Welcome back to another Fabulous Find. I’m your host, Greg Turner, and this week I bring you a companion post to the Fabulous Find from two weeks ago. It’s the Paragon Pretty Girl Portfolio from Paragon Publications. Since both items came out in 1981, I’m not sure which one hit the market first, but I’m guessing this came second.
Paragon Publication is the company affiliated with artist, Bill Black, and you can see that the cover image is the same as the centerfold from the Pretty Girl Sketchbook published by Paisley Publications. And in fact, the complete drawing is also included in the Paragon Pretty Girl Portfolio too.
This portfolio is actually, four separate four (4) page, black and white, portfolios with a wrap around cover in three colors, red, blue and yellow. It sold by mail order for $ 3.00 back in 1981. Here is the cover:
Paragon Pretty Girl Portfolio front cover
The back cover lists the artists represented in the portfolio, take a look:
Paragon Pretty Girl Portfolio back cover
Sorry, my scanner bleached out the color for some reason. I must have hit a stray key to get this effect. But I really don’t know why it did that, but hey it’s still readable and since it’s just a list of the artist, no big deal. Hope you feel the same way.
I’ll go ahead and show you two (2) images from each of the individual portfolios to give you an idea of what they contain. From the first portfolio:
Black Canary by Bill Black
And the aforementioned John Byrne Black Queen. The cover featured a partial look at this drawing, only reversed, and of course, with color enhancement.
Black Queen by John Byrne
Next up from Portfolio two, Spider-Woman from Marvel Comics and Power Girl from DC Comics:
Spider-Woman by Steve Leialoha & Bill Black
Power Girl by Bill Black
And from the third portfolio, a couple more Marvel Comics characters drawn by artist associated with these characters, Marionette and Lieko Wu:
Marionette by Pat Broderick
Lieko Wu by Mike Zeck
And finally from the fourth portfolio included in the package, Marvel’s Red Sonja and a generic, pretty girl from World War Two:
Red Sonja by Bob McLeod & Bill Black
Sexy Girl by Rudy Palais
I’ve never heard of the last artist, Rudy Palais, but I guess was a comic book artist from the 1940s. And personally, with a drawing like this, he ought to be known.
Hopefully, I didn’t offend anyone by showing the tasteful Lieko Wu nude, but if I did, please forgive me!
So that wraps up another Fabulous Find. As you can see again, there was a lot of use of Marvel and DC characters, but as you might have been able to tell, Paragon’s own, Bill Black was highly involved with this project and a number of Black’s and Paragon’s characters were also found in the portfolio. Since a lot of you might be less familiar with them, I chose not to spotlight them this time around.
Please come back next week for a new RETRO REVIEW, and until then, stay warm and healthy! Be seeing you …
