"Good Girl" Artist Bill Ward Goes Black!

Though known for his...stimulating...renditions of buxom (and usually blonde) women...

...Bill Ward was one of several well-known comic artists who provided Playboy-style cartoons featuring Black women (and men) to Duke, a 1950s magazine intended to attract the young, male, African-American audience that other male-oriented mags didn't (yet) cater to!

You'l note that while the men are clearly African-American, the women have more of a "look" like Dorothy Dandridge (here as seen in her only genre film, Tarzan's Peril).

Since some of the cartoons in the issue showed both men and women as Black...

...we're not sure if it was editorial choice or Ward's lack of ability to portray attractive Black women with more "ethnic" features...
I don't know if Ward contributed any illustrations for the remaining five issues of the mag's run.

If anybody can provide more info, please contact me!

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Wonderful World of Bill Ward

King of the Glamour Girls

Wednesday Worlds of Wonder DUKE "Last White Man"

From the first issue of a long out-of-print 1950s Playboy competitor comes this Ray Bradbury tale...

...which was presented only once with this title!

Intended as one of several new stories to link previously-published Mars tales in the now-legendary anthology The Martian Chronicles (1950) as a sequel to "Way in the Middle of the Air", it was delayed due to editorial requests for revisions and ended up initially-appearing in 1951 in a non-science fiction magazine dedicated to short stories in every genre as "The Other Foot"...

...before finally making its' appearance in a later, equally-legendary Bradbury anthology in 1951...

How did this unusual retitling come about?
In 1957, with Playboy dominating the newsstands, a new publisher introduced an African-American counterpart called Duke, which featured Black creatives and cheesecake models.

(The centerfold models were called "Duchesses"!)

Along with acclaimed Black writers Langston Hughes, Erskine Caldwell, and Chester Hines, the premiere issue featured Ray Bradbury's short story "The Other Foot", now entitled "The Last White Man"!

Unlike most of Bradbury's works, this tale has, to date, never been adapted into any other media!

(Sadly, Duke only lasted six issues.)

AFAIK, the only time "The Other Foot/The Last White Man" has ever been cover-featured was in a rare, limited-run book produced by, of all companies, Xerox, in 1967!

Try finding a copy of it at a reasonable price (or even a clean scan of the cover)!

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Tomorrow Midnight

Adaptations of Ray Bradbury's sci-fi stories from EC Comics!

Plus a new cover by Frank Frazetta