First released in hardback last year, Naughty and Nice: The Good Girl Art of Bruce Timm was so popular that it quickly became hard to find a copy without spending upwards of £100. Thankfully, publishers Flesk now offer a more accessible paperback edition subtitled, The Big Pocket Edition. Although not much smaller in physical size it does lose around 50 pages from the original that would have otherwise included work from licensed characters from the Marvel and DC universe. What’s left is still over 250 pages of some highly accomplished and stylish pin-up work that although clearly takes influence from golden-age artists such Gil Elvgren, Enoch Bolles, Harry Ekman and a host of others, also throws film noir and the artist’s own background in comics and animation into the mix, resulting in a unique graphical style all of his own.
An introduction from Jim Steranko goes into some detail of Bruce Timm‘s career, including his groundbreaking work on Batman: The Animated Series in the 1990s, and the lessons learned from the Filmation and Don Bluth Animation Studios, not to mention fellow master of the pin-up Dave Stevens. For the budding artist there are your own lessons to learn here in Timm’s simplification of the human form and elimination of unnecessary details, while for the casual viewer it’s another fine collection of dreamgirls and dangerous dames that (like all the best work of this kind) is perfectly pitched to never feel sleazy and whole-heartedly surrenders to all-powerful female.