wally Wood, Jack Cole and Bill Ward.

 

The first volume was published by Fantagraphic Books in 2005 and was edited by Alex Chun and designed by Jacob Covey. Outside of the introduction piece by Bill Morrison and an editor's note explaining Humorama's history, the rest of the 216 pages is nothing but Dan's pin-up work; some full page, some close-ups and, reflecting Humorama's original cheap production, single color tone of red.

 

Volume Two followed in 2007 with the same crew and page number as before, only with, as noted above, Jamie Hernandez introduction instead of Morrison's.

 

In-between the covers of both editions are loaded with gag cartoons by Dan featuring healthy curvy attractive women, usually as showgirls dealing with 'fans', gold-diggers looking for sugar-daddies, wives of cheating husbands (and vise versa) etc., in various sexy situations. Some today might take offence with the outdated and slightly un-P.C., 'battle of the sexes'-based humor presented here, especially compared to Archie Comics, but the level of adult humor here are more of a wink-wink nudge-nudge, hanky-panky variety with various stages of undress but no nudity and rough stuff ......and with a small side order of spanking for you fetishists out there. It should be noted here that, snuck in both books, are a piece or two of commissioned work Dan had done in the early 2000's, proving he still had the pin-up touch!